1. Sartre Finds the Proletariat: 1950-1954

a. In Defense of Bolshevism

During the 1950s politics played a dominant role in the thought of the existentialists.  The news of the existence of labor camps in the Soviet Union and the Korean War in 1950, the arrest of FCP leadership during a protest against General Ridgway in 1952, the Henri Martin affair in 1953, Dienbienpbu in 1954, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, De Gaulle and the Algerian question in the late 1950s and early 1960s--these events were carefully scrutinized by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty for hints of the vitality of the French proletariat and the CP.  It was a tense time, with continuous acrimony between Marxists and existentialists and also within the existentialist camp.  Along with others Merleau-Ponty left Les Temps Modernes, and his relations with Sartre were severed, to be renewed later but on much cooler terms.  There was the split between Sartre and Camus which was never repaired.  There were innumerable positionings and replies, open letters and responses, even responses to responses.  Sartre endured public controversies with Camus, Claude Lefort, Pierre Naville, Roger Garaudy, and others.  This was a long decade for Sartre, emotionally exasperating, philosophically inconclusive, and politically confused.  In these years be had finally committed himself, the writer was engage', while Merleau-Ponty's commitment waned.  The tone of intellec-

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tual changed from the 1940s, when the glow of political unity on the Left still lingered, when hopes were high for an intellectual integration of Marx and existentialism.  The sense of historical direction that was so strong among intellectuals in France in the 1940s crumbled into chaotic, contradictory fragments in the 1950s.  Yet, below the surface, Hegel's Phenomenology, the 1844 Manuscripts, and the early Sartre, now an integral part of the intellectuals' mental baggage, were having their effect and were soon to emerge in Sartre's Critique and in the writings of the Arguments group as synthetic, existential Marxisms.

Among the existentialists, thought was stifled by a failure to look beyond daily politics.  So strongly were they against the distortions of contemplative idealism that the immediate turns of events assumed a disproportionately large place in their minds.  They were convinced that reason could be found in history, and insisted on making sense of the course of events minute by minute even though the inscriptions before them could not be deciphered unambiguously.  Capitalism was not disintegrating, Soviet socialism was not generating the New Man, revolutionary impetus could not be found in the West but in the Colonial world, the working class in industrial society was becoming integrated into the capitalist order.  The daily newspaper, that morning prayer of modern man, recorded only the disjunction of history.  Could history be slipping completely off its course?  Was reason disappearing from human affairs?  The contradictions between Marxism old or new--of Das Kapital or of the 1844 Manuscripts--and politics became more and more glaring.  What was needed was a socioeconomic analysis of industrial society, and this was not forthcoming until the 1960s with studies of technological society and the new working class.  Neither Sartre nor Merleau-Ponty was able to see this in the 1950s.  The only time they turned to social and economic questions was in relation to the Soviet Union, whereas France and the capitalist countries in general were comprehended by them only politically.  Yet the "infrastruc-

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ture" of capitalist societies was undergoing a fundamental transformation in the 1950s which was not always mirrored in the burning issues of politics.  Lacking a socioeconomic perspective, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty continually looked to the traditional working class and its political arm, the CP, for signs of a universal subject of history, for a Proletariat.

For one brief moment Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were united politically.  In January, 1950, they jointly signed an article in Les Temps Modernes on the Soviet labor camps.[1]Wishing to avoid the cheers of the anti-Communists without supporting repressive institutions in the USSR, they admitted the existence of forced labor camps, with a population exceeding ten million.  Still the Communist regime could not be condemned because "the USSR is on the whole, situated, in the balance of powers, on the side of those who are struggling against the forms of exploitation known to us.  The decadence of Russian Communism does not make the class struggle a myth, 'free enterprise' possible or desirable, or the Marxist criticism in general null and void."[2] The proletariat was still a living force in history, the embodiment of dialectical reason.

Within a few months the battle in Korea began and the politics of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty took off in opposite directions.[3] To Merleau-Ponty it appeared that the Soviet Union wanted war and, since "history had definitely perverted its course,"[4] he fell into silence for two years.  Conversely, the war stimulated Sartre to deeper political commitment: in a short time be would no longer be a writer on the Left, preserving his independence, wary of aiding capitalism yet critical of the Communists when necessary, hoping to unite the Left around a program of socialism and freedom.  Now, on the con-

1."Les Jours de notre vie," Les Temps Modernes, 5: 51 (Jan., 1950) 1153-1168.
2. Ibid., 269 as trans. in Signs, "The USSR and the Camps."
3. "Merleau-Ponty," in Situations, 191.
4. Ibid., 190.

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trary, he, still standing outside the Party, would polemicize for the Communists. just when Merleau-Ponty saw the proletariat disappearing from the stage of history, Sartre discovered its presence for the first time, alive and thriving under the aegis of the CP leadership.

b. Sartre, a Stalinist?

Many Left-wing intellectuals were disillusioned with the Communists as a consequence of the events in 1952 surrounding a protest against General Ridgway.  The government of Pinay, anxious to please the Americans, arrested several CP leaders on May 28th, among them Jacques Duclos, in an arbitrary, repressive fashion.[5]  Duclos' car radio and chicken dinner were interpreted by the police as espionage equipment: a wireless "to intercept police messages" and a carrier pigeon to fly to Stalin.  The Communists responded to the arrests with strikes on June 4th, but the strikes were not strongly backed by the workers.  Some intellectuals concluded that the Party no longer inspired the workers' loyalty.  It was against this assertion that Sartre wrote.  His articles had great impact on both the Communists and the non-Communist Left. [6]

Sartre was angered by the cheap gesture of the government at suppressing the Communists.  The government's "sordid, childish tricks turned my stomach. . . . An anti-Communist is a rat."[7] It was at this moment that Sartre was won over to the CP.  With his political passions running high, he "swore to the bourgeoisie a hatred which would only die with me."[8]   When Sartre crossed his political Rubicon, he did so out of moral outrage against the hypocritical bourgeoisie that bad abrogated its own humanism, its own "principles" of "liberty, equality, fraternity," denying basic civil liberties to its citizens.

5. Cf. Alexander Werth, France: 1940-1955 (N.Y., 1966) 575-586.
6. Ibid., 523, 581-584.
7. "Merleau-Ponty," in Situations, 198.
8. Ibid.

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Les Communistes et la paix, written about this affair, was penned "at top speed, with rage in my heart, gaily, tactlessly."[9] The crumbling of the last wall that separated the petty-bourgeois intellectual from the CP had nothing to do with any change on the part of the CP and nothing to do with any change in Sartre's politics or philosophy.  What made Sartre a Communist, or as much of a Communist as he would ever be, was moral fervor, feelings of guilt against his own class.  The man who until 1950 wanted to constitute a non-Communist Left now ridiculed, with all of his great literary skill, the anti-Stalinists on the Left.  The Communists, for their part, like Jean Kanapa, who heaped no end of scorn on Sartre in 1947, now spoke of his essay as "courageous," "generous" and in essential accord with their position.[10]

The Communists and the Peace mollified the deep embarrassment of the CP over the poorly supported strikes.  Sartre's theme that the CP remained the genuine representative of the working class struck at the skeptics on the Left who gleefully applauded the apparent apathy of the workers for the Party.  Furthermore, with the enormous prestige of Sartre behind the Communists, the government retreated in its prosecution of Duclos and the others.[11] What probably pleased the Communists most about Sartre's July articles in Les Temps Modernes was that they clearly identified the Soviet Union with the cause of peace and the United States with the interests of war. [12]

More germane than the political consequences of The Communists and the Peace was the way in which Sartre began to modify his previous existentialism.  Writing about the working class, be started to develop the historical and social categories that received full

9. Ibid., 199.
10. Jean Kanapa, "J.  P. Sartre, Les Communistes et la paix,." La Nouvelle critique, 39 (Sept.-Oct., 1952) 23-42.
11. Werth, op. cit., 584.  The impact of cultural figures on politics in France should not be underestimated.
12. Kanapa, op. cit., 26 and Sartre, The Communists and the Peace, trans.  Fletcher and Berk (N.Y., 1968) 16-17.

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elaboration in Critique de la raison dialectique.  In the 1952 essay he confronted two questions that altered his 1943 positions and carried him one step closer to an existential Marxism: first, the relation of individual freedom to history, and, second, the different modes of group relations.

The freedom of the individual to make himself that Sartre espoused in Being and Nothingness now, after Humanism and Terror and Sense and Non-Sense, [13] became rooted more securely in the historical situation: "The historical whole determines our powers at any given moment, it prescribes their limits in our field of action and our real future; it conditions our attitude toward the possible and the impossible, the real and the imaginary, what is and what should be time and space." [14]  The situation was no longer the passive object of human projects; it had an intentionality of its own; it pointed toward us; it actively shaped our possibilities.  Sartre now accommodated Merleau-Ponty's notion of the ambiguous body, both choosing and being chosen.  Only in this double unity of acting -and being acted upon did the individual choose.  "From there on, we in turn determine our relationship with others, that is to say, the meaning of our life and the value of our death: it is within this framework that our Self finally makes its appearance. . . . "[15] In the situation of the working class, the possibilities of self transformation were indeed bleak.  In general, Sartre now saw many mediations between the choice of the individual and its realization; the individual worker could freely choose to abolish his alienation, but this goal might not be achieved for some time,

13. Sartre openly acknowledged his debt to Merleau-Ponty: "It was Humanism and Terror which caused me to make an important decision. . . . It gave me the push I needed to release me from my immobility." In Situations, 8 (Paris, 1972) 124.
14. The Communists and the Peace, op. cit., 80.  Sartre's study appeared originally in the following issues of Les Temps Modernes: nos. 81 (July, 1952) 84-85 (Oct.-Nov., 1952) and 101 (April, 1954).  The English translation also included Sartre's "Réponse à Lefort , which was printed first in no. 89 (April, 1953).
15. Ibid.

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perhaps not until after he died.  Sartre had placed a limitation on the effectiveness of the freedom of the individual, although not on its quality as absolute choice of oneself.

In analyzing the working class, the existentialist discovered social obstacles to the fulfillment of authentic freedom. In order to change himself the worker had to change the situation for his entire class; this meant that Sartre had to comprehend the structure of interrelationships that constituted the working class.  He came to grasp vaguely the social reality of capitalism.  Under capitalism the worker existed as a "mass," "isolated," "abandoned," connected with other workers only "mechanically."[16] Sartre's comprehension of the modes of interactions among the working class was the germ of his later concept of serialization.

The hidden truth of capitalist society, however, was that the bourgeoisie was more highly integrated than the proletariat.  "The bourgeois is basically integrated; solitude is the game he plays; the worker is basically solitary; politics is his need." [17] Each of the freedoms of capitalist ideology had reference to an "atomized society," in which each individual exercised his right to vote, to speak freely, and so forth, in total isolation.  The negative freedom of liberalism rendered ineffective the workers' need to collectivize the means of production because the bourgeoisie was integrated as a group through its command of the highly structured economic system.  Significantly, Sartre's critique of bourgeois democracy was the one argument in The Communists and the Peace that Kanapa, the Communist, dismissed, [18] revealing the attachment of the CP to the Fourth Republic.  Sartre's argument that the CP was the vehicle of the workers' transcendence of bourgeois democracy was gainsaid by the CP itself.

Sartre's chief insight in 1952 was that in order to overcome capitalism the working

16. Ibid., 125.
17. Ibid., 124 and 3-32.
18. Kanapa, op. cit., 39.

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class had first to overcome its own atomization.  Mechanical unity had to become organic unity.  What shaped the masses of workers into proletarians was just the organic unity of their collective project to overcome alienation.  To the degree that the worker participated in the freedoms of bourgeois society he confirmed his alienation in the mass; [19] when he voted or made a labor contract he supported a mechanical unity with others, he legitimized a social system based on private property.  In his situation within capitalist society, the only project the worker could take on that would further his self-realization, his substantial freedom, was that of dismantling the apparatus of social atomization: "The masses are the object of history: they never act by themselves, and every action of the working class requires that they begin by suppressing themselves as masses in order to accede to the elementary forms of collective life."[20]  Sartre was now ready to argue for the CP: only through the Party could the worker find a type of unity that transcended atomization. the Party could the worker find a type of unthat transcended atomization.

With the concepts of mechanical and organic social interactions Sartre began his meditation on the problem of social classes.  The concept of class was, of course, one of the central doctrines of Marx and one that was repeatedly challenged by liberal sociologists.  To Marxists, capitalist society was organized in groups based on relationships to the means of production.  Liberals answered that social position depended upon a number of status factors, the primary one being income.  Because the income of the lower classes was rising in the 1950s, the antagonism between the haves and the have-nots was abating; the class struggle was, in this sense, disappearing.  Against the liberal contention, official Marxists piously quoted Marx's law of the progressive pauperization of the working class under capitalism.  Until Marxists acknowledged the material success of capitalism they could not begin to refute the liberals.

In The Communists and the Peace Sartre argued against both positions.  Liberal sociologists like Gurvitch, Halbwachs, and Sorokin all characterized social classes mech-

19. Sartre, op. cit., 122.
20. Ibid., 207.

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anically, viewing them as an "identity" of particulars, as a "collection" of thing-like atoms. [21] What these theories failed to express was the "unity" of a class, the vital, interior connection of individuals.  Thus, rather than join the debate between liberals and Marxists on the old grounds, the existentialist wanted to show the subjective element of social classes.

For Sartre, a social group became a class only when the individuals interiorized a common project and captured their individual identity in the common destiny of the group.  It was not enough to list external criteria like income, relation to means of production, or status in order to constitute a historical class.  A class was not a collection of things, but a human group that constituted itself, that actively organized itself into a commonality: "It is movement which holds together the separated elements; the class is a system in motion: if it stopped, the individuals would revert to their inertia and to their isolation. This movement, directed, intentional and practical, requires an organization . . . a class organizes itself." [22] Sartre's focus on the dramatic subjectivity of social categories was typical of the existentialists' approach to enriching Marxist social theory.  What he did not account for at all in 1952 was the fact that most social interactions did not include a dramatic commonality of projects.  Most often, inertia characterized society.

The scandalous aspect of Sartre's concept of class was his promotion of the CP to the role of unifier of the "collection" of individual workers.  For the workers, the leap from atomization to class unity was effected through the magic of the Party, within which they were "unified" into a class, realizing their subjective, intentional, creative nature. 23 Under the leadership of the Party, the individual worker acted for humanity, Sartre proclaimed, returning to his theme of the universality of the individual project from "Ex-

21. Ibid., 93.
22. Ibid., 98.
23. Ibid., 128-131.

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ism is a Humanism": "That the proletariat is the carrier of human values is not to be doubted; what it demands for itself it must necessarily claim for all."[24] The identification of the proletariat under the CP with humanity left no room for critically examining the Party's particular acts or decisions.  Hence when the CP, in 1956, would support the Russian invasion of Hungary, it would have to be said to be acting in the interests of all men.  Furthermore, with this notion of class unity, Sartre denied the Marxist proposition that capitalism unified the workers in the process of production through the division of labor; he asserted instead that unity in the workplace was not sufficient to mold the workers into a class.  At best the social aspect of labor was an external condition for class, part of the in-itself that shaped the workers into a passive collectivity.  Although Sartre failed to accord the activity of work its rightful prominence, he was admitting the achievement of 20th-century capitalism: its destruction of the day-to-day solidarity of workers in the factories.

Sartre was now significantly qualifying his individualism: the worker could not achieve his goal alone; individually his freedom was impotent because it was a matter of changing the mode of social interactions.[25] Individual, "granular" projects to end alienation had a historical voice only through the politics of the Party.  Close to Lenin's view in What is to Be Done? as well as to that of Kautsky, Sartre argued that the worker's interest in higher pay became a political interest connected to the overthrow of capitalism only when the Party struggled against the capitalists.  The Party was the working class; it incarnated the agency of the workers as proletarians and through it alone did the workers become the subjects of history, the universal class of Marx. [26]

When a worker joined the Party he enacted a mutuality of recognition that transcended solipsism.  Here Sartre went beyond his concept of the Other as external

24. Ibid., 154n.
25. Ibid., 127.
26. Ibid., 266.

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beyond his concept of the Other as external threat, as the "look" in Being and Nothingness:

. . . what I imitate in my neighbor is not the Other, it is myself become my own object; I do not repeat his act because he did it, but because I, in him, have just done it.  In short, I must perceive his situation and his
needs as my needs in such a manner that his behavior appears to me outside like a project springing forth from my head; the imitator and the imitated are at one and the same time interchangeable and separated, and imitative behavior is the result of a dialectic of identity and of exteriority. . . . [27]

The same CP, with the same ideology that Sartre dismissed in 1946 as determinist, was now extolled as the embodiment of the freedom of the working class.  It did not matter that the workers did not enthusiastically support the strike of June 4th; their apathy did not change the situation one iota.  It was understandable to Sartre that the workers., weighed down, fatigued by the oppression of capitalism, would not rise to their historical task on every occasion.  Their fate remained in the bands of the CP, as did the fate of all France.  Only two years before, in 1950, Sartre had presented the Stalinist bureaucracy as the destroyer of revolutionary subjectivity.  At that time, in his preface to Louis Dalmas' Le Communisme Yougoslave he charged the Stalinists with failing to lead the masses toward liberation.  After the revolution, the spontaneous needs of the masses were opposed to the problems of modernization, requiring the leadership to inspire a new subjectivity, a new dedication, for the building of socialism. [28]  The Leninist party

27. Ibid., 207-208.
28. J. P. Sartre, Préface in Louis Dalmas,  Le Communisme Yougoslave (Paris, 1950) xiv, xvi, xx-xxi, xxv.

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in Russia, led by Stalin, detached itself from the masses, relying instead on the bureaucracy, and used repression rather than education to accomplish its goals.  Now, in 1952, Sartre ascribed to the French counterpart of Stalin's Party this same capacity for revolutionary subjectivity.

The irony of Sartre's position in The Communists and the Peace was that he had advanced his social philosophy while regressing in his politics.  One could argue, as he did in the 1960s, [29] the same social theory without concluding that the CP, as it was then constituted, was the only viable project for the workers.  Such a stance was taken by Claude Lefort of Socialisme ou Barbarie, an ex-Trotskyist and a friend of Merleau-Ponty, in his rejoinder to the first two parts of The Communists and the Peace which was printed in Les Temps Modernes in 1953 along with Sartre's reply.

Lefort admonished Sartre for reducing the prospects of communism to the Stalinist Party.  Stalinism was bureaucratic; it limited the workers to passivity with its strict discipline and hierarchy. [30] Stalinism "tacitly collaborated with the bourgeoisie," and could not lead the working class to revolution.  By adhering to the Stalinist Party, Sartre was forced into the false antithesis of vanguard party versus spontaneity of the workers. [31] When he postulated "the Party as the only subject of praxis," he suppressed the dialectical interaction of work and politics, of the workers and their leadership.[32] His Stalinism compelled him to overlook the true revolutionary dialectic of the workers actively engaged in the making of policies.  Consequently Sartre merely elevated the

29. In a conversation with Burnier, Sartre criticized The Communists and the Peace for not raising the question of the internal structure of the Party: " . . . is it possible to conceive of democracy in the Party outside of revolutionary moments? . . . This reflection on the notion of legitimacy is what was lacking in The Communists and the Peace. . . . In France today, the Party itself has become serial." In Contat, op. cit., 275-276.
30. "Le Marxisme et Sartre," Les Temps Modernes, 8:89 (March, 1953) 1556.
31. Ibid., 1561.
32. Ibid., 1568.

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vated the pragmatic success of the Party in retaining the allegiance of a good proportion of the workers into a matter of legitimate principle.  In the last analysis his position was a "political empiricism" that justified the unfortunate fact of the Party's success.

Sartre's "Réponse à Lefort" hardly extricated him from the predicament.  As long as one advocated Stalinism, there was no way out of the dualism of passive, "mechanical" masses of workers in their act of production versus active, "Unified" proletarians politically supporting the CP.  Sartre could not refute the charge that be had misconstrued Marx's concept of class by detaching the productive activity of the workers from political action. [33] He would have to show, Lefort maintained, that in the very process of production the workers were not only isolated but unified and mutually dependent, producing socially and cooperatively; that the transcending project of revolution was "chosen" by workers from within this situation; and that the politics developed by the workers was intimately tied to their work context.  Since the Stalinist Party ruptured the bond between the productive activity of the workers and their politics, it could not be the authentic "subject" of the proletariat.

The Communists and the Peace won Sartre the friendship of the French Communists, a friendship he already enjoyed with Italian Communists. [34] He now shared the platform with Communists at rallies and meetings; Simone de Beauvoir gave exclusive interviews to the Communist press; and Sartre refused permission for an Austrian production of Dirty Hands because it shed a bad light on Communists.  After a trip to Russia, he euphorically reported "The freedom to criticize is total in Russia" and "Whatever road France takes must not contradict the way of Russia." [35] From 1952 until the Hungarian invasion of 1956, the existentialist was comfortably committed.

33. Ibid., 1543.
34. Burnier, op. cit., 87.
35. Ibid., 89.

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2. Merleau-Ponty on Sartre's Dialectical Adventures

Merleau-Ponty's skepticism about Marxism only deepened when Sartre aligned himself with the CP.  The erstwhile political editor of Les Temps Modernes was chagrined by his friend's newest adventures in politics.  Disenchanted now with Marxism and with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty wrote Les Aventures de la dialectique in 1955 to settle his accounts with Communism and to reprimand Sartre for his errors.  Chapters on Max, Weber, Lukacs, Lenin, and Trotsky were followed by a long section on Sartre, comprising half the book.  "Sartre and Ultra-Bolshevism" was a painstaking refutation of Sartre's discovery of the proletariat in the bosom of the CP.  Now, however, the tables were turned, and the Communist intellectuals, in their riposte to Les Aventures de la dialectique, called Les Mèsaventures de l'antimarxisme, defended Sartre against Merleau-Ponty. [36] Les Aventures de la dialectique was important for the development of an existential Marxism because in it Merleau-Ponty specified the inability of Sartre's attempt in The Communists and the Peace to join concepts of history and society with his concept of radical freedom.  Merleau-Ponty interpreted The Communists and the Peace as Sartre's attempt to "annex history onto his philosophy of freedom and the other."[37] Carefully, deliberately, Merleau-Ponty took Sartre's concepts from Being and Nothingness and matched them against those in The Communists and the Peace.  In each case be demonstrated that  Sartre

36. Garaudy, et al., Mèsaventures de l'anti-marxisme (Paris, 1956).  Cf. also Henri Lefebvre's review "M. Merleau-Ponty et la philosophie de l'ambiguité," La Pensée 68 (July-August, 1956) 44-58 and 73 (May, 1957) 37-52.  Catholics and liberals were more favorable to Les Aventures de la dialectique: for a liberal review Jean Ullmo, "Une étape de la pensée politique," Critique, 11:98 (July, 1955) 625-643 and for a Jesuit review, Jean-Marie Le Blond, "Le Sens de l'histoire et l'action politique," Etudes (Nov., 1955) 209-219.
37. Les Aventures de la dialectique (Paris, 1955) 216.

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had failed to unite his concept of radical freedom with a Marxist concept of history and society.

The chief reason for Sartre's failure was his dualistic ontology: the world was composed of pure consciousness and opaque facts, without the all-important mediations.  "The question is if, as Sartre says, there are only men and things, or also the interworld that we call history?"[38] Sartre was still trapped in the Cartesian cogito, viewing historical action as no more than the "action of persons," nothing but a collection of individual "projects."[39]  Sartre, le bon cartésien, limited history to a "plurality of subjects, but no intersubjectivity. . . ."[40] When Simone de Beauvoir reviewed Les Aventures de la dialectique for Les Temps Modernes she justifiably took exception to Merleau-Ponty's oversimplification of Sartre's dualism: in fact, Sartre had given some recognition to "that interworld between men and things." [41] The only question was whether  Sartre adequately conceptualized the interworld and here Merleau-Ponty was more convincing.

When it came to comprehending the action of the proletariat or the relation of the workers to the Party, Sartre resorted to an abstract concept of the free actions of individuals.  Relations among workers were no more than the "magic of the look," claimed Merleau-Ponty, haunting Sartre unfairly with Lefebvre's criticism of Being and Nothingness.[42] At bottom, Sartre was stuck in a Cartesian concept of consciousness, vitiating any attempt to account for historical action:

Perhaps it is finally the notion of consciousness as pure power to  signify, as centrifugal movement without opacity, without inertia, that rejects the signified, history and the social, reducing them to a series of instantaneous sights, subordinating doing to seeing, and

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and reducing, finally, action to "manifestation" or to "sympathy" . . . [43]

Philosophically, Sartre blindly steered a course through the Scylla of replacing Marxist ideas with his own from Being and Nothingness and the Charybdis of adopting the CP's version of Marxism.  Either way, he lost.[49] For example, when he considered the

43. Ibid., 267.
44 Signs, op. cit., 173.
45 Merleau-Ponty, Les Aventures de la dialectique, 169.
46 Ibid., 178.
47 Ibid., 138, 145, 188.
48 Ibid., 142, 155.
49 Ibid., 181.

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Party the only source of historical action for the working class, he was simply repeating the CP's view of itself.  When he described the working class as completely atomized, he was superimposing on Marxism the dualism of self and other from Being and Nothingness.  Each Sartrean worker faced the hostile capitalist world alone as a Cartesian, finding the world a dense, impenetrable Other.  For Merleau-Ponty, true Marxism had solved this question by denying that the world was Other.  Marx demonstrated that man had penetrated the world completely, ending dualism in practice.  For Marx, ". . . man was diffused everywhere, inscribed on all the walls, in all the social mechanisms be had fabricated."[50] Nowhere was man confronted by an absolute Other, by a pure thing or in-itself; everything bore the traces of human action.  If, instead of focusing on the isolated worker confronting the world, Sartre had sought the interworld of the worker's relationships he would not have ended with the facile opposition of free Party versus inert working class.  The task of existential Marxism was to add subjectivity to the Marxist notion of social interaction, [51] a task Sartre did not achieve.

Merleau-Ponty was far too harsh: Sartre bad begun to underline the reciprocity of individuals in collective projects.  Merleau-Ponty's desire to refute Sartre's Stalinism led him to throw out the genuine advances Sartre had made toward a social theory, advances that relied heavily on Merleau-Ponty's previous works.  The philosopher of ambiguity was chiefly concerned with reminding Sartre that all had not gone well for Marxism, that the Stalinists were not close to socialism, and the crisis of Marxism could be resolved only by accounting for the "inertia" of history, for the failure of the revolution: "Both the Marxism of the young Marx and the 'Western' Marxism of 1923 [a reference to History and Class Consciousness] lacked the means of expressing the inertia of infrastructures, the resistance of economic and even natural conditions, the binding of
 
50 Ibid., 192
51 Ibid., 58.

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'personal relations' in 'things.' "[52]  In short, Marxism could not account for regressions in history.  By 1960, in the Critique, Sartre hoped to satisfy Merleau-Ponty's objections by elucidating the region of the "practico-inert," the sedimentation of human actions into social structures that lost their human quality and resisted the freedom of individuals and groups.

For his own part, Merleau-Ponty had practically given up hope for socialism and freedom.  It was necessary to recognize as no one on the Left was willing to do that "the USSR has ceased to be the fatherland of the revolution." [53] Only the development of a non-Communist Left could carry forward the revolution and Merleau-Ponty resigned himself to an "a-communism." Sartre's stance was not viable: "To be a Communist from the outside, to impose on Communism a look which comes from outside and which is not hostile . . . "[54]--this would have no effect because its premise was free, critical thought, a premise denied by the Party.  In this predicament the Left would have to rely on the only institution that offered even a "Minimum of opposition and truth," the liberal Parliament.  The trauma of Korea still obsessed Merleau-Ponty as be slid deeper and deeper into skepticism.  Writing now for L'Express, he pinned his slender hopes on Mendes-France and "La Nouvelle Gauche" of Bourdet and Gilles Martinet, the latter taking a somewhat technocratic attitude toward social change. [55] La Nouvelle Gauche, with its organ France Observateur, was a short-lived attempt in the 1950s to unify men of the Resistance who were either neutralists or anti-colonialists and without a political party.  It bad some influence on the Christian Left.  From Les Aventures de la dialectique until his death in 1961 the only optimism Merleau-Ponty would indulge himself was a dream of the contingent reemergence of the Proletariat in the distant future: "Perhaps

52 Ibid., 88.
53 Ibid., 299.
54 Ibid., 240.
55 De Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, op. cit., 318.

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incredible detours, the proletariat will rediscover its role as the universal class, and will once more take over that universal Marxist criticism which for the moment has no historical impact or bearing." [56] For all his influence on political thought, Merleau-Ponty never found a place in the French political scene.

3. Polemics with Pierre Naville

A relatively minor intellectual incident in early 1956 disclosed Sartre's hesitations about the CP at a time when he was closest to it.  Pierre Hervé, a Communist who edited Action in the 1940s, published La Révolution et les fétiches in 1956, the first criticism of the Party by one of its members since Stalin's death.[57] He hoped to incite discussion and reform; for his trouble, be was expelled.  Sartre reviewed the book in the February, 1956, issue of Les Temps Modernes.[58] He agreed with the Communist reviewer, Guy Besse, who lambasted Hervé's book for its idealism and its reformism, adding that the book should have circulated within the CP to avoid unfavorable publicity from the Right.  Sartre charged that the book, though intellectually weak and of dubious political motivation, nonetheless deserved consideration by Hervéís comrades.  The fact that the CP refused it an open discussion was indicative of the dogmatism of Communist intellectuals.  It disturbed Sartre that "Marxism was arrested in France." [59] As for Hervé, he persisted in his criticism of the CP--along with Pierre Fougeyrollas who later joined the Arguments group--in a short lived periodical, La Nouvelle Réforme.  Finally, Hervé joined the Socialist Party.

To Sartre, the Communists ascribed to Marxism the powers of making reality intellig-

56 Signs, op. cit., 8.
57 De Beauvoir, op. cit., 341.
58 "La Réformisme et les fétiches," Les Temps Modernes (Feb., 1956) 1153-1164.
59 Ibid., 1163.

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ible, of comprehending not only society but also the individual.  The French Communists, however, had done nothing to carry out this intellectual and cultural project; their minds were closed.  Sartre regretted the absence of a "living Marxism," probably thinking that a revolutionary movement without intellectual vitality was doomed, but not saying this for fear of taunts about idealism.  He noted that marxisants scholars in many fields, Georges Lefebvre in history, Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology, Pierre Francastle in art history, used Marxism profitably without belonging to the CP.  Sartre was dismayed: be was an intellectual advocating a Party that discouraged independent thought.

Sartre's uneasiness was exacerbated by Pierre Naville, who answered the Les Temps Modernes piece in L'Observateur and then extended his remarks about Sartre in a pamphlet, L'intellectuel communiste: à propos de  J.-P. Sartre.[60] Naville had long been a leading theorist in the Trotskyist movement.  Before the war he edited La Verité, an official organ of the Fourth International in France.  Even after he left that movement, after the war, he remained an important Marxist theorist.  Yet his writings often slid into the same mechanical reductionism as that of his enemies in the CP.  In this very effective little pamphlet of 1956, Naville caustically drew attention to Sartre's ambiguous stance as a partisan of the CP and as an independent intellectual.[61] To the Trotskyist, the ambiguity was an unstable synthesis that was resolved only in Sartre's "subservience" to the Stalinists.  Hervé, Naville pointed out, had criticized the bureaucratic nature of the Party--a favorite Trotskyist charge--but Sartre's equivocations could not go this far.  Everything Sartre wrote, especially The Communists and the Peace, ended in an apology for the CP.  The ambiguity deepened and became hypocrisy, he continued, once it was realized that Sartre took this position only to gain the confidence of the Stalinist intellectuals so that be could initiate Party reform.  Yet his position prevented him from having that effect.

60 (Paris, 1956).
61 Ibid., 9.

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The function of the intellectual, Naville urged, either in the Party or close to it, could only be to criticize the Party, to judge continually the political acts of the Party against its Marxist philosophy.  And Sartre, of course, knew this: why else would he guard his independence so scrupulously?  Yet Sartre penned nothing but encomiums of the infallible CP. Naville went further, arguing that the corpus of Sartre's writings revealed the same ambiguity that was found in his relations with the CP:  as far back as Being and Nothingness Sartre's thought floundered on the relation of "creation and politics": the former was "useless" but free, while the latter was "useful" and unfree.  Sartre wanted "commitment" but also the role of "witness," of gadfly and critic. [62] His career swung from pole to pole without resolution: from joining the RDR and advocating Titoism to the flirtation with the CP, becoming its watchdog.  In the end, Sartre "forbids himself the only task of value-to restore the true function of the intellectual confronting revolutionary tasks." [63] Sartre was a "crypto-Stalinist" who appeared, once the masks were torn away, as nothing more than a confused idealist. "There is a secret relation," Naville hissed, "between the affirmation of unconditional subjectivity and the assurance that whatever happens must happen.  This relation is ubiquitous in the idealist tradition . . . "[64] Sartre wanted to have his cake and eat it too: for him, "Marxism is arrested and at the same time, the Communist Party is infallible; charming existential psychoanalysis!"[65]

Naville had touched a sensitive nerve; Sartre's reply was a compound of irritation and wounded feelings. [66] The Trotskyist and former Surrealist had indeed uncovered an inner contradiction in Sartre's thought and politics.  The importance of the controversy rests with the abrupt shift Sartre took immediately following the polemic: from 1956 on

62 Ibid., 33-34.
63 Ibid., 20.
64 Ibid., 40.
65 Ibid., 57.
66 "Réponse à Pierre Naville," Les Temps Modernes, 11:123 (March-April, 1956) 1510ff.

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he would remain at a distance from the French CP while attempting to reform its bureaucratic nature and critically reexamining Marxist thought.  The invasion of Hungary later in 1956 provided him with the occasion for a break.  From 1956 until May, 1968, he reconciled himself to the position of an independent intellectual and threw himself fully into the task of regenerating Marxism.  In 1957 and 1958 be initiated relations with Polish intellectuals to aid the destruction of Stalinism there.[67] Concurrently he immersed himself in Marxist thought, with the goal of seriously defining its limits, a task that resulted in the Critique of 1960.  After 1956 there was a degree of unity to Sartre's thought and politics that he had not found before.

Back in 1956, the "Reply to Naville" was the last gesture of Sartre's period of partisanship with the CP, his last Stalinist gasp.  The first section of the article, filled with maudlin sentimentality, rebuked Naville for stabbing him in the back.  Sartre did not think he deserved the treatment dished out by a companion and friend on the Left who had always enjoyed a welcome in the pages of Les Temps Modernes.  He posed as the injured innocent who was "irritated" and "hurt." [68] " Naville's article was damned for its impoliteness: "?I always thought that we should maintain between ourselves, even in the liveliest discussions, a tone of courtesy and camaraderie?"[69]  Did not Naville see that the arrest of Marxism was "temporary, that the CP deserved sympathy for attempting to remain revolutionary while struggling for reformist demands at a time when the revolution was only a distant possibility . . . [70]

There was an amusing irony amidst all this heat: Naville had done to Sartre what Hervé had done to the Communists--given public criticism.  Sartre, defending Hervé for opening up discussion, was oblivious to the similar purposes in Naville's pamphlet.  Sartre's defensiveness to criticism implied that, although the CP should be brought to

67 Burnier, op. cit., 115-116.
68 "Réponse à Pierre Naville," op. cit., 1521.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid., 1514.

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task as part of an open atmosphere of serious debate, his own thought was not likewise subject to argument.

4. The Hungarian Invasion: Skepticism or Stoicism

Sartre and Merleau-Ponty met at an international conference in Venice in 1956 and found they could work together even with their disagreements about the relation of culture to society. [71] Aware of the distance that divided them, they continued to see one another until Merleau-Ponty's death in 1961.  Yet nothing clarifies better the separate paths the existentialists had taken since 1950 than their responses to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Writing for L'Express in November, right after the invasion,, Merleau-Ponty had become a skeptic who engaged in political journalism while maintaining a posture of abstention.  His article "On De-Stalinization" brought home the verdict that the Russian experience of socialism was a failure.  The existing forms of communism no longer evoked special support against the other camp.  ". . . the only correct attitude is to see communism relatively as a fact without any special privilege, as an undertaking, preyed upon by its own contradiction. . . .  Communism as a universal model, as the future of mankind, has proved abortive."[72]  The existentialist was still a humanist, but a skeptical humanist who found little substantiation for his ideas in politics.

For Sartre too the Hungarian invasion sparked a change, although in a different direction.  He now broke completely with his Communist friends. [73] Like Merleau-Ponty, he had been enmeshed in the assumption that Russia was the vehicle of man's hopes, that the Western capitalist nations were its enemy, and that any position not specifically

71 "Rencontre Est-ouest à Venise," Comprendre, 16 (Sept., 1956) 212-216, 219, 247, 263-264, 289-290.
72 "On De-Stalinization," Signs, op. cit., 303.
73  De Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, op. cit., 356-360.

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in support of the former redounded to the aid of the latter.  The events of October and November, 1956, released Sartre from this web.  It was precisely this reasoning on the part of the Communist intellectuals in France that made any evaluation of Soviet policy impossible since it called for the immediate certification of the Party's position.  What was now in question was Sartre's stance in The Communists and the Peace that the Party was always right.[74]

The Ghost of Stalin presented an extended socio-historical analysis of the Hungarian invasion, the course of socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe, and concluded with a judgment about the future of de-Stalinization and, more importantly, the future politics of the FCP.  Sartre practiced his existential Marxist history, often brilliantly, to highlight the convergence of the pressures of the situation with the choices of individuals.  Penetrating, lucid,.  The Ghost of Stalin recalls other great examples of contemporary history like Marx's studies of 1848, Louis Napoleon, and the Commune of 1871.  In Sartre's analysis the Hungarian rebels could not simply be labeled agents of foreign capitalism, as the CP piously incanted.  Nor could Russian socialism be flippantly chalked off as a nightmare, a huge mistake, as liberals and even Merleau-Ponty pretended.

Sartre imagined that all was not yet lost for the de-Stalinization of Russia because the present contradictions there required democratization as the only available solution.[75] The leadership had to develop faith in the masses and renew its connections with them in the process of creating consumer industries.  Sartre did not see that consumer industries, like those in the United States, could be developed from above, undemocratically, through the manipulations of advertising.  Still, he was cautious.  The

74 "Le Fantôme de Staline," Les Temps Modernes, 129, 130, 131 (Nov., Dec., 1956 and Jan., 1957) trans. as The Ghost of Stalin by Fletcher (N.Y., 1968) 22-23.
75 Ibid., 103.

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success of democracy in Russia was not by any means assured, because in eliminating exploitation the Soviet Union had developed new forms of alienation. [76] The cult of personality and the bureaucracy dialectically reinforced each other, detaching the direction of society from the influence of the masses.  Institutions were erected in the bard process of industrialization that had to be dismantled.  Where Merleau-Ponty erred in his L'Express article was precisely in taking the stance he bad condemned in Sartre: in standing outside the situation, at a non-existent point of objectivity.  Seen from within, the chances of renovation in Russia were not bright, but they were not totally absent either. [77] Despite Stalin, Russia was still socialist.

The essential question for Sartre--and this is where his political thinking progressed-was not the Soviet Union and its fate but the French CP and the chances for socialism in France.  Regardless of events in Russia, the direction of the Party in France had to be examined separately, and it was to France that Sartre now limited the scope of his influence.  "But there is in France a Party . . . . That Party is our business . . . we have all been its fellow travelers; it is on it that we must, that we can effectively act."[78] The only hope for France lay in a "Popular Front" of Socialists and Communists.  For this to happen, the CP had to extricate itself from its dependence on the Soviet Union, becoming a truly French party that formulated its goals in terms of the French working class, then "decompressing" its authority by democratizing its bureaucratic structure.  Socialists could thereafter seize power without violence through the vote.

These conclusions opened up matters immeasurably for Sartre.  His politics could now be geared to a socio-historical analysis of France; he could estimate from a distance the direction of the CP, leaving open the possibility of abandoning it at an appropriate moment; above all, with good conscience, he could begin the important job of existent-

76 Ibid., 115, 70-71.
77 Ibid., 119, Cf. also 6-7.
78 Ibid., 122.
79 Ibid., 140-141.

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ializing Marxism.  Immediately after The Ghost of Stalin, Sartre wrote, for a Polish periodical, "Marxism and Existentialism," the first statement of a new project in which he would carefully define the relationship between the two theories, indicating the historical nature and role of existentialism.  His old stoicism would now add a decidedly optimistic tinge: although the revolution was not around the corner, the obstructed path could be clearly understood, the obstacles could be named, so that hope for a clear path could be soberly assessed and wholeheartedly attempted.  The writer and the activist, the man of culture and the man of politics, were united, committed to a project that was at once liberating and authentic.  Politically, the road was opened for Sartre's highly effective protests in favor of the Algerian FLN in the late 1950s and early 1960s; in fact Les Temps Modernes was seized four times in Algeria in 1957. [80] When Sartre took great risks and supported his friend François Jeanson upon his arrest for leading a pro-Algerian group in France, the existentialist had placed himself to the left of the Communists on the Colonial question.  Standing with Jeanson, who was considered by many a traitor, Sartre had taken an independent position that aided in revitalizing Marxist politics.  Indicative of the new political complexion, it was the SFIO and the CP who were dragging their feet, finally to come round to the initiative of Sartre, who suffered numerous bomb threats by the OAS.[81]

What is more, the vanguard position of Sartre's existential Marxism on the Algerian issue came just at the moment when the student movement was consolidating into a New Left. [82] The positions of Les Temps Modernes became the political and theoretical direction of the student movement, even of the UEC, the youth organization of the Communist Party.[83] The New Left student movement looked to Sartre for intellectual leadership, and Les Temps Modernes began to place the students, not the Leninist Party, in

80 Burnier, op. cit., 114.    
81 Ibid., 126.
82 R. Johnson, op. cit., 39.
83 Ibid., 49.

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the role of revolutionary vanguard.[84] Leaders of the student movement, Kravetz, Peninou, and Griset, wrote for Les Temps Modernes.  The important political strategy developed by André Gorz in Strategy for Labor was worked out during this period with Kravetz and the others.  So deep and widespread was Sartre's prestige among radical youth that Garaudy complained to him on behalf of the CP: "you are preventing people from coming to us. . . ." [85] But it was not until May, 1968, that Sartre's existential Marxism would show its full powers of interpreting history.

5. The Confrontation with Liberalism

Some perspective on the prospects of existential Marxism can be gained from the comments of Albert Camus and Raymond Aron, two prominent liberal social theorists.  Both had been friends of Sartre, Aron since the years at the Ecole Normale and Camus since the Resistance.  Camus was regarded by many as a fellow existentialist and Aron was on the original editorial board of Les Temps Modernes.  Both split with Sartre over the question of his pro-Communism.  Although it is not in strict chronological sequence, a discussion of liberalism is appropriate here because Camus and Aron maintained a consistent skepticism about existential Marxism throughout the period we have been discussing.  The purpose of this section is not to assess the thought of Camus and Aron but to illuminate further Sartre's Marxism.

The friendship of Sartre and Camus was broken with much noise and gossip over the publication of L'Homme revolté in 1951.  During the trying moments of 1952, François Jeanson wrote a critical review of Camus' book which elicited a hostile letter from the author to Sartre, followed by Sartre's equally nasty reply.  When the shouting stopped,

84 Ibid., 39.
85 Michel-Antoine Burnier, Choice of Action, trans.  B. Murchland (N.Y., 1968) 168.

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Sartre and Camus were no longer on speaking terms and their animosity continued until Camus' death in 1960.

From his earlier books, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus was known as a philosopher of the absurd and was grouped with the existentialists even though he himself denied the intellectual association.  In both the novel and the essay, Camus, accepting the death of God, doubted that human life had any meaning.  Now, in The Rebel, Camus suggested that human life was given a value by the act of the oppressed in saying "no" to his condition.  The irrational upsurge of rebellion, risking the rebel's life, consecrated the value of human existence.  The rebel struggled for human dignity, valuing it above life itself.  Camus was testing his own moral version of the Marxist identification of the oppressed with the cause of humanity, using a variation of Hegel's master-slave relation without a specific reference to Hegel.

After establishing the human value of rebellion, Camus traced the fate of revolution up through the twentieth century.  To him contemporary history was an apocalypse of murder: every act led to violent death.  In this moral atmosphere of terror the value of rebellion had to be questioned again.  Camus concluded that revolution failed to constitute justice,  that it degenerated instead into greater and greater terror.  The moral perversion of Marxist revolutions abrogated the initial value of the rebel's great refusal, leading Camus to search for meaning in the moderate ethics of the "Mediterranean spirit." At odds with the metaphysical horror of the human situation in the first part of the book, Camus, at the end, advocated the path of privatized art, a compromise that did not establish a reign of justice but did provide the individual with a way of creating some meaning to his life.  The lesson of The Rebel could be taken as an existentialist's refusal of Marxism, a direction opposite from Sartre's.

Jeanson's review denigrated The Rebel for not comprehending the historical conditions
 
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of revolutions, and for holding them up against an ahistorical, moral standard of justice. [86] Camus' letter to Les Temps Modernes, attacking Sartre, asserted that Jeanson had missed the point of the book and that Les Temps Modernes, under Sartre's direction, refused any criticism of the Soviet Union.  In short, Sartre had perverted his philosophy and become a crude ideologue. [87] Sartre's reply was equally venomous and ad hominem, reaffirming however his continued sense of the need to think within history.

Defending what we have seen as his Hegelian project of locating reason within history, Sartre reasoned that The Rebel was a moralist's search for eternal values, a liberal retreat from history, a bourgeois humanist's abandonment of social justice for the sake of personal integrity.  The "Reply to Albert Camus" in no way furthered his intellectual position; it was rather a reaffirmation of his search for an existential Marxism.  Against Camus' Sisyphean meaninglessness, Sartre restated his principle that meaning was found only within history and through engagement.

We won't argue whether there are or are not transcendent values to History.  We shall simply observe that, if there are any, they are manifested through human actions which are, by definition, historical. And this contradiction is essential to man: he makes himself historical in order to undertake the eternal, and discovers universal values in the
concrete action that be undertakes in view of a specific result.  If you say that the world is unjust, you have already lost the game.  You are already outside, in the act of comparing a world without justice to a justice without content.[89]

86 "A.  Camus, ou l'âme revoltée," Les Temps Modernes, 79 (June, 1952).
87 "Lettre au Directeur des Temps Modernes," Les Temps Modernes, 82 (August, 1952) 323-333.
88 "Réponse à Albert Camus," Les Temps Modernes, 82 (August, 1952) 334-353, trans. by B. Eisler in Situations, op. cit., 54-78.
89 Ibid., 352-353; and in English, 77.

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to accept Marxism?  To Sartre, Camus rejected the Russian revolution and consequently all efforts at social transformation; this is just what Sartre wanted to avoid.  Although the outlook was bleak, Sartre steadfastly held on to his philosophical convictions:

. . . from the moment one makes a choice, all things take on meaning. . . . Because it is within historical action that the understanding of history is given. Does History have a meaning, you ask?  Has it an objective?  For me, these
are questions which have no meaning.  Because History, apart from the man who makes it, is only an abstract and static concept, of which it can neither be said that it has an objective, nor that it has not.  And the problem is not to
know the objective but to give it one.[90]

Raymond Aron also denied the compatibility of existentialism and Marxism, but with more philosophical clarity and rigor than Camus.  About once every ten years Aron felt called upon to denounce the pretended alliance of existentialism and Marxism.  First in

90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., 343.
92 Ibid., 343n.

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1946, then in 1955, and finally in 1964, Aron polemicized against "Marxism and existentialism . . . which continue to represent one of the major philosophical tendencies of our age." [93] Granting the importance of the dialogue, Aron nevertheless rejected Marxism, existentialism, and any combination of the two, preferring instead a pluralist pessimism.  Much more than Camus, Aron claimed to have had personal participation in both movements: "Beginning with Marxism, I arrived at the tragic existentialism of Max Weber." [94]

Raymond Aron's intellectual career presents as confusing a kaleidoscope of positions as Sartre's.  In the 1930s Aron was instrumental in the importation of German thought into France, especially the sociology of Max Weber.[95] In the mid-1940s he joined and quickly left Les Temps Modernes, going over to the conservative-liberal paper Le Figaro.  With the changing moods of politics, Aron became the leading spokesman of that peculiar Cold War phenomenon, the end-of-ideology" ideology.  Ironically, these liberals rebuffed Marx because of his alleged concept of the end of history, while they themselves pronounced an end of major historical change, since capitalism had undone the class struggle.  A decade later, Aron was balancing his older liberalism with technocratic thoughts.[96]

In his articles on Marxism and existentialism, Aron reviewed the major themes of French intellectual life: the Hegelian dialectic of recognition, the Marxist concept of alienation and the concepts of freedom in the existentialisms of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre.  Aron acknowledged many commonalities in Marxism and existentialism:

93 Marxism and the Existentialists, trans. by H. Weaver and R. Addis (N.Y., 1970) 11.  The three articles referred to were collected in this text.  Aron's denials of possible reconciliation may be found on pp. 28, 87, and 175-176.
94 Ibid., 3.
95 Cf. Raymond Aron, La Sociologie allemande contemporaine (Paris, 1935) and Essai sur la théorie de l'histoire dans l'allemagne contemporaine:: la philosophie critique de l'histoire (Paris, 1938).
96  Cf. Raymond Aron, An Essay on Freedom, trans.  H. Weaver (N.Y., 1970).

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". . . thought in situation, discovery and transcendence, unsatisfied consciousness, the historicity of values?" and, in short, a common "anthropology derived from Hegel." [97] More fundamental, for Aron, were the irreconcilable divergences.  For Marxism, as opposed to existentialism, work was the human essence, making man's relation to nature primary, while the existentialists saw only an eternal struggle of consciousnesses.  Second, for Marx, history was unidirectional and progressive, while it was a "failure" for existentialists.  Unsatisfied with these two objections, Aron invented a third in 1946 which was for him the crux of the matter, his "fundamental theme": "What will always prevent an existentialist from being a Marxist is that revolution will not solve his philosophical problem, that of the dialogue of the individual with the absence of God.?" [98] And in a later formulation:

The Marxists and the existentialists come into conflict at the point where the tradition of Kierkegaard cannot be reconciled with that of Hegel: no social or economic regime can ever solve the enigma of history; individual destiny transcends collective life.  Individual consciousness always remains alone in the face of the mystery of life and
death, however well organized may be the communal exploitation of the planet.  The ultimate meaning of the human adventure is not given by the classless society, even if this society is inevitable.[99]

97 Marxism and the Existentialists, op. cit., 31.
98  Ibid., 37.
99  Ibid., 87.
100 Ibid., 83.  Aron continues in this vein in Histoire et dialectique de la violence (Paris, 1973), which rejects Sartre's notion that man can be constituted through violence but accepts Sartre otherwise as part of the historicist tradition of Dilthey and Weber.

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We need to look more carefully at this alleged incompatibility.  There was some truth in Aron's claim that Sartre's idea of authenticity was not a historical concept.  But Being and Nothingness did not present authenticity as a realized fact; bad faith was the dominant structure of consciousness.  The existentialist concept of radical freedom was the deep structure of human consciousness that haunted bad faith.  Authenticity was no more than a hope for a "radical conversion." Sartre's silence about authenticity could be said to derive from his lack of a concept of historical community.  Only with the Marxist concept of community could the concept of authenticity be fully articulated, a telling sign of the mutual dependence of the two doctrines.

Aron's second argument for the incompatibility of existentialism and Marxism derived from his view of Sartre.  For Aron, Sartre had conceptualized an eternal truth which was formulated with no awareness of history.  In Aron's eyes Sartre conceived of the "human condition" as a Pascalian travail of being trapped between finitude and the infinite, as a "Mystery of life and death," which was the "ultimate meaning of the human adventure." Aron wanted to burden existentialism with a universal flaw in the constitution of man.  Aron made Sartre into far more of a Cartesian than he actually was: "Sartre, in spite of everything, never transcended the Cartesian duality as reinterpreted by Husserl.  The Sartrean consciousness is solitary, self-translucid, and alienated in matter, and as a result of uniqueness, each man becomes the enemy of every other." [101]

Merleau-Ponty and others had noted the traces of Cartesianism in Sartre's early book; Aron wanted to go further, clothing existentialists with pure rationalism.  But this would not do: the existentialists placed human reality in time, in contradiction to Descartes.  Like Copernicus, who removed man from the physical center of the galaxy, and like Darwin who removed man's angelic pretentions, existentialism removed a remaining bit of self-flattery--the idea that man could think like God, in and for eternity.

101 Ibid., 9.

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Unfortunately, for Aron, existentialism insisted that reason was not ahistorical, that it was man hic et nunc who thought, not some transcendental ghost in a machine.  Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, as Aron claimed, "ignore the historical diversities, the slow creations, the unforeseeable accidents, the innumerable variations on the same theme"[102] that characterized human history.  But this does not imply that the concept of history itself was contradictory to existentialist thought.

What was most curious in Aron's contention of the gap between existentialism and Marxism was that in some places he made note of the similarity of the two in espousing a " subject-object dialectic."[103] Thus at one point Aron ascribed to existentialism the discovery of an eternal truth, as we have seen, while at another point he berated the existentialists for making truth relative to history.  The appearance of accuracy in Aron's articles in the 1940s and 1950s came not from the strength of his argument but from the lingering separation between the two camps.  The Marxists had still not unchained themselves from Stalinist orthodoxy, and the existentialists bad many loose ends in their social and historical thought.  In any case, Aron's liberalism, in Sartre's eyes, was incapable of deciding the matter because of its reliance on an idealist notion of rationality.

There was, however, a problem in Marxism and in existentialism that neither group faced concerning the precise nature of the transcendent capacity of reason.  The philosophical problem was this: how could reason at the same time be critical of the given and remain within history?  The classical Marxist answer was that history was contradictory, containing its own negation, and that scientific reason, as opposed to ideology, had its ground in the negating social class.  Somehow the individual identified with the oppressed and was able to reason from a progressive perspective.  This line of thought floundered over the question of science: how could a bourgeois like Einstein, who did not identify with the proletariat, achieve scientific results, while Lysenko, his

102 Ibid., 84.
103 Ibid., 79.

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socialist counterpart, reported only absurdities?  For Sartre and the existentialists, on the other hand, the transcending nature of reason was grounded in the self-evidence of truth to the situated individual.  This answer left open the question of how the individual thinker approached the totality.  Clearly, neither group handled the problem satisfactorily.

6. Genet and the Other

Sartre's existential biographies constitute a somewhat separate line of his thought which nonetheless is important to the development of his social theory.  We must break with chronology again in order to consider the significance of this genre of his writing for existential Marxism.

In 1952 Sartre published Saint Genet: comédien et martyr, the second in a series of full-scale studies that began with Baudelaire in 1946 and ended with Flaubert, in which he applied his method of existential psychoanalysis to literary figures.  Each was an attempt to capture the unifying project of the individual and follow the dialectic of his becoming.  Each grappled with the penetration of the Other, society and history--in sum, of the situation-upon the individual's choice of himself.  Sartre handled this question better with each successive study.  In his hands, Baudelaire's project was barely articulated in terms of society; with Genet, the Other became a crucial moment of his self-definition; for Flaubert, his relation to the bourgeoisie was fundamental for his project.  As Sartre's sense of society and history deepened, his intellectual biographies became rich studies of the relation of the social-historical milieu to the individual.[104]  In these biographies social reality illuminated the drama of the individual, and through the life of the individual the social field could be understood as a human product.

104 De Beauvoir, Prime of Life, op. cit., 459.

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Readers of Saint Genet have been astonished by Sartre's virtuosity at portraying an individual life.  Genet comes alive with such immediacy, the pages palpitate so humanly with his breath, the complexities of his life are laid bare so lucidly, that the reader is embarrassed by his uninvited intrusion into someone else's privacy.  One feels that rarely before has a human being emerged in a book so completely.

As we might expect, Sartre's purpose in Saint Genet was to undermine determinist explanations, to exemplify existential freedom and to totalize the comprehension of individual:

I have tried to do the following: to indicate the limit of psychoanalytical interpretation and Marxist explanation and to demonstrate that freedom alone can account for a person in his totality; to show this freedom at grips with destiny, crushed at first by its mischances then turning upon them and digesting them little by little . . . . [105]

Young Genet, an orphan living with peasants, creates himself through internalizing the gaze of the Other.  Caught stealing from his benefactors, Genet decided to be a thief.  Caught stealing the peasant's property, Genet is an object, an evil thing in the eyes of the other, and this is what he decides to become.  From the first decisive choice, Genet's adventure unfolds dialectically-a thief, a homosexual, a poet, a saint, a hero, a traitor, through it all his original project stands and is transformed: to be himself as the Other sees him.

105 Saint Genet, trans. by B. Frechtman (N.Y., 1963) 628.

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Instead of challenging the social taboo that exiles him from masculinity, he prefers to assume it: it is always social misfortune that he insists on; it is always against the Other and the Other's intentions that he has chosen to fight in becoming willfully and defiantly what the Other obliges him to be.[106]

If the everydayness of philosophy in Saint Genet was a carry-over from Being and Nothingness, Sartre's treatment of the dialectic of subject and object, self and other, in 1952 was an essential enrichment of his thought of 1943.  Merleau-Ponty, Lefebvre, Lukacs, and others pointed to the inadequacy of Sartre's dualism.  In 1952 Sartre turned to the "interworld," in order to explore capitalist society.  Marx had shown, from the 1844 Manuscripts to Capital, that, in bourgeois society, relations between men took on the appearance of relations between things.  In Saint Genet Sartre accepted the consequences of alienation, but went on to depict how the subject lives the relations that appear to be those between things.

106 Ibid., 320 and cf.  R. D. Laing and D. Cooper, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy (N.Y., 1971) 67-92.
107 Saint Genet, op. cit., 74.

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Man, says Marx, is an object to man.  That is true.  But it is also true that I am a subject to myself exactly insofar as my fellow man is an object to me. . . . He and I are not homogeneous: we cannot be part of the same whole except in the eyes of a third person who perceives us both as a single object.  If we could all be . . . both object and subject for each other and by each other . . . the separations would cease to exist. . . . As for absolute reciprocity, it is concealed by the historical conditions of class and race, by nationalities, by the social hierarchy. . . . Thus we usually live in a state of familiar and unthinking vagueness; we pass unnoticed.  In our profession, our family, our party, we are not quite objects and not quite subjects . . . not a moment goes by without your speaking and listening, and whatever you say or hear is what anyone would have said or heard in your place . . . you have no secrets, no mystery and yet, in a certain way, you are alone. And I do not locate this solitude in our private life, which is only a sector of public life. . . . It is everywhere.[108]

108 Ibid., 634-635.

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In the interworld we are depersonalized things and personalized ghosts without being able lucidly to comprehend this.  Sartre leaves open the possibility of transforming the structure of interactions, indicating only that a liberating revolution would preserve and deepen the individuality of the subject while allowing the other to become a separate presence without becoming a thing.  At present, to Sartre, the humanizing direction of change is the most difficult option for the individual: he must make himself more of an object, integrate himself more fully in the unsatisfying society by joining a revolutionary group.  Normally the individual finds his meaning through both making himself a thing for others and privatizing his subjectivity.  But only by making his subjectivity public, by engaging himself fully in the public realm, can be move toward ending alienation.  This choice brings to light both our freedom and our evasions of it in bad faith, and hence disturbs us and causes anxiety.[109] Genet, for Sartre, is a "hero" of our age because he made all the "bad" choices of our bourgeois subjectivity and objectivity.  He chose to be as the Other saw him in every case.  And he escaped the Other only by artistically recreating his choices in his plays and poems, forcing to the consciousness of the bourgeoisie its own bad side.  "Genet is we.  That is why we must read him." [110] Genet is the condemned monster of bourgeois society, as Bukharin was in Soviet Russia.  Both internalized the meaning their self had for society.  But Genet presented back to his society the bad side of its own structures: the criminal is defined and created by private property; the homosexual by the prudes.  Genet was part of the reified society, but he internalized the side of society that it wanted to forget.  The inadequacies of interactions in capitalist society were manifest in what capitalist society labeled evil.  The evil implied the good: theft implied private property.  The vicious circle was not broken by Genet, only suspended in his art, held up so that it could be observed.

109 Ibid., 639.
110 Ibid., 644.

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To escape the circle of an isolated objectivity that is too subjective (our private life) and a public subjectivity that is too objective (our work relations and politics) we must become both more subjective, facing ourselves more completely as what we are, and more objective, joining in the social task of reconstruction.

If we maintain the hope and firm intention of escaping this alternative, if there is still time to reconcile, with a firm effort, the object and the subject, we must, be it only once and in the realm of the imaginary, achieve this latest solitude which corrodes our acts and thoughts.  We spent our time fleeing from the objective into the subjective and from the subjective into objectivity.  This game of hide-and-seek will end only when we have the courage to go to the limits of ourselves in both directions at once.[111]

111 Ibid.

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subjective by democratic collective ownership, but the isolated subject, the atomized worker, must become more objective by adopting the revolution as his personal project.  Similarly, the idealist gesture of changing our ideas was inadequate because it forgot that we are not isolated atoms but rather diffused in our interactions and that we chose our isolation through the others who look at us as isolated.  The subject-object dialectic, in Sartre's hands, strove to preserve both moments of the dyad (we must go "in both directions at once"), envisioning an authentic choice that would open us up to being.

In Saint Genet Sartre still had not laid bare the structures of the interworld; he had not yet probed the dead weight of historical structures.  What he achieved, in addition to a great study of Genet, was a firmer sense of the other, a more animated outline of the interpenetration of the self and the world, and a more ominous awareness of the depth of our inauthenticity.  In totalizing Genet's original project, Sartre uncovered the truth that the whole world was enmeshed in the individual's bad faith.  And yet for Sartre Saint Genet remained a work separate from his political involvement.  Although I have probed this book for elements of a social theory, that is not the way it was generally read or, indeed, intended.  There is clearly a unity of method in Sartre's biographies and political philosophy, a unity that becomes more and more pronounced as we move from Baudelaire to Flaubert.  Still, these studies present themselves as personal investigations, remote from social concerns.  Perhaps at bottom Sartre always reserved part of himself for art and culture, safe from the noise of politics.  One might surmise that only with this anchor in cultural life could be preserve his equilibrium in the intense world of Leftist politics.

7. Socialisme ou Barbarie

During the 1950s Sartre identified Marxism exclusively with the Stalinism of the CP.  Merleau-Ponty, who was more cogent than Sartre about the theoretical and political

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multiplicity of Marxism, also used Stalinism as the main reference point of his political writings.  Yet there was one tiny group of Marxists, those of Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-1965), who had struggled since 1946 to separate Marxism from its identification with the Soviet Union.  Furthermore, Socialisme ou Barbarie developed Marxism along the lines that I will define as existential Marxism in the next two chapters, although it was hostile toward Sartre and toward most of the other existential Marxists.[112] In reviewing the formation and theoretical development of this extremely important journal, we must stress that they were a very sectarian group who existed in almost total obscurity until the mid-1960s, remaining well outside the arena of debate.

The two main figures in Socialisme ou Barbarie, Cornélius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, derived from the Trotskyist movement.  A refugee from the Greek Civil War, Castoriadis split from the Fourth International, rejecting the Trotskyist position that the Stalinist bureaucracy was no more than an accident.  To Castoriadis, Soviet socialism was not a mere 'degenerated workers' State," as it was for Trotsky.  Instead, Castoriadis, having studied Max Weber, saw that the bureaucracy that had arisen in Russia since 1917 was a new ruling class, an exploiting class which, if anything, was more oppressive than the Western bourgeoisie.[113] A professional economist, Castoriadis had thus begun the most penetrating critique of Marxism available in France.

The other thinker we shall mention, Claude Lefort, turned to Trotskyism before the war at the suggestion of his philosophy professor, Merleau-Ponty.  Lefort maintained direct contact with factory workers for many years after joining the movement.  He met

112 Interview with Claude Lefort in Paris, September 18, 1973.
113 C. Castoriadis, La Société bureaucratique (Paris, 1973) 205-282.  This contains some of his articles from Socialisme ou Barbarie, which are all being reprinted.  His pseudonyms are Paul Cardan, Pierre Chaulieu, and Jean-Marc Coudray.  Lefort's contributions are collected in Eléments d'un théorie de la bureaucratie (Geneva, 1971).  Interview with C. Castoriadis in Paris, Sept. 21, 1973.

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Castoriadis in 1946 when the Socialisme ou Barbarie group was formed.  Through Lefort, Socialisme ou Barbarie had direct contact with existentialism since he and Merleau-Ponty were close friends.  As we have already seen, Lefort published for Les Temps Modernes.  Also, there are traces of the influence of Socialisme ou Barbarie on Merleau-Ponty in Les Aventures de la dialectique.[114] Finally, the positions taken by Castoriadis in the last issues of the journal appear to have benefited from a reading of Merleau-Ponty's last works.

From its first critiques of Stalinist bureaucracy, Socialisme ou Barbarie began to radicalize its position by drawing a connection between Stalin's state and Lenin's theory of organization.  The theory of the autonomous Party, strictly self-disciplined and standing above the mass of workers, that Lenin developed in What Is to Be Done? in answer to the trade unionism of German social democracy, led directly, for Castoriadis, to Stalin's bureaucracy. [115] In both cases the same contradiction operated: the workers were objectified and seen as passive social elements.  With this highly important concept, Castoriadis warned that Marxists must regard the workers as creative participants in the building of socialism.  Very much like the existential Marxists, Castoriadis defined socialism as "the conscious organization by men themselves of their life in all domains." [116] Hence Socialisme ou Barbarie turned to the tradition of workers' councils for a concept of a revolutionary form of organization.  Later, Castoriadis, again like the existential Marxists, emphasized the critical concepts of workers' self-management and alienation as means of debureaucratizing socialist movements.  In the 1960s Socialisme ou Barbarie, now joined by younger men like Lyotard and Souyri, began

114 Cf.  Les Aventures de la dialectique, 312-313, which quotes Socialisme ou Barbarie (July-Aug., 1952) 10.
115 "Sur le contenu du socialisme," Socialisme ou Barbarie, organe de critique et d'orientation révolutionnaire, 9:22 (July-Sept., 1957) 1-73.
116 Ibid., 9:23 (Jan.-Feb., 1958) 81.

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to totalize its conception of revolution.  No longer limited to the work-place, socialism, it argued, must transform and democratize all areas of social life, in short, the totality of everyday life.[117] In this rethinking of Marxism, Socialisme ou Barbarie developed its thought precisely along the lines taken by existential Marxists, in a parallel but autonomous manner.

The main contradiction for Castoriadis both within Western capitalism and within Russian State capitalism was not simply confined to the means of production but was more precisely within the bureaucratic nature of social relations.  Here Marx was often just as guilty as the capitalists.  Bureaucracy objectified the working class, viewing it as a thing to be manipulated or, in Marx's analysis, an inert source of value.  But workers were not mere things, Castoriadis warned; they were creative sources of action.  Bureaucracy actually relied on the conscious nature of the workers, but it could not integrate their creativity into its structure.  This was the fatal contradiction that would ultimately cause the collapse of capitalism.  In the last issues of the journal Castoriadis extended this critique to liberal and rationalist forms of thought.  Borrowing from Merleau-Ponty, he claimed that Western thought was based on a "visual ontology" that objectives and devitalizes its object and hence is an improper tool for theorizing about human affairs.[118]

To underline once again a necessary connection between Marxism and existentialism, it should be noted that Castoriadis had made use of an existential phenomenology back in 1948 in order to illuminate the creative, subjective side of the workers' experience.  In an article called "Phénoménologie de la conscience prolétarienne," [119] he used Hegelian concepts of in-itself, for-itself, and for-others to expose the oppressiveness of bureaucratic organization.  Hence Socialisme ou Barbarie followed a trajectory that took it from a critique of Stalinism and Leninism to a critique of contemporary capitalism, in

117 La Société bureaticratique, 33.
118  Ibid., 50-54.
119 Ibid., 115-130.

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which it approached and anticipated the position of existential Marxism by emphasizing the need for overturning all alienated relationships and for a comprehension of the subjectivity and creativity of the working class.  Expectedly, it was difficult through all these years to maintain unity among the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, given its non-Leninist position.  In 1958, during the Algerian crisis, Lefort left the journal in a disagreement over the extent of organization necessary to take power.  With France in turmoil, the question of a revolutionary overthrow was posed and Lefort took a more anarchistic position than Castoriadis.  Lyotard then left in 1963.  Yet for all its sectarianism and its purges, Socialisme ou Barbarie was the first French group effectively to criticize Stalin's Russia and to draw theoretical conclusions that led to an existential Marxism.  It should not be surprising that the young radicals from Nanterre who ignited the events of May, 1968, had been poring over Socialisme ou Barbarie in the late 1960s.