Crime, Governance, and Existential Predicaments. By J. Hardie-Bick and R. Lippens (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2011, v–vi, 1–213pp. £ 60.00 hb)

Abstract

The questionable intellectual standing of Marxism as the bastion of radically minded humanistic reform is traceable to (at least) two, mostly overlapping transitions in continental philosophy that occurred during the pre-to-post World War II era. One of these shifts is the existentialist movement, championed principally by philosopher–playwright–novelist Jean-Paul Sartre. The other pivot is the phenomenological movement, heralded most prominently by Edmund Husserl through his eidetic formulations on consciousness and intentionality and Martin Heidegger through his temporal ontology regarding the dasein analytic (i.e. the meaning of being-in-the-world). What is significant here is that Sartre’s view of dialectical materialism (Marx’s response to Hegel’s historical idealism and, thus, Sartre’s fluctuating allegiances to Marxism) is inconsistent if not contradictory. It is this paradox that helps to account for continental philosophy’s divergent landscape during a war-torn period of increasing political dissent and economic decline. Consider the following. On the one hand, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness(1943/1948) followed by his Materialism and Revolution (Sartre 1946/1962) represent an homage to phenomenology’s re-engagement with the human subject not as alienated and oppressed; not as a by-product of extant forces beyond the conscious, intending, choice-making, responsible and condemned to-be-free individual. After all, ‘existence precedes essence’ in the Sartrean canon that posits an alternative philosophy to Marxist class consciousness, collectivist struggle and cooperative overcoming. On the other hand, Sartre’s phenomenology of existence (of being-in-the-world) looses traction in his work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960/1976). Here, a version of Marxist existentialism is put forth whose objects of inquiry are the historically contingent, co-determining forces or lived social conditions against which the unfettered being that is ‘for itself’ (Sartre’s pour soi) makes choice and undertakes action. These choices and actions consist of navigating stratification and scarcity dynamics. This is being-in-the-world as sociological embeddedness (Granovetter 1985) in which the ongoing networks of social relations between and among people co-produce and structurate (Giddens 1984) the existential (human agent) phenomenological (social structure) project, including its tendencies, limits and potentialities.