In a milieu of scarcity: Sartre and the limits of political imagination

Abstract

As the maladies of material scarcity fade into cultural memory throughout much of the post-industrial world, there is something of a tendency to orient ethical and political reflection away from any driving concern for limitation, whether material or intellectual. In this article, I revisit Sartre's underappreciated meditations on scarcity and dialectical reason in an effort to vivify a sense of reflective sobriety. I argue that dialectical language emerges in Sartre's later work, at least partly, as a rhetorical tool, a means of directing attention toward persistent conflicts over limited resources. On Sartre's account, we tend to ‘internalize’ conflicts in such a way that we come to exhibit an almost Hobbesian political sensibility or ethos. By underscoring the psychic significance of our situation in what he calls a ‘milieu of scarcity,’ Sartre's dialectical perspective encourages a sharper attentiveness to some of the material and intellectual constraints that may prevent the normative possibilities late-modern theorists imagine and defend.