Sartre, Jean‐Paul (1905–1980)

Abstract

The introduction to Sartre's monumental Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) was published in English as Search for a Method (1963). Sartre saw the social sciences as in deep crisis arising from a basic contradiction: “We are not only knowers, in the triumph of intellectual self‐consciousness, we appear as the known” (Sartre 1963: 9). Sociologists also remarked upon the discipline's state of arrested development. For instance, at the time Sartre was writing, C. Wright Mills (1959) had characterized sociology as split between an “abstracted empiricism” and “grand theory.” This is a similar notion to the Sartrian criticism of sociology and Marxism as an unprincipled empiricism on one side and pure fixed knowledge on the other. Search for a Method is a critical comparison of Marxism and sociology by the existential philosopher who defined his goal as “revisionism,” the ongoing process in any living philosophy which takes place in thought but is also part of the “movement of society” (Sartre 1963: 7). Sartre is critical of sociology for being “an idealistic static knowing, the sole function of which is to conceal history,” and a “practical empiricism in the hands of the capitalists which supports human engineering” (pp. 67–8); and critical of Marxism for no longer knowing anything: “Its concepts are dictates; its goal is no longer to increase what it knows but to be itself constituted a priori as an absolute knowledge” (p. 28). Sartre castigated “lazy” Marxists who, “stand(ing) in their own light,” transformed Marxism into determinism through the a priori application of Marx's theory (pp. 38–3), and the mechanical materialism of sociology that reduced persons‐in‐the‐world to a system of objects linked by universal relations (see Sartre 1955: 200).