Theories of Collectivities in Sartre and Rousseau

Abstract

While studies of Jean-Paul Sartre's work have multiplied recently, several appearing since his death in 1980, much expository and exegetical work remains to be done on his second major philosophic essay, Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), an attempt to achieve an understanding of collectivities or social wholes in a rational framework which he qualifies as existentialist-Marxist.' Acquaintance with at least the main lines of the Critique is nearly essential for an understanding of his later creative work, especially The Condemned of Altona and the massive study on Flaubert, The Family Idiot which he called un roman vrai.2 The present essay proposes to survey his view of wholes, for the benefit of those not conversant with the volume, and then consider it in relationship to Rousseau's understanding of collectivities, as presented in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and the Social Contract, with the aims of illuminating Sartre's thinking, indicating a likely source, and identifying a persistent, and somewhat disquieting, current of French political writing. The name of Rousseau occurs only a few times in the Critique.3 While Sartre's thought is, to a considerable degree, original, if one were to mention the political and social thinkers to whom he is most indebted, the name that would first come to mind would not be Rousseau but names like Hegel or Marx and Engels, then Claude Levi-Strauss, the historians Henri Guillemin and Georges Lefebvre (plus, in the background, writers of the existentialist and phenomenological schools, whose themes he had earlier developed and illustrated). Eighteenth-century rationalism does not interest Sartre much in the Critique, except as a manifestation of Cartesian rationalism (16). That he knew Rousseau's work is nevertheless beyond question. Despite crucial differences, especially in their views on religion, and Rousseau's appeal to the inner authority of conscience, there are striking parallels between the two, which doubtless reveal direct influence.4 To be sure, some resemblances in their thinking may be due simply to the fact that Sartre is a product of French education. Others spring from the links be-