Sixty years of Sartre’s Critique : Revisiting The Critique of Dialectical Reason today

Towards the foundations of historical and dialectical materialism

What is the Critique about? In a word, Marxism. While Sartre infamously argued that Marxism was the unsurpassable horizon of our time (Sartre, 1968: 30), he also thought that its fundamental concepts remained obscure. In particular, Sartre felt that the invocation by Marxists of the dialectic as some sort of unifying explanation for society and struggle covered over a multitude of distinct doctrines and even basic misunderstandings of dialectical reason itself (Sartre, 2004: 26–29; 1976: 69–74). To remedy this, in the Critique Sartre presents his own dialectical account of self and society, one that is far more abstract than Marx’s, but which, in his eyes, helps illuminate many of the dynamics that Marxists are most concerned with, chief among them class struggle.

In the opening sections of the Critique, Sartre attempts to find a non-dogmatic starting point for his enquiries, one that secures the pertinence of dialectics at the level both of being and knowledge. To understand the complex movement of these introductory sections, we can begin by considering the paradox of the Critique’s title. How can one critique – that is, in the Kantian sense, limit – dialectical reason if dialectics is a logic of totality, indeed of the totality? Sartre’s opening gambit is to claim, against Engels and some later Marxists, that the nature studied by scientists isn’t remotely dialectical: only human action is (Sartre, 2004: 27–32, 83–8). In other words, the sole domain in which the category of totality has any meaning – totality being the fundamental concept of dialectics (Sartre, 2010: 159, 161; 2004: 44–5; 1976: 62) – is human existence. This raises the question of what is specifically dialectical about human action. Reprising without revision one of the key arguments from Being and Nothingness (Sartre, 2019), Sartre argues that we are fundamentally future- or goal-oriented beings: we perform all of our acts in light of an end. Sartre’s innovation in the Critique is to claim that this is what makes human action dialectical: the aim of our activity is a totality, while the steps taken to achieve it are this totality’s parts (Sartre, 2004: 80). Dialectics, as a logic of part-whole relations, is thus the most fundamental structure of each of our acts. More than this, since the subject also immediately apprehends themselves in this dialectical manner, even if it is only pre-theoretically, then the knowledge they have of themselves also takes a dialectical form (Sartre, 2004: 43–47). For these conjoined reasons, Sartre treats the subject as the unique site at which being and knowledge – both dialectical – fuse (Sartre, 2004: 36). This is the foundation of Sartre’s argument in the Critique, the source of his claim to have both preserved Hegel’s dialectic while also taking seriously Marx’s – as well as Kierkegaard’s – materialist and existential critique of the great German Idealist (Sartre, 2004: 23; 1968: 10–12). If Sartre’s use of dialectics is not dogmatic, as he believes Hegel’s is (Sartre, 2004: 21–2), then in his eyes it is because his starting point, namely, the human subject conceived in terms of his idiosyncratic phenomenology, ⁶ both is and knows itself to be dialectical. By contrast, against those Marxists who believe in a dialectic of nature, on Sartre’s account the objects that scientists study aren’t dialectical at all (Sartre, 2004: 84; 2010: 158). ⁷ Consider a compound like water, with its two elements hydrogen and oxygen. In a part-whole dialectic, parts exist only insofar as they are parts of, precisely, a whole. Yet as Sartre notes, the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that make up water obviously exist as such in abstraction from this compound, which is not a whole but rather an aggregate. Finally, while human action is oriented towards the future, physical objects are moved by causes flowing from the past.

While Sartre’s account of the dialectical nature of human action is enough to ground his argument, in the early pages of the Critique he also gives a special place to the experience of need (Sartre, 2004: 79–83). ⁸ In one sense, this is a gesture of allegiance towards historical materialism, which also begins with a conception of the human being as an entity beset by the ravages of hunger. Yet it is also because need is manifest in the form an injunction that the human subject cannot but respond to: the subject must persevere in its being, and in doing so its action must take a dialectical form. The dialectical nature of need is thus existentially fundamental. In need, the human subject experiences a basic dialectical movement. Sartre writes:

it is through need that the first negation of the negation and the first totalisation appear in matter. Need is a negation of the negation in so far as it expresses itself as lack within the organism; and need is a positivity in so far as the organic totality tends to preserve itself as such through it. (Sartre, 2004: 80; emphasis in original)

This part-whole logic is only one half of the dialectic of human action. In fact, the subject not only has a dialectical form thanks to its future-oriented action; it also exists as a material being, that is, as an entity made up of existents related to one another in exteriority and through relations of efficient causality, like the chemical elements and compounds mentioned above. Indeed, when it acts on and in the world, the subject uses its body as a mechanical system, manipulating the inert objects that surround it. This dialectic between existents related in interiority as per a part-whole logic, and existents related in exteriority and subject to efficient causality, is what Sartre calls ‘praxis’ (Sartre, 2004: 83). Far from being an index of freedom, however, Sartre shows that praxis implies an absolutely untranscendable form of alienation. Perhaps the best example Sartre gives of this fundamental alienation in the Critique is his discussion of deforestation in early to mid-20th century China (Sartre, 2004: 161–3). Sartre notes that when an individual farmer cuts down trees, they are acting dialectically, that is, in light of an end, which is the transformation of virgin forest into arable land. At the same time, their action is inscribed in inert matter, which is indifferent to the farmer’s future-oriented project and is subject to the reign of efficient causality. At this level, the farmer’s activity loosens the soil, which eventually ends up in the river system. Over time, this soil collects at certain points, raising the water level and producing floods that ultimately destroy the farmer’s crops. While for the farmer cutting down a tree was an entirely positive achievement, its inscription in inert matter meant that it produced an outcome that was the exact opposite of what he intended to achieve. As Sartre writes memorably:

If some enemy of mankind had wanted to persecute the peasants of the Great Plain, he would have ordered mercenary troops to deforest the mountain systematically. The positive system of agriculture was transformed into an infernal machine. But the enemy who introduced the loess, the river, the gravity, the whole of hydrodynamics, into this destructive apparatus was the peasant himself. (Sartre, 2004: 162)

Scarcity

So far, Sartre’s concepts make explicit what he believes to be the foundations of Marx and Engels’ historical materialism as they present it in a work like The German Ideology. Human beings are creatures of need who seek to persevere in their being by engaging with inert matter and transforming it into tools. In turn, these tools produce distinctions between people and the ideologies that justify them. Likewise, his account of materiality as split between a part-whole logic and efficient causality is his version of the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Where Sartre takes a step beyond Marx in these early stages of the Critique is in his analysis of a second – but this time contingent (Sartre, 2004: 125) – form of alienation, following the subject’s unavoidable entanglement with inert matter. This second form of alienation is scarcity. For some readers, the central place Sartre accords scarcity in the Critique makes him a de facto apologist for capitalism and the artificial forms of scarcity it produces. ¹⁰ Sartre plays a double game here. On the one hand, he recognises that scarcity is an historical product, and he takes care to map the convoluted dialectic of its various forms, which run from a scarcity of goods relative to human beings, to a scarcity of human beings relative to goods, and finally to one of the most perverse forms that scarcity takes in capitalism: a simultaneous scarcity of consumers in relation to certain goods, which a portion of consumers cannot afford, and a scarcity of available goods in relation to the population as a whole (Sartre, 2004: 137–9). This is the form that scarcity took during, say, the Great Famine in Ireland in the years 1845–9. On the other hand, Sartre’s hypothesis – which, admittedly, he doesn’t make much effort to test in the Critique – is that all historical forms of scarcity, including capitalism’s, are products of collective responses to the first form of scarcity: a lack of goods relative to human beings (Sartre, 2004: 138). There is an opening here for readers to do their own research to verify or reject Sartre’s claim. The key point will be to study in what sense every mode of production is a response to a fundamental inability of a given society to respond to the imperious injunction of need without transforming itself and in the process creating new forms of scarcity.

Where Sartre’s account of scarcity becomes more immediately useful is in his analysis of the triple form of alienation it produces (Sartre, 2004: 129–32). First, scarcity means I am alienated from the world, which poses a risk to my existence insofar as it might refuse to provide the resources I need to survive. This is one aspect of what Sartre calls our univocal relation of interiority to the world, the basis of his unique form of metaphysical realism: ¹¹ while we can only exist in relation to the external world, this world is utterly indifferent to our fate. Second, scarcity means I am alienated from others, who become my enemies insofar as they could consume the resources I need. On this point, Sartre notes a curious synthesis of what Marxists call reification and the future-oriented – and thus not thing-like – nature of human action: in scarcity, the other is both a pure quantity, a brute capacity to consume goods, and a strategist whose actions I have to predict and counter (Sartre, 2004: 132). Third, scarcity means I am alienated from myself as well since in consuming an object of vital necessity I increase the unbearable pressure of scarcity: there is now one less good available. While my praxis usually serves to sustain my existence, in a milieu of scarcity it rebounds and puts me at an ever greater risk of death (Sartre, 2004: 137–8).

A new social ontology

Sartre’s analysis of scarcity brings the social dimension of his work in the Critique into focus for the first time. To fully appreciate his revision of Marxism, however, we must now turn to the two wholly original concepts he develops in this book: ‘seriality’ and the ‘group’. I mentioned above that Sartre refuses the idea that nature – or the universe as a whole – is dialectical, and argues instead that only human action is. Crucially, however, this doesn’t mean that society is dialectical; that it is a whole with various interlocking parts. Where Sartre’s polemical target in the opening sections of the Critique is Engels and his Dialectics of Nature, here he takes aim, albeit only implicitly, at Lukacs and his famous claim from History and Class Consciousness that the category of totality is the most decisive concept in the Marxist tradition. ¹² On the contrary, Sartre claims that society is not a totality but in fact a complex web of relations between what he calls series and groups, neither of which are totalities (Sartre, 2004: 68). Sartre’s argument is that it is only by conceiving of society in this way that we can make sense of the Marxist notion of class struggle, as we will see further on.

Before we explore these fundamental concepts of Sartre’s social ontology, it is important to say in what sense his account of the human subject as praxis grounds his analysis of social forms. How does Sartre’s unique form of methodological individualism – his conviction that it is only by beginning with the subject’s apprehension of themselves as dialectical that we can avoid all forms of dogmatism, whether idealist or materialist – give him access to the social world? How can a subject-centred philosophy illuminate the dynamics of a domain in which there exists an irreducible multiplicity of subjects? Sartre’s answer in the Critique is to say that however complex they become, all social forms involve some variation on the basic dialectic of praxis, that is, on the entanglement between the part-whole logic of human action and the domain of inert objects related in exteriority. By showing how this dialectic is at play at each level of society, Sartre can claim to have proven the dialectical nature – in his specific sense – of social existence (Sartre, 2004: 70–4).

Let us begin with the concept of seriality. At the most general level, to act in seriality is to act as an abstract other would act in response to the impersonal exigency emitted by worked matter. When I respond to worked matter’s exigencies, I mould my body and manipulate my thoughts so that I become the ideal other who can best actualise the schema of thought or action that is potential in worked matter. Take Sartre’s famous example of waiting for a bus in Paris (Sartre, 2004: 254–65). In this example, it is the bus that sets the parameters for how people are to engage with it in pursuit of their individual ends. But what is more important than the way worked matter abstracts from people’s particularity is the way it compels them to submit to it. In seriality, I not only do what the abstract other would do in response to worked matter’s exigencies: I do it because the other could and would do it in my place. ¹³ If I fail to submit to worked matter, I simply lose my place in the series – in the queue to catch the bus. We can see here how seriality is very often linked to scarcity: if there aren’t enough seats for everyone, then there is even more pressure to respond to the exigencies the bus emits. Scarcity is not essential, however, to seriality’s coercive force. What is most fundamental is that in responding to some serial law, I know that an indefinite series of others can and will follow it, irrespective of what I do.

While Sartre’s bus stop example seems trivial, he shows that the same dynamics are at play in phenomena such as the labour market (Sartre, 2004: 311–13), crises of inflation (Sartre, 2004: 178–9, 289–94), and capitalist accumulation (Sartre, 2004: 743–9). Workers submit to the logic of the labour market because they know that if they don’t, others will. In inflation, if I fear that the buying power of my money is going to fall, then I either quickly raise my prices or stock essential goods, all before similarly-placed others do the same – even if these acts end up worsening the very inflation that I think I’m taking precautions against. As Sartre says, a serial act is in some sense a cause of itself: it is both a response to a situation and a cause of that very situation (Sartre, 2004: 288). Likewise, as a capitalist, there would be no point to accumulation unless I knew that other capitalists were accumulating too, and would do so irrespective of how I, as an individual, chose to behave (Sartre, 2004: 749).

What Sartre notices, uniquely, about each of these examples is that everyone in a series – in a bus queue, in a job market, in an economy – is equally impotent. Each individual submits because their individual resistance would be ineffective. Yet it is precisely this reciprocal impotence that gives the series its extraordinary coercive power. In seriality, human action takes on all of the features of inert matter: the behaviour of one serialised individual is caused by another, equally inert individual, whose own action has been caused in the same way, and so on to infinity. Here we find the first example of a homology between the basic dialectic of praxis and a more complex social form: where previously the subject was engaged with inert matter, in seriality the subject must contend with human beings who appear to have been transformed into inert matter through the logic of seriality (Sartre, 2004: 255).

Sartre’s claim that a series is infinite is not an idle one (Sartre, 2004: 743–9). While the pressure of scarcity shows that finitude is crucial to a series’ structure, the more important property of a series is that there cannot be a definite limit to the number of people who engage with it. If Sartre sometimes calls this indefinite number an infinite one, it is because in tracking down the origin of seriality’s coercive power, one can only ever be led from one individual to the next, endlessly: the force of the series always emanates from somewhere else. Sartre’s example of the radio broadcast is perhaps most illuminating here (Sartre, 2004: 270–6). Supposing that the radio show is disseminating the ideology of an enemy party, Sartre imagines trying to convince listeners one-by-one of the falsity of the information they are hearing. Yet it is not only that visiting each audience member is impractical, what matters most is that even if Sartre managed to convince one of them that the information they heard was false, as soon as he moved on to the next listener the person who a moment earlier had felt convinced by Sartre’s counter-arguments would still know that an indefinite series of other people believed the broadcast. As such, they would still be stuck in seriality, their belief having been transformed into a fear of others believing. Far from breaking with the logic of seriality, Sartre’s intervention would only have transmitted a typically serial affect, which he himself already felt. If a series is infinite, it is therefore because as soon as one tries to put a limit on it, that limit disappears. This is also the reason why a series is not a totality: where in a totality the whole’s power is present in each of its parts, in a series power always emanates from elsewhere; it resides in none of the terms of the series. It takes the mad genius of Sartre to show, on the basis of some deceptively simple analyses of a bus stop and a radio broadcast, that the capitalist process itself should be understood as an instance of seriality. As I noted above, the dynamics of accumulation are fundamentally determined by seriality. This means that exploitation is a serial phenomenon as well. As I will show further on, the serial nature of the capitalist process is also inflected by the existence of various forms of groups. However, the basic point stands: against Lukacs, the category of totality misrepresents the way capitalism functions.

The final feature of seriality to note is that while each individual in a series pursues their own end – which, if scarcity is involved, fundamentally conflicts with the ends of others; it is thus not a common end – altogether the series can appear as if it were pursuing a common aim. This is precisely the inversion that occurs when we speak of the market as if it were a totality acting for or against its fundamental interest, which – for capitalists – is for it to grow. Yet the inversion here is more radical still: it is not only that dispersed individual acts come to appear as if they were the acts of a single hyper-organism; subjects who were caused to act by the specifically social form of efficient causality that is seriality appear to take on the garb of teleological subjects. Sartre calls this overturning of praxis a ‘process’:

In this way, serial being […] can be defined as a process, that is to say as a development which, though oriented, is caused by a force of exteriority which has the result of actualising the series as the temporalisation of a multiplicity in the fleeting unity of a violence of impotence. (Sartre, 2004: 304, emphasis in original)

From the group to the institution

All of the concepts discussed above – praxis, worked matter, scarcity, seriality, and counter-finality or anti-praxis – come together in what Sartre calls the ‘practico-inert hell’ (Sartre, 2004: 228). Fortunately, however, the practico-inert is only one half of Sartre’s account of society in the Critique. Indeed, if there were only the practico-inert, there would be no class struggle in the Marxist sense. Halfway through the Critique, Sartre makes an abrupt shift and begins analysing what he calls the group and its various derivative forms: the ‘group-in-fusion’, the ‘pledged group’, the ‘organisation’, and the ‘institution’. Before we examine these new social forms, it is once again worth commenting on Sartre’s method in the Critique. As with his account of seriality, Sartre’s aim is to show how these new social forms can be exhaustively explained from the first-person perspective of praxis. Equally important is that Sartre believes his description of these structures of sociality is complete. Every social phenomenon is made up of some unique entanglement of series and groups (Sartre, 2004: 65). This also allows us to dispel a misunderstanding that Sartre’s method in this latter half of the Critique has sometimes inspired. Sartre never claims that social forms necessarily pass through the stages running from a group-in-fusion to an institution before the group falls back into seriality. He also never claims that all groups begin as the simplest group form, the group-in-fusion. At the beginning of its existence, a group can take any of these forms. If, however, Sartre chooses to engender these different forms of group existence sequentially, it is to show how the properties that each more complex group form accrues to it arise for teleological reasons: they are added in order to help solve a certain problem that the group confronts in the pursuit of its aim. Thus, while members of a group might not be aware of the teleological meaning of certain of their group’s structures, Sartre’s method is geared towards showing that this meaning can by rights always be restored.

Beginning with his breath-taking narration of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, Sartre shows how a series is suddenly transformed into the simplest group form: a group-in-fusion (Sartre, 2004: 351–63). Against any revolutionary romanticism, Sartre insists that when Parisians started to loot the city’s armouries after hearing news that royalist troops were surrounding Paris, they did so initially in a serial panic. Rather than working together, Parisians saw each other as a risk to their individual survival: the scarcity of arms meant that those who succeeded in obtaining them had effectively taken them from others who didn’t have them – individuals who now faced a more certain death. If Parisians were to resist the royalist troops as part of a common action, then a radical – indeed intrinsically improbable – mutation in their social relations would have to take place. First, one or many of them would have to offer a directive such as taking the Bastille, which, if followed in unison, would increase the collective’s chances of survival. Where acquiring a gun in seriality is an individual act that conflicts with the ends of others, the directive to take the Bastille sketches out a common task, one that serves everyone’s interests. The problem with such a directive, however, is that it is always a safer bet not to follow it. If I leave the series, then someone else will take my place; and if nothing comes of the proposed common action, then I will have missed my one chance at survival. In short, once a directive like taking the Bastille is issued, following it means making the hazardous wager that others will refuse the logic of seriality – and do so against, in a sense, their objective interests.

Once beyond this event-like moment, however, a group-in-fusion emerges as a common attempt to achieve a common aim: here, taking the Bastille. There are two key transformations that take place at this point (Sartre, 2004: 382–404). First, where in seriality the weight of numbers was the key factor in my impotence, in a group the presence of others expands my power: we become capable of things that were impossible for us in isolation. Second, while as a member of a series I could only ever align myself with the law, in a group I can use my initiative to respond to changing circumstances and suggest to the group a plan of action. As Sartre explains, in a group-in-fusion, each individual can occupy what he calls the position of the ‘quasi-sovereign’ (Sartre, 2004: 579): the group’s momentary leader. Unlike in seriality, where power is always elsewhere, in a group the destiny of its action is decided in the here and now – in the power of each individual’s common action.

Does this mean that while a series is infinite, a group is a totality? No: the members of a group-in-fusion are never perfectly-integrated parts. Rather, as Sartre explains, they are better described as having a relation of simultaneous ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’ with respect to the group (Sartre, 2004: 374–82). When an individual issues a directive, they transcend the group momentarily since they manipulate it from the outside as if it were an inert instrument. And when the same individual follows a directive given by another quasi-sovereign, they shift from this relation of transcendence to one of immanence. What’s significant about this oscillation is that the momentary transcendence of a quasi-sovereign always risks turning into absolute transcendence – into the individual leaving the group. This can happen if no-one – or an insufficient number of people – follow their directive, or if their directive fails to correspond to the group’s immediate practical needs. It is also possible for an individual to leave the group by becoming absolutely immanent to it as well, since at this point they cannot return to the position of the quasi-sovereign, which is a condition of their membership. In sum, far from being parts of a whole, individuals have to perpetually win their integration into the group-in-fusion: membership is a task, not a mode of being.

This makes the group-in-fusion a particularly fragile construction. Once the immediate circumstances that brought it into existence have dissipated, as soon as the common end is achieved, it risks dispersal. If a group-in-fusion is to be anything more than an ephemeral phenomenon, it must secure its permanence. This is the famous moment of the pledge (Sartre, 2004: 417–28). Sartre’s readers have often complained that his analysis of the pledge and the threat of violence it implies is far too specific and extreme. Surely not all groups involve an explicit pledge, and surely betraying them doesn’t always lead to death? Sartre’s point is far more subtle. The pledge is nothing more than a name for the group developing its own internal form of power, and indeed sanction, whether this is made explicit or not. In seriality, power is absolutely impersonal: it emanates from nowhere. In the pledged group – and precisely in order to fight against seriality’s impersonal violence – power also arises from the group.

The pledge gives the group-in-fusion the unity it needs in order to differentiate itself internally and thus to move to the next stage of common action: the organisation (Sartre, 2004: 445–79). Put differently, if a group is to exist without being defined solely by its most immediate ends, it needs to turn back on itself and take itself as its end. This is all that the pledge names: the internally enforced commitment to the group as such, and not just to the achievement of the common end. Thus, while the group-in-fusion has no structure, with individuals taking on tasks as best they can according to changing circumstances, thanks to the minimal unity provided by the pledge the organisation can give each individual a function. This division of labour implies a new conception of power: while in the pledged group power was the diffuse jurisdiction of everyone over everyone else, in the organisation power is structured as a complex network of rights and duties: I have a right to do my duty – that is, my function – and a right to demand that everyone else do theirs. We can see here that the individual undergoes a transformation in the organisation. While their function limits their individual initiative, it also enriches them, giving them new capacities for action and allowing them to specialise to the point of being able to see practical possibilities that are invisible to other, non-specialised individuals. Indeed, such specialisation is crucial to the organisation if it is to act effectively in the world. Yet it also points to the fact that the organisation is radically dependent on its individual members. In concrete action, the variety of exigencies is often so great, their urgency so imperious, and the skills required to effectively respond to them so specific that only an individual with the capacity to adapt to singular circumstances can take their measure. No more than the group-in-fusion, an organisation is not a totality, even if it is built on the apparently constringent powers of the pledge.

After the group-in-fusion, the pledged group, and the organisation, each of which is a more complex formation than the previous one, Sartre analyses the final species of common action: the institution (Sartre, 2004: 583–99). For Sartre, an institution is always a degraded organisation. The key moment in this degradation is the new risk of secession that emerges in the organisation. As we have just seen, the common individual performs their function via the indispensable mediation of their individual initiative. However, this opens up the possibility of them betraying the organisation, or appropriating it for themselves, not for lack of performing their function but precisely because they perform it. What was once the essential means for the organisation to act effectively in the world now becomes a threat that the organisation will dissolve or be co-opted by one individual or subgroup. In circumstances where the organisation is split, dispersed, or otherwise divided against itself, this structural dependence on individual initiative means that everyone comes to be seen as a possible traitor. In order to prove their loyalty, each common individual begins carrying out their function in as formulaic a way as possible. Where power used to be my right to do my duty, in the institution it now becomes my obligation to show that I do indeed have the right to do my duty – something that I can only achieve by curtailing my creative capacities and aligning them with the most generic interpretation of the group’s project and of my part within it (Sartre, 2004: 604). The organisation’s ability to respond to unique conditions through its members’ individual action is thereby drastically undermined. In fact, with its members becoming ever more inert, the organisation must find a new way of guaranteeing its practical homogeneity and efficacy. For Sartre, it is here – and here alone – that sovereignty emerges (Sartre, 2004: 608). According to Sartre, sovereignty appears when the mobile, circular movement of quasi-sovereignty becomes blocked in a single subgroup. Explaining its genesis thus amounts to showing how one subgroup or individual can monopolise the position of the quasi-sovereign. This can never happen because of physical dominance alone: since the other subgroups will always be more numerous, one subgroup can become the unique sovereign only when the others have devolved to the state of inertia and impotence described above. For this reason, it is impossible for sovereignty to ever be legitimate: it arises only when those subject to it cannot resist it (Sartre, 2004: 630). The figure of the sovereign is nevertheless the group’s final move to maintain its practical homogeneity. Every individual initiative must now pass through the sovereign, whose imprimatur alone can legitimate it, and whose bodily individuality seeks to covers over the institution’s dispersal. In a sense, sovereignty is Sartre’s final proof that no social form is ever a totality. On the contrary, the travails of the group as it shifts from a group-in-fusion, to a pledged group, to an organisation and then to an institution, shows that a totality is only ever what the group tries, but fails, to become.

From class and class struggle to history

As I mentioned above, while Sartre engenders each of these social forms sequentially in the Critique, he conceives of society as such as an ever-shifting set of simultaneous relations between series, groups-in-fusion, pledged groups, organisations and institutions. A market, for instance, is never just a series: the very existence of state regulations shows that it is minimally a relation between a series and sovereign institution. The state itself is an institution that must contend both with the series of voters and with civil society, which is populated by various kinds of groups (Sartre, 2004: 635). In a particularly entertaining section in the latter half of the Critique, Sartre explains how like the state, which always has an interest in painting over social divisions, marketing firms qua institutions manipulate a series of consumers by suggesting to the series’ members that they are not in fact isolated and impotent but are instead participants in a totality with a consistent set of preferences (Sartre, 2004: 644–54). The same formal structure – of an institution manipulating a series by purposefully misidentifying the series as a whole – is also at work in the way reactionary states encourage outbursts of fascist violence. The fascist lynch mobs that form are not groups per se but instead series who draw their sense of unity from outside themselves, that is, from the state qua institution, which really is united (Sartre, 2004: 645). Finally, a class is also always a set of relations between groups and series. The working class, for instance, can be understood as a series in the form of labour markets, as an institution in the form of unions, and as groups-in-fusion in the form of local struggles (Sartre, 2004: 683). The capitalist class is even more complex still: it is not only a set of firms related to each another in seriality, but also an ensemble of organisations in the form of cartels and of institutions in the guise of capitalists’ representatives in the state. With regard to the working class, what Sartre’s multifaceted conception of class reveals is that workers always have to fight on at least three fronts at once: not only against the capitalist class, but also internally against the working class itself as series and as institution. Thus, on the one hand, if a group-in-fusion emerges in a workplace, then one of its principle objectives must always be to mobilise the majority of workers who will still be sunk in seriality. After all, the easiest way to break a strike is to draw on the surplus population of serialised workers who are subject to the relentless pressure of scarcity. On the other hand, danger also lurks in the shape of the union – or party – as an institution. For as we know, an institution only exists by keeping its members relatively impotent. If a group arises from its ranks, then this not only contests serial impotence, it also undermines the institution’s sovereign authority. This contradiction between the group and the institution can be alleviated somewhat when the institution steps in and helps the group mobilise other sectors of the workforce, thereby turning the initial group-in-fusion into a subgroup of a larger organisation. But the contradiction remains, since it is now unclear whether the subsequent directives that are issued come from the group or the institution. A crisis of legitimacy ensues, violent debate becomes inevitable. From the perspective of the institution, the emergence of a group might well be a danger to the movement as a whole, for if the group fails to mobilise enough serialised workers, it will be crushed. From the perspective of the group, however, if the institution is overly prudent and decides to demobilise the group, then the movement as a whole risks dying (Sartre, 2004: 683). In truth, what fundamentally determines this contradiction are the different judgements that the group and the institution make regarding the capacity for the series of workers to be mobilised (Sartre, 2004: 699–700). This is always the most decisive variable: either a critical mass of serialised workers cast off their shackles, or the series ends up swallowing the group.

Conclusion

In the remainder of the Critique, Sartre deploys his new-forged categories to provide a novel interpretation of post-1848 French history – a history that is marked almost exclusively by bloody defeats for the working class (Sartre, 2004: 754–805). In the final pages, he reflects on whether his categories remain pertinent when applied to a struggle between absolutely opposed parties (Sartre, 2004: 805–18). These pages then connect to the dramatic opening of the second volume of the Critique, where Sartre responds to this question through an extraordinary account of a boxing match, before turning to an analysis of the catastrophe of Stalinism (Sartre, 2006: 17–50, 198–227). What seems to me most important to retain from the Critique – and this against the vision of Sartre as a philosopher of freedom and instead as a philosopher of alienation – is that there will always be processes of counter-finality that no one will have determined. For this reason, we will never not be in practico-inert hell. With climate change the most pressing case of counter-finality facing us today, the only thing that matters, Sartre’s Critique teaches us, is just how hot it will get.