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"The work is a landmark in modern social thought... a turning point in the thinking of our time.' Raymond Williams, Guardian "The Critique is essential to any serious understanding of Sartre." -- George Steiner, Sunday Times
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At the height of the Algerian war, Jean-Paul Sartre embarked on a fundamental reappraisal of his philosophical and political thought. The result was the Critique of Dialectical Reason, an intellectual masterpiece of the twentieth century, now republished in two volumes with major original introductions by Fredric Jameson. In it, Sartre set out the basic categories for the renovated theory of history that he believed was necessary for post-war Marxism. Sartre's formal aim was to establish the dialectical intelligibility of history itself, as what he called 'a totalisation without totaliser'. But, at the same time, his substantive concern was the structure of class struggle and the fate of the mass movements of popular revolt, from the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century to the Russian and Chinese revolutions in the twentieth: their ascent, stabilisation petrification and decline, in a world still overwhelmingly dominated by scarcity.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Sartre's Critique volume 2 follows up many of the issues raised in volume 1, exploring the dialectical intelligibility of history and the relationship between praxis, inertia and group-formation. Whereas volume 1 concentrates mainly on the different kinds of groups which can emerge from praxis, volume 2 concentrates mainly on the history of the USSR, treated as an example of the interaction of praxis and matter (inertia). Through this example, and broader discussions of the philosophy of history and the relation of agencies in conflict, Sartre develops a dualistic philosophy where historical outcomes rely on the interaction of two distinct fields, the field of agency associated with phenomenological meaning-construction and subjectivity, and the field of inertia associated with the deviation or alienation of praxis by matter.
This is an important work for students of critical theory and philosophy, including those interested in the development of western Marxism, people exploring the possibilities for Marxist theory, students of phenomenology and meaning-formation, and scholars interested in debates between poststructuralism and Marxism about meaning and discourse. Important and interesting, though not necessarily adequate; the methodological dualism leaves the application of the method dependent on intuitive judgements, and the application to the USSR in particular is weakened by a persistent bias towards the Bolshevik and later Stalinist way of viewing the situation. As a result, the account is open to objections that anti-regime agency is downplayed or dehumanized and that Sartre wrongly assumes a continuity between his own humanistic Marxism and the official ideology of Stalinism. Since Sartre is also not saying anything very original about the USSR, I'd say the book is of more interest as a text in philosophy than a text in Soviet studies.
This is an important work for students of critical theory and philosophy, including those interested in the development of western Marxism, people exploring the possibilities for Marxist theory, students of phenomenology and meaning-formation, and scholars interested in debates between poststructuralism and Marxism about meaning and discourse. Important and interesting, though not necessarily adequate; the methodological dualism leaves the application of the method dependent on intuitive judgements, and the application to the USSR in particular is weakened by a persistent bias towards the Bolshevik and later Stalinist way of viewing the situation. As a result, the account is open to objections that anti-regime agency is downplayed or dehumanized and that Sartre wrongly assumes a continuity between his own humanistic Marxism and the official ideology of Stalinism. Since Sartre is also not saying anything very original about the USSR, I'd say the book is of more interest as a text in philosophy than a text in Soviet studies.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I would just like to point out that, while Sartre's monumental Critique of Dialectical Reason is normally published in two volumes, the 1982 paperback edition comprises the whole work in a single volume.
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54 of 64 people found the following review helpful
Sartre's last major philosophical work.
2 May 2002
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Seeking to give Marxism what Michael McGee called "a more rigorous intellectual defense," Sartre wrote volume one of Critique of Dialectical Reason (CDR) between 1957 & 1960; it was published in France in 1960. The first English edition appeared in 1976. A second, unfinished volume appeared posthumously in 1982.
CDR was a massive attempt to describe the dynamic of various levels of human interaction & what characterizes these levels, from a mere chance collection of people to the social entity we call an institution. The ultimate objective was to show why Marx's categorization of "class" as some kind of hyperorganism was wrong. Its thesis statement can be drawn from its thematic antecedent, Search for a Method: cultural order is irreducible to natural order.
In CDR, life was endless occasions of totalizations, detotalizations, & retotalizatons on a field of scarcity. These various totalizations were instances of human groupness, whether people waiting @the bus stop, a soccer team, or the "mob" storming the Bastille. We called the temporalization of events "history."
First half of the volume, or Book I, is devoted mainly to ennui-provoking explanation of the dialectical investigation: hidden there in a footnote was Sartre's curt dismissal of Darwinism. However, he got wound up in Book II & showed how task assignments, division of labor, & the institution came about.
I know of no other original study, treatise, or even novel that uses the themes & concepts of CDR. A CDR-oriented examination of, say, American domestic relations court proceedings (with its forced as opposed to mediated reciprocity) might be a worthy endeavor.
CDR was a massive attempt to describe the dynamic of various levels of human interaction & what characterizes these levels, from a mere chance collection of people to the social entity we call an institution. The ultimate objective was to show why Marx's categorization of "class" as some kind of hyperorganism was wrong. Its thesis statement can be drawn from its thematic antecedent, Search for a Method: cultural order is irreducible to natural order.
In CDR, life was endless occasions of totalizations, detotalizations, & retotalizatons on a field of scarcity. These various totalizations were instances of human groupness, whether people waiting @the bus stop, a soccer team, or the "mob" storming the Bastille. We called the temporalization of events "history."
First half of the volume, or Book I, is devoted mainly to ennui-provoking explanation of the dialectical investigation: hidden there in a footnote was Sartre's curt dismissal of Darwinism. However, he got wound up in Book II & showed how task assignments, division of labor, & the institution came about.
I know of no other original study, treatise, or even novel that uses the themes & concepts of CDR. A CDR-oriented examination of, say, American domestic relations court proceedings (with its forced as opposed to mediated reciprocity) might be a worthy endeavor.
11 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Sartre's Inimitable Greatness - One response to the above reviews
13 July 2009
Format:Paperback
Sartre was primarily a moral philosopher - not a metaphysician, epistemologist, or political philosopher. Yet, he was a bit of all these. He is a political thinker by way of his profoundly thought moral philosophy. Thus, I claim: 1) While it may be his last extensive philosophic work, Sartre's CDR is not his "last great philosophic work" - big is not always best. The tragically neglected, "Saint Genet: Actor & Martyr" is perhaps the most important book of moral philosophy since Kant's "Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals". This book was published in French in 1953, but for reasons evident to me but obscure to many, was not published until 1963 in English (i.e., America of the 1950's was for all it's extroversion, an uptight place - for all its "loss of innocence" - still is). There is a magnificent review of Saint Genet on this site to which I could not add more. Saint Genet, not Being and Nothingness is Sartre's magnum. 2) We're dealing with a generation who grew up in the heyday of Reagan's media robots - not only do they not understand Marx, his enormous stature and insight - they haven't dared to read him. The fact is the corporate/service divide which is really central to all our problems today - is none other than the reappearance of the old bourgeois/proletariat divide, "the antagonism of capital and wage labor" once again. Think about it at the pump. 3) Sartre was left with the problem of trying to reconcile his Marxism, with his very egocentric existentialism - really a syncretism - and he tries in this huge tome. (I am always amazed at how prolific Sartre was - and how good!) 4)Oddly, although existentialism conflicts with Marxian utopianism and its vision of unity (after all one could call many of our contemporary corporate anarchists existentialist), it radically opposes statism which Marx notoriously failed to do, allowing his ideas to serve as justifying ideologies for some of the worst human rights transgressions in history, in Russia, China, Cambodia, etc., transgressions which most certainly have Marx and those who truly understood him in his time "turning over in their graves". This insight, leads Sartre into a radically deep (hundreds of pages) analysis of the roots and manifestations of statism in our civilization. 5) The reviewer is right in saying that few manage to wend their way through Sartre's Critique. Rather, he wrote a neat, user-friendly Introduction, much more feasible for the general reader, covering in some depth all the main points in the argument, and his thinking as a whole. This exordium, originally a postscript to it - was published separately and went through a number of revisions - and is now available in English under the title, "Search for a Method". But please - please, do yourself a favor - before you attempt Being In Nothingness (Heidegger's Being and Time <Stambaugh translation> - is more essential - and in many ways "the original version" of Sartre's epistemology and metaphysics) or CDR - read Saint Genet - a masterpiece of honesty and critical investigation.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
A Foundation for the New Marxism, Towards a Philosophy of Totality
1 July 2010
Format:Paperback
The CDR is by far Sartre's most original work, for beyond Being and Nothingness. As a theory of ensembles, the various groupings and reinterpretations of historical events and phenomena strike me as a call to re-evaluate our current situation. Though written in the 60s, and I am only referring to Volume 1, the chapter which is entitled "Matter as Totalized Totality" is the greatest articulation and criticism of Marxist materialism with regard to the environment, meaning, we are not merely determined by our materiality and circumstances, there is an interdependence between the person/group and the world: We mediate the world as the world mediates us. Nevertheless, the language is quite turgid, with a focus on praxis and the practico-inert, interiority/exteriority, etc. In the end at least this volume can constitute a building of a new method which is yet to be realized.
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