bourgeois heart”^23 were scarcely fashioned to allay the fears of the
expanding Iron Curtain and Soviet hegemony. Yet Sartre had made it
clear that he was agreeing with the Communists on specific, limited
subjects, “arguing on the basis ofmyprinciples and nottheirs(CP 68 ).
This served to distinguish him from the Stalinist-oriented PCF during
this period of relative cordiality.
Some of those principles would appear in Sartre’sCritique of Dialect-
ical Reason, especially remarks that reveal that the principles of a social
ontology are starting to form. But the conceptual framework had
changed. The means–end issue was being “historicized” and the “situ-
ation” becoming concrete. In theprevious chapterwe witnessed Sartre’s
forceful statement of the “ethical problem” of means and ends in a
violent society lodged in a footnote toSaint Genet: “Ethics isfor us
inevitable and at the same time impossible” (SG 186 n.). It seems that
the high-minded nonnegotiables of Sartre’s ethical belief up to this point
are being placed on the shelf of abstraction or projected on to the sky of
an idealist “as if.” In effect, he is echoing, however reluctantly, the
revolutionary’s maxim that the end justifies the means – up to a point.
This was the period during which Sartre broke with two of his most
important friends and associates, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty. In Camus’ case, though their respective political views had been
moving in opposite directions for some time, what occasioned the break
was Sartre’s heavy-handed treatment of Camus’ political treatiseThe
Rebelin a review by Francis Jeanson inLTM. Sartre would have known
that Jeanson’s review would not be favorable when he asked him to write
it. Aside from the quality of Camus’ argument, much of the controversy
focused on Sartre’s alleged deliberate silence regarding the labor camps
maintained by the Stalinist regime. Their existence had recently been
discovered by the western press and the moral outrage rebounded on the
Stalinist PCF. Sartre took Camus’ remarks as a personal attack and
responded in kind inLTM. It would have sufficed to have pointed out
that the journal had acknowledged and taken a position on the camps
from the moment their existence became known. “Yes, Camus,” he
agreed, “like you, I find these camps inadmissable; but inadmissible
too is the use that the bourgeois press makes of them every day”
(^23) WA 274.
Sartre’s fellow-traveling with the PCF (1952–1956) 301