command (le mot d’ordre) echoes among scores of people who reverse
direction even as they change their perception of the scene. What was
constructed as flight is now read as mobilization for counterattack. It is a
practical awareness that “we” are acting – at first a small band, but soon
swelling to large proportions, each participant buoyed up by the realiza-
tion that “we are a hundred strong.” Sartre calls this constitutive action
the interiorization of multiplicity. It denotes the crucial praxis where
each takes the rest as “the same” and adopts what was the “elsewhere”
of serial flight as the “here” of common concern. Each emerges as the
common individual, the practical negation of serial individuality.^13
To summarize Sartre’s brilliant phenomenological description amidst
a dialectical analysis, let us simply note that, once the group is formed
and the external threat removed, an “oath” is conceived to preserve
the union.^14 This pledge of loyalty to their cause under pain of death
for betrayal constitutes the problematic concept of “fraternity-terror”
that haunts his social philosophy. It is a duality that Sartre never
managed to resolve (seeHope 93 ). He sees the pledge as the insertion
of a necessary element of the practico-inert into the spontaneity of the
group, its subsequent (d)evolution into the organized group, and finally
the institution (for example, the bureaucratic state). There seem to be
stages or degrees of practico-inert mediation in Sartre’s social ontology,
but one can state simply that where the practico-inert mediates, human
relations are serial; where praxis mediates, the relations are free.
Regarding the mediating third party (MT), asle tiers me ́diateuris
often translated, we can better appreciate its function – and it is a
functional concept – if we think of a football team (under whatever
(^13) SeeCDRi: 351 ff. andSME 112 – 122 for the follow-through and detailed analysis of
this event.
(^14) The famous “Tennis Court Oath” of 1789. For Sartre’s heretofore unpublished notes
regarding the origin of the National Assembly entitled “Mai-Juin 1789 ” and “Liberte ́-
E ́galite ́” conserved at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of
Texas-Austin, seeSartre ine ́dit, transcribed, presented and annotated by Jean Bourgault and
Vincent de Coorebyter,E ́tudes Sartriennesno. 12 (Brussels: Ousia, 2008 ), 5 – 256. Jean
Bourgault’s introduction to the unedited manuscript,Le Manuscript “Mai-juin 1789 ,” is
particularly helpful. Actually, this is a foreshortened version of the events. The storming of
the Bastille followed the Oath by several weeks. Sartre is giving us an ideal reconstruction
according to the social ontology he has formulated in theCritique. The equivalent of the
group-in-fusion could have been mapped, though less dramatically, over the grouping of the
members of the E ́tats Ge ́ne ́raux prior to their taking the Oath.
344 Individuals and groups:Critique of Dialectical Reason