So what of Machiavelli, or the saying that one can’t make an omelette
without breaking eggs? It seems that two distinctions may soften the
problem of coordinating fraternity and terror, though they do not resolve
it. One would be to speak of a violence that is nonantagonistic. That
could include the fear of legal sanctions that maintains order in our
society. It may be a necessary condition for the “fraternity” of nonalien-
ating social action and authentic ethics (think of traffic police in the
classless society). Another distinction would be that between necessary
and meaningless violence (taking terror and violence as roughly syn-
onymous). We might think of the “counter-violence” that is required
to overcome structural violence such as colonialism, but which is not in
excess of commonly recognized limits. Still a third possible distinction
can be made between means that are inconsistent with the end itself
(in this case expanded freedom as maximization of possibilities) and
those that respect that goal in their very pursuit. Sartre recognizes this
limiting principle on violence when he writes that “all means are good
except those thatdenaturethe end.”^41 While these attempts at fine-
tuning the problem may seem to be bordering on casuistry, which Sartre
explicitly rejects in the Cornell lectures (CSC, 27 ;Making the Human
337 ), it seems plausible that Sartre is employing a solution characteristic
of the pragmatism of John Dewey – what he famously calls “the means–
ends continuum” – when Sartre asserts that “revolution contains its own
criterion in itself.”^42
(^41) Cited from the 1964 Rome Lecture(typescript, 139 ) by Bowman and Stone in their informa-
tive and apt essay “The End as Present in the Means in Sartre’sMorality and History,”
Sartre Studies International 10 ,no. 2 ( 2004 ): 2 – 3. As Sartre explains in a somewhat dialectical
manner: “Morality is control of praxis in light of itself, that is to say, in light of its goal.
[There is a] rule of efficacy: all means to attain the goal are good on the condition that they
do not alter the goal in producing it. Morality is a supplementary control of efficacy: the
goal, being the synthetic ensemble of means, socialist morality is none other than the goal
itself returning to its means to control them in light of itself, which is to say, to demand of
those means that they be absolute means, that is, at once the means of the means (hence
linked mediately to the goal) and means to the goal, linked directly to it. [Such means may be
understood] as at once respecting the final demand and producing humanity in the negative
form of sub-humanity negating its sub-humanity” (typescript, 138 ). For a critique of this
42 thought regarding “Communist utilitarianism” in aesthetics, seeWL^213.
Cited by Elizabeth Bowman and Robert Stone in “The Alter-Globalization Movement and
Sartre’sMorality and History,”Centenary 278. For the continuum, see John Dewey,Logic:
The Theory of Inquiry(New York: Henry Holt, 1938 ), 496 – 497.
A socialist humanism and its morality? 371