double movement of regression followed by progress, is valid – with the
modifications which its objects may impose upon it –in all domains of
anthropology”(SM 52 n.). We should note that Sartre takes “anthropology”
in a sense equivalent to what the French call “the human sciences” (les
sciences humaines) – that includes history, sociology and psychoanalysis.^19
How this threefold method maps over the Hegelian-Marxian dialectic
so that neither the group nor the man is suppressed remains to be seen
(seeSM 53 ). Sartre points in that direction when he insists that “the very
development of the dialectical philosophy must lead it to produce – in a
single act – the horizontal synthesis and the totalization in depth” (SM 82 ).
This is the task sketched in the present chapter, but admittedly slated for
development in theCritiqueandThe Family Idiot.
In search of a “supple, patient dialectic”
Sartre landed a direct hit on “Neo-Marxist scholasticism” with his
“Materialism and Revolution,” published in the ninth issue of the first
volume ofLTM.^20 It is the rigidity of the “Official” (Stalinist) reading of
Dialectical Materialism, its reductionist “economism,” that Sartre
opposed in the late 1940 s. Such an approach to history and the “anthro-
pology” that sustained it was, in his view, impatient with the nuances
of concrete life and in denial of the “mediating “factors that could give
it access to the concrete. We saw Sartre opening the door to a more
“humanist” dialectic inMRand laying the path for such an approach in
Search for a Method. Before turning to theCritique, let me state the
Marxist mantra for a materialist dialectic that Sartre will now adopt,
but as usual in his own way: “Men themselves make their history but in
a given environment which conditions them.”^21 It is the nature and
flexibility of that “conditioning” that continues to divide Sartre from
the “Marxists,” even as greater flexibility is incrementally acknowledged
by each side. The “sticking point” in this exchange is the reality of
(^19) Sartre’s use of “anthropology” would resemble that of Foucault inThe Order of Things,
especially when Foucault disparages the “anthropological slumber” of nineteenth-century
20 thought, where he notoriously imprisons Sartre (Order of Things,^340 ). See above,note^14.
21 The phrase “supple, patient dialectic” is taken fromSM^126.
Sartre quotes this from a letter of Lenin to Marx (“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte,”Karl Marx. Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford University Press,
1977 ).
330 A theory of history:Search for a Method