there were other candidates for that title in other countries in those
days. After distinguishing directive (dictatorial) from nondirective
societies, the latter being capitalist societies left for future study,
Sartre focuses on Stalin and the phenomenon of Stalinism as a case
study in the dialectical circularity between the common individual
and the sovereign. Though he allows that the formative experiences
of this Georgian seminarian were decisive in many respects (as befits
his appeal to “the unsurpassable childhood” [SM 65 n.]), his interest
at this stage is not in biography as such (the “singularization of
the social”), but in history as the subsumption of chance events
and personal idiosyncracies (the “socialization of the singular”)
(CDRii: 216 ).
Where does this lead? To a dialectical relation by which Stalin makes
himself (and is made) the man of the hour: a transformation of the
individual and a deviation of the social function (seeCDRii: 219 ). It is
this reciprocal modification, this transformation and deviation, which
Sartre calls the “Circularity of incarnation” (CDRii: 194 ), that determin-
ists like Georgi Plekhanov overlook. What it means is that, as a common
individual, “Stalin was not a mereperson.” Sartre dubs him “a human
pyramid, deriving all his practical sovereignty from the inert structures
and from all the support of every leading sub-group (and every
individual)...But conversely, inasmuch as he was not just a man called
Stalin butthe sovereign, he wasretotalizedin himself by all the complex
determinations of the pyramid” (CDRii: 199 ).
What distinguished Stalin from other sovereigns, in Sartre’s mind,
was that he was so constituted by the type and organs of his power that
there was nogapbetween person and function, between a private
Stalin and a public Stalin, where freedom, responsibility and (one
could say) “conscience” could lodge.^20 By subsequent moves of his
dialectical argument, Sartre uncovered Stalin’s voluntarism, the terror,
suspicion and other qualities of the regime. The Russian revolution
“demanded a sovereign who would be a dogmatic opportunist” (CDR
ii: 215 ). Without slipping into historical determinism as analytic reason
might counsel, but relying on dialectical necessity, which Sartre finds
compatible with freedom, Stalin emerges as “the man of the hour,” not
(^20) See CDRii: 200.
352 Individuals and groups:Critique of Dialectical Reason