Critique of Dialectical Reason

Introduction

The first volume appeared in Paris in 1960, preceded by the essay Search for a Method (1957), in which Sartre calls Marxism the unsurpassable philosophy of our time while criticising its dogmatic forms. Over some 750 pages he tries to show how history can be intelligible on the basis of individual praxis. Under conditions of scarcity, human action congeals into the “practico-inert”, a world of things and institutions that turns back against people. A queue at a bus stop exemplifies a “series” of isolated individuals, the storming of the Bastille a “group-in-fusion”. A second volume remained unfinished and appeared only in 1985. Lévi-Strauss replied critically in The Savage Mind.

Connections

Builds on

• Capital1867 · Karl Marx
• Being and Nothingness1943 · Jean-Paul Sartre

Taken up in

• The Wretched of the Earth1961 · Frantz Fanon

Criticized in

• Wild Thought (La Pensée sauvage)1962 · Claude Lévi-Strauss

More works by Jean-Paul Sartre

• 1943Being and Nothingness
• 1946Existentialism Is a Humanism