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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 142.78
EAN num: 9781844670772
ISBN number: 1844670775
Label: Verso
Manufacturer: Verso
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 480
Printing Date: July 15, 2006
Publishing house: Verso
Sale Popularity Level: 568309
Studio: Verso
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'A landmark in modern social thought… A turning point in the thinking of our time.'—Raymond Williams
At the height of the Algerian war, Jean-Paul Sartre embarked on a fundamental reappraisal of his philosophical and political thought. The result was the Critique of Dialectical Reason, an intellectual masterpiece of the twentieth century, now republished in two volumes with major original introductions by Fredric Jameson.
Here, Sartre began a new theory of history that he believed was necessary for postwar Marxism. His substantive concern was the structure of class struggle and the fate of mass movements of popular revolt, from the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century to the Russian and Chinese revolutions in the twentieth.
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Rated by buyers 
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Sartre was primarily a moral philosopher - not a metaphysician, epistemologist, or political philosopher. Yet, he was a bit of all these. He is a political thinker by way of his profoundly thought moral philosophy. Thus, I claim: 1) While it may be his last extensive philosophic work, Sartre's CDR is not his "last great philosophic work" - big is not always best. The tragically neglected, "Saint Genet: Actor & Martyr" is perhaps the most important book of moral philosophy since Kant's "Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals". This book was published in French in 1953, but for reasons evident to me but obscure to many, was not published until 1963 in English (i.e., America of the 1950's was for all it's extroversion, an uptight place - for all its "loss of innocence" - still is). There is a magnificent review of Saint Genet on this site to which I could not add more. Saint Genet, not Being and Nothingness is Sartre's magnum. 2) We're dealing with a generation who grew up in the heyday of Reagan's media robots - not only do they not understand Marx, his enormous stature and insight - they haven't dared to read him. The fact is the corporate/service divide which is really central to all our problems yesterday - is none other than the reappearance of the old bourgeois/proletariat divide, "the antagonism of capital and wage labor" once again. Think about it at the pump. 3) Sartre was left with the problem of trying to reconcile his Marxism, with his very egocentric existentialism - really a syncretism - and he tries in this huge tome. (I am always amazed at how prolific Sartre was - and how good!) 4)Oddly, although existentialism conflicts with Marxian utopianism and its vision of unity (after all one could call many of our contemporary corporate anarchists existentialist), it radically opposes statism which Marx notoriously failed to do, allowing his ideas to serve as justifying ideologies for some of the worst human rights transgressions in history, in Russia, China, Cambodia, etc., transgressions which most certainly have Marx and those who truly understood him in his time "turning over in their graves". This insight, leads Sartre into a radically deep (hundreds of pages) analysis of the roots and manifestations of statism in our civilization. 5) The reviewer is right in saying that few manage to wend their way through Sartre's Critique. Rather, he wrote a neat, user-friendly Introduction, much more feasible for the general reader, covering in some depth all the main points in the argument, and his thinking as a whole. This exordium, originally a postscript to CDR - was published separately and went through a number of revisions - and is now available in English under the title, "Search for a Method". But please - please, do yourself a favor - before you endeavor Being In Nothingness (Heidegger's Being and Time - is more essential - and in many ways "the original version" of Sartre's epistemology and metaphysics) or CDR - read Saint Genet - a masterpiece of honesty and critical investigation.
Rated by buyers 
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You must have read Being and Nothingness if you are considering this book so I won't describe Sartre's scholastic interest in preliminary formal considerations; as usual it takes up 3/4 of the total work. Sartre is also an imaginative writer, however, and his analyses of group terror, top-ten lists, and respectability (in vol 2) almost make up for it. I find Sartre's apparent devotion to Marxism troubling in an "objective" philosophical work, especially since much of Marx is obsolete. In other words, I don't know why you would buy this book. It used to be tedious; now it's just interesting to specialists.
Rated by buyers 
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Seeking to give Marxism what Michael McGee called "a more rigorous intellectual defense," Sartre wrote volume one of Critique of Dialectical Reason (CDR) between 1957 & 1960; it was published in France in 1960. The very first English edition appeared in 1976. A second, unfinished volume appeared posthumously in 1982.
CDR was a massive endeavor to describe the dynamic of various levels of human interaction & what characterizes these levels, from a mere chance collection of people to the social entity we call an institution. The ultimate objective was to show why Marx's categorization of "class" as some kind of hyperorganism was wrong. Its thesis statement can be drawn from its thematic antecedent, Search for a Method: cultural order is irreducible to natural order.
In CDR, life was endless occasions of totalizations, detotalizations, & retotalizatons on a field of scarcity. These various totalizations were instances of human groupness, whether people waiting @the bus stop, a soccer team, or the "mob" storming the Bastille. We called the temporalization of events "history."
First half of the volume, or Book I, is devoted mainly to ennui-provoking explanation of the dialectical investigation: hidden there in a footnote was Sartre's curt dismissal of Darwinism. However, he got wound up in Book II & showed how task assignments, division of labor, & the institution came about.
I know of no other original study, treatise, or even novel that uses the themes & concepts of CDR. A CDR-oriented examination of, say, American domestic relations court proceedings (with its forced as opposed to mediated reciprocity) might be a worthy endeavor.
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