Culture, alienation and social classes

Abstract

The book published in English as Search for a Method was included as part of the French edition of The Critique of Dialectical Reason. Search for a Method could serve as a preface to either The Critique of Dialectical Reason or Sartre’s several volume study of Flaubert entitl ed The Family Idiot. This book provides an introduction to a dialectic al version of psychoanalysis, sociology and what Sartr e refers to as the “ideology” of Existentialism. Search for a Method takes on the appearance of being a Marxist work, but it is reall y a debate with Marxism. Sartre later claimed that he had never bee n a Marxist. His primary task in Search for a Method was a defense of Existentialism. This point is made clear in his highly critical rem arks about Georg Lukacs’s. Sartre was also responding to criticisms of Existentialism by French Marxists like Henri Lefebvre. Sartre suggest s that Marxism is a philosophy that expresses the basic philosophical c onception of capitalism while Existentialism is an ideology whic exists within the framework of the philosophy of Marxism and articula tes the reality of the individual as a mode of Being in the world. In his debate with Marxism, Sartre attempts to form ulate the grounds for the intelligibility of culture in relation to h istorical totalization. In his attempt to formulate the dialectics of individual p raxis and history, he elaborates a theory of social class and human agenc y. From the point of view of this analysis, two particular aspects of hi s t eory are of interest: his conceptions of praxis and the practico-inert. Sartre does not reify the concept of culture; his i s a theory of mediation, in which he attempts to establish the si ngular unity of individual praxis and history: