saint sartre

The ultrachic grad student who writes Infinite Thought has been writing some nice things about Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason – which is the world’s greatest monument to speed (runner up is Dylan’s Blond on Blond).

We are happy about that. Last week there was one of those thought infections that hit the big blogs. There was a David Brooks column about the difference between the left and right in the good old U.S.A. Brooks made the point that the lefties no longer have a philosopher – he called up some lefty think tanker and asked him, hey, who is your philosopher, and the think tanker evidently couldn’t think of anybody. This got commented upon all over the place. Matt Yglesias wrote a post claiming that liberals are all about policy, nowadays, and have dispensed with the superstitious retention of philosophical mascots.

Now the standard Crooked Timber reaction to Brooks challenge is to reach for “A theory of justice.” Rawls, it is true, does codify a certain dimension of liberal thinking. But if there were one thinker who encoded the fundamental difference between classical and contemporary liberalism, that thinker has to be Sartre.

Sartre? Mr. Cockeyed French supporter of the soviet invasion of Hungary? Yeah, that guy. Contemporary liberalism – post New Deal liberalism – depends on a philosophic anthropology that departs radically from the old contractual myth of the relation of the individual to society. For the classical liberal, the contract – whether construed by Locke or by Rousseau – was the warrant for a political order founded on individual liberty that still maintained a hierarchical order. For the contemporary liberal, however, freedom has another dimension – a dimension of human identity – from which the contract is distantly derived. If, that is, one wants to continue to think in terms of that hoary myth. The dimension of human identity is revealed by human situations. The philosopher who put this all together – sloppily, with massive misreadings of Heidegger thrown in to add some spice, and those bennies to keep him awake at night – is Sartre. Like Freud, whose vocabulary so permeates the way we talk about consciousness that even his critics talk blandly about “repression” and the “unconscious,” that freedom is defined by action, and that it is a measure of situations preceding any economic measure – the Sartrean contention – has become part of folk anthropology. The triad at the end of Being and Nothingness – to have, to do, to be – is the basic triad of contemporary liberalism. This is why the separation of politics and culture is conceptually impossible for contemporary liberalism – that separation reflects the older, contractual view of the individual. Situations cut across the segregated zones of the socius, ultimately putting in question the justification of those segregations. In this, of course, Sartrean existentialism joins the classical Marxist critique of ideology – but without endorsing class struggle as the motor of those segregations and their uses.

The engrossment of such as Yglesias in policy issues, at the moment, reflects the dearth of movement politics on the left side of the ledger, and the dominance of a class of political parasites – the party apparatchik. The party – Labor in the U.K., the Socialists in France, the Democrats in the U.S. – are a sort of institutionalized death drive, sucking out the libidinal energies of the true left and turning them into terms of office for white male non-entities with expensive hair or hair transplants. It isn't that these people aren't going to be there, regardless. The point is to have some gun to point at their heads -- a variety of movements that push them.

Unfortunately, the direction of momentum is backasswards. The mark of this is the way in which the defense of liberal issues is now conducted entirely in terms of economic cost benefit – ultimately, a very silly and defeatist way of looking at the issues involved. The larger demands should be put in terms of a larger definition of freedom – the iron rule of necessity has long been lifted in the West, and its continued effect is wholly the result of preserving, like some saint’s relic, an absurdly archaic slaveholding structure, with the wealthy holding down the role of our Simon Legrees, and the natural producers of wealth being alloted an insanely small portion of it.

Remember -- no slave revolt has ever succeeded by pennypushing.