Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (review)

150 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW íREVJEWS Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser. Princeton University Press, 1975. 415 pp. $17.50 This well-documented, closely-argued, and lucidly written study deals with the relations between existentialism and Marxism in postwar France. Since it is difficult to think of an important French thinker in this period who has taken no interest in either existentialism or Marxism, the book amounts virtually to an intellectual history of the period. As such it is extremely useful. But Poster's aims are polemical as well as historical and descriptive. In tracing the progress of existentialism and Marxism from a position of relative antagonism at the time of the publication of Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) to their merger in the sixties and seventies, Poster argues that existential Marxism provides a social theory more adequate to the contemporary sitution than any other. The test of its adequacy, according to Poster, was the uprisings of May 1968: "it was the existential Marxists," he writes, "who were best able to discover and explain those features in the events of May that were new to protest movements and that make May, 1968, so historically significant" (387). Poster's story begins with "the Hegel Renaissance" of the mid-forties, sparked by the translation, teaching, and interpretation of the Phenomenology by two men, Alexandre Kojeve and Jean Hyppolite. The Hegel Renaissance coincided with the rediscovery of the early Marx, most importantly the 1844 Manuscripts. These events posed a challenge to official Marxism, which under the intellectual leadership of men such as Garaudy had come to be regarded as a closed system of ideas. Writing in 1946, "Garaudy safely delineated Marxism as scientific, moral, and French. The image of Marxism drawn by CP apologists like Garaudy was not of an open, critical theory that could lead the strategies for smashing oppressive institutions, but of a respectable, elevated, very French, philosophical doctrine" (37). This comfortable system, in which everything of importance was determined and known in advance, was one of the targets against which the early Sartre voiced his doctrine of freedom. Being and Nothingness was not without an implicit political radicalism. "The thesis that man was free to construct himself and his world would become , for Sartre, the basis for his contribution to Marxism: human reality understood as freedom was the condition for the possibility of Communism or the end of alienated labor" ( 1 04). Yet this concept of freedom, in the form it took in Being and Nothingness could not find reason in history, and descended into an irrationalism in which one 'choice' was as good as another." So Lefebvre and other Party intellectuals argued, arriving at a final verdict identical to that ofPravda: "Sartre's philosophy spoke for a 'decadent class,'. . ." (121) How, then, were these modes of thought to be reconciled? "Marxism was weakest in specifying the contours of the 'thought' side of the theory-praxis dyad, while existentialism was strong in determining how the individual chose or lived his freedom. Paradoxically, both doctrines ascribed to Hegel's anthropology, in which man made himself while making reality, but the vital center of both schools was not developed by Lefebvre"-or by any other member of the two groups (120). The development of this "vital center" would come only with the emergence of post-industrial society, a society of technology, bureaucracy, and consumerism which pacified the proletariat and rendered the traditional Marxist theory of class struggle obsolete. The principal figures in the gradual creation of an existential Marxism are the early Merleau-Ponty, the Arguments group of the late fifties and early sixties (including Edgar Morin, Jean Duving- REVIEWS 151 naud, Dionys Mascólo, Kostas Axelos, and Pierre FougeyroUas, Francois Chatelet, and Lefebvre), and the Sartre of the Critique ofDialectical Reason. Althusser and the structuralists are credited with partial but ambiguous contributions to exitential Marxism. Lefebvre, even more than the later Sartre perhaps, emerges as the central and most satisfactory existential Marxist in his analysis of everyday life in the society of controlled consumption. What are the main characteristics of existential Marxism? First of all, "the recognition of the active role of consciousness in history" (248...