Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique de la Raison Dialectique appeared in France in 1960. It was entitled Volume i—‘A Theory of Practical Ensembles’. Its object was the abstract relationships between individuals, groups, series and collectives which Sartre called the ‘formal elements of any history’, in a world dominated by scarcity. It ended with a promise that Volume ii would proceed to a study of the concrete combinations of these elements that constituted the process of history itself. In the event, no second volume of the Critique was to appear. For long, it has been thought that Sartre in fact abandoned the project after writing at most a few fragments of it. The most reliable account of the incomplete work was to be found in Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka’s excellent study Les Écrits de Sartre (Paris 1970), which reported the existence of two chapters. To coincide with the appearance of the English edition of Volume i of the Critique, however, Sartre authorized the publication in nlr of a brief section from the—now somewhat legendary—manuscript of Volume ii. The text below is the excerpt selected by the Review.
To explain it, something must be said of the work from which it is taken. The manuscript of Volume ii of the Critique is much longer than most readers of Sartre have probably imagined—some 200,000 words or so, or a book of at least 500 pages. From internal evidence, it seems to have been written, not after the publication of Volume i, but prior to it—as a direct prolongation of the same work. (There are repeated references to 1958 as the political ‘present’ of the study). In style, however, it is far less technical than Volume i, containing many passages of great literary verve. These characteristically take the form of extended historical accounts, of a sort necessarily absent from the philosophical method of the first volume.
The theoretical framework of Volume ii, however, is a logical sequel to that of its predecessor. Its essential enquiry is stated at the outset of the book. The problem of the work is exactly that which was posed to Sartre in the nlr interview with him in 1969: ‘How can a multiplicity of individual acts give birth to social structures which have their own laws, discontinuous from the acts which for you formally constitute a historical dialectic? . . . Why should history not be an arbitrary chaos of inter-blocking projects, a sort of colossal traffic-jam?’ (nlr 58, pp. 58–9).