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Toward a Sartrean Economics

Michel Kail & Richard Sobel
Published online: 07 Jan 2015.

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To cite this article: Michel Kail & Richard Sobel (2015) Toward a Sartrean Economics,
Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 27:1, 33-50, DOI:
10.1080/08935696.2014.980674
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Rethinking Marxism, 2015

Vol. 27, No. 1, 3350, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2014.980674

Toward a Sartrean Economics

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Michel Kail and Richard Sobel

Despite the absence of a systematic analysis of economics in Sartres work, we argue
that a Sartrean economics can indeed be said to exist, even if it is an economics that
still awaits development. The status that Sartre accords to the concept of scarcity
allows him to advance the critique of economism begun by Karl Polanyi, who, for his
part, had been satisfied simply to challenge the reduction of economics to its formal
definition. Scarcity, Sartre teaches us, should not be submitted to the process of
instrumental reason but should be considered as a fact of human history. Economic
analysis, meanwhile, should not be based solely on the theme of mans confrontation
with a typically ungrateful nature but should rather be articulated through the
concept of the world as elaborated in Sartrean philosophy.
Key words: Economism, Karl Polanyi, Jean-Paul Sartre, Scarcity, World

A Renewal of Sartres Criticism of Economism

Neither for the economy itself nor for the discipline of economics has Sartre
developed a systematic analysis that can be qualified as economic (Latour and
Lpinay 2009). Is that to say, however, that the question we propose to raise here
whether there is a Sartrean economics in the same sense that there can be said to
be a Marxian economicsis meaningless if not downright fantastic? Our undertaking
might seem even more baffling if we add that the question of economics was not even
one of Sartres central preoccupations. When he began writing the Critique of
Dialectical Reason, Sartre set out to penetrate the intelligibility of history without
the assistance of any historical philosophy, refusing to mobilize any causality that was
too metaphysical to be deployed outside of or unbeknownst to human actions or that
might in any way function to determine the last instance of history. The development
of such a project would thus oblige him to reconstruct a version of anthropology
issuing solely from a theory of individual praxis, the being-for-itself of Being and
Nothingness:
In short, we are dealing neither with human history, nor sociology, nor
anthropology. To parody a title of Kants, we would claim, rather, to be
laying the foundations for Prologomena to any future anthropology The
entire historical dialectic rests on individual praxis in so far as it is already
dialectical, that is to say, to the extent that action is itself the negating
transcendence of contradiction, the determination of a present totalisation

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KAIL AND SOBEL

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in the name of a future totality, and the real effective working of matter.
(Sartre 2004, 656, 80)
Thus problematized, his anthropological quest would not seem to have required
Sartre to elaborate an original philosophy of economics, or one that is essentially
different from the Hegelian-Marxist philosophy of labor that Sartre had inherited
from Kojve, whose famous seminars Sartre had attended in the 1930s (and from
which he would construct his thought, if only later to break away from it). One hint,
however, might lead us to think that Sartre had nonetheless encountered the
economic question in a quite specific manner in the course of his investigation.
When initiating his program of research in what would appear a very Hegelian
manner, Sartre (2004, 80) announces, Everything is to be explained through need
(besoin), insofar as need represents the first totalizing connection between man, as
material being, and the material world of which he is a part. However the manner in
which Sartre thus enters into economics, it cannot quite be described as orthodox, for
economics is indifferent to need, preoccupying itself instead with the question of
interest. If there is then more than one paradox inherent in postulating a coherent,
original Sartrean economics, is it not (as we will show) precisely because the Sartrean
bricolage lends little importance to the common distinctions by which economists
delimit their proper fields of study? If taken seriously, however, this very bricolage
may be capable of serving as a radical springboard for those who seek, even today, to
launch an attack on economism.
Before plunging into the very heart of our demonstration, we should draw
attention to a methodological point that highlights the current relevance of our
remarks and the originality of our epistemological stance. To us, economism is the
dominant form of naturalism in the world today. By naturalism, we mean the
ideological operation that consists in depicting a sociohistorical phenomenon as a
natural phenomenonthat is, the operation that eliminates the contingent and
relative nature of construction from society and human history (Rosset 1974).
Economism is, therefore, defined as the form of naturalism that especially concerns
this category of economic sociohistorical fact. Of course, the social sciences, with
Marxism in the forefront, have constantly fought this economic naturalism. But
examination of Sartres radical perspective on these questions will show that they
have not remained consistent.

Defining Economics? A Necessary Detour through Karl Polanyi

To grasp how Sartre addresses the question of economics, one must take a detour
through the work of the anthropologist, historian, and economist, Karl Polanyi.1
Certainly, if we hold strictly to Sartres writings and to what we know of his reading
(particularly that of the period when he was working on the Critique of Dialectical
Reason), we must admit that Sartre does not appear to have known Polanyi either at
first or second hand. But the work of defining economicsto which Polanyi
1. For a concise account of the life and work of Karl Polanyi (18861964), see Maucourant (2005).

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repeatedly returned throughout his career2remains, we feel, a vital reference

point for elucidating the character of Sartres encounter with and problematization of
the economic question. In the pages that follow, therefore, we will argue that Sartre,
working independently, confronted in his own manner a problem that Polanyi raised
but never properly resolved.

Sartre and the Economic Question

In Sartres philosophical oeuvre, we can identify two places where the economic
question is addressed in and of itself, as well as in more general terms.
The first is in Notebooks for an Ethics, a collection of unedited writings that
remained unpublished in Sartres lifetime and in which Sartre (1992b, 7582) devoted
a handful of pages to the notion of the economic. This perspective does not rest
merely at the level of a general commentary but can be seen at work precisely in the
Marxist analysis that Sartre mobilizes to discuss economicsalthough with one slight
difference, in that it is a form of Marxism that Sartre was already beginning to render
more phenomenological,3 in line with his explicit ambitions in Search for a Method.
While the question doubtless requires deeper systematic study, one might nonetheless follow Raymond Aron (1970) in arguing that, understood in these terms, one
cannot so much speak of a specific Sartrean economic philosophy but rather of a
Sartrean apprehension of the economy founded on Marxist categories.4 In this
substantive perspective, the philosophy of labor represents the anthropological basis
of economic investigation, as well as that upon which every sociohistorical analysis of
the mode of production is founded. Sartre situates himself on the same intellectual
plane as Hegel, Marx, and Kojve (Aufret 1990). At base, however, his economic
philosophy in Notebooks for an Ethics has nothing original about it, even if the
phenomenological treatment to which Sartre submits the anthropology of labor might
in itself be considered so (see Kail and Sobel 2005).
Undoubtedly more famous, the second text is radically different from the first in its
line of economic attack. Drawn from the Critique of Dialectical Reason, it is entitled
Scarcity and the Mode of Production (Sartre 2004, 12239) and is developed further
in Scarcity and Marxism (14052). What first strikes ones attention in these texts is
the essential link established in Sartres economic anthropology between the
definition of economics and the notion of scarcity. The concept of laborhow, from
an anthropological point of view, we enter into the economy in a substantive sense
remains present, certainly, yet henceforth we see it allocated a secondary status.
Sartre makes no explicit reference to instrumental rationality but rather centers his
discussion on one condition of the exercise of this rationality, the situation of
scarcity. Whatever the case, the question remains as to whether this posture can be
said to signal a specific and developed economic philosophy. Does it allow us to give
2. See Polanyi (1944, 1957, and especially 1977).
3. For Aron (1970), readings of Marx consist of two fundamental, if intermixed, types:
phenomenological (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) and structuralist (Althusser).
4. It matters little here whether or not Sartre mobilizes Marx at first or second hand.

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KAIL AND SOBEL

more substance to our initial question? This is the issue that we go on to examine.
Before doing so, however, one final remark must be added to complete the terms of
our inquiry.
One is tempted to deplore the lack of interest, with a few rare exceptions (see
Guibert 1981, 1989; Rizk 1996), in Sartres economic philosophy. This can doubtless
be attributed to the difficulty of understanding such an apparently heterogeneous
approach as Sartres, which at once appears to view economics through a Marxist lens
and yet to revisit it through the notion of scarcitya notion that Marx, it will be
recalled, associated negatively with the robinsonades of political economy. From the
point of view of substantive economic philosophy, whether it is Marxist-Hegelian or
structuralist in type, one simply does not know what to do with this concept of
scarcity since it cannot be mobilized innocentlythat is, disdaining the naturalist,
ahistorical background of the formal definition of economics. Meanwhile, from the
point of view of formalist economic philosophythat is, from those axiomatic or
cognitive theories of rationality that dominate analytical philosophy in the academy
todaySartre is simply not recognized as an economist; he is a continental
philosopher and not even a postmodernist, which is as much as to say that he is
merely a writer. And even if he were recognized as such, we would be forced to
remark that his bricolage (scarcity without instrumental rationality, but coupled with
an anthropology of labor) is not only of little interest but today also finds itself largely
outdated.
To clarify this overview of the economic question as it appears in the work of
Sartre, it may prove useful to step back a little and place it in perspective, with the
help of some distinctions proposed by the economist, historian, and anthropologist,
Karl Polanyi (see Dale 2010). In order to remove any ambiguity, we must point out
that, to our knowledge, Sartre was not familiar with Polanyis economic history work
and a fortiori had not read his epistemological reflections. If we allow ourselves to
make this comparison, it is because we believe that it allows us to (1) explain the
distinctions with respect to the economy that appear in Sartres work by linking them
to the history of economic thought and (2) above all to show the special features of
Sartres approach by highlighting all its critical potential (which is greater than that
of Polanyis work) as well as the theoretical benefit that it might offer in shoring up a
genuinely antinaturalist approach in economics.

The Two Definitions of Karl Polanyi

Every economic philosophy mobilizes a general notion of the economy. For Karl
Polanyi, there are only two possible definitions of the economy in the real and not
purely nominative sense of the term: the substantive definition and the formal
definition. Devolving from these two starting points, there can therefore be only two
broad types of economic philosophy (see Caill 2003; Maucourant 2005; Postel and
Sobel 2008).
The term substantive definition refers to the qualification of a domain, proper to
all societies, that encompasses the production, distribution, and consumption of
resources (goods or services) necessary to individual and collective life. Such a

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37

domain is not necessarily formulated as such in the social imaginary of these societies
and, a fortiori, does not necessarily implicate the apparent autonomy of the modern
capitalist system. Most of the time, this domain is embedded in the social, to take
up a celebrated Polanyi (1944) concept, and one has to await the eighteenth century
and the birth of political economy for it to become a specific object of study. This
domain is not then purely mechanical or technical, evoking the instrumental
relationship between men and things, but finds itself constantly structured by
sociopolitical relations: the relations of men among themselves; relations that
precede relationships between men and things and that also condition those
relationships. As for the illustration and analysis of this connecting structure, the
figure of Marx looms incontestably large, as it does over every noninstrumental
conception of economics. But for all that, no human society is conceivable without an
economy, and an economy, from a substantive perspective, can be considered as a
veritable empirical universal of the human condition, always finding expression as a
singularity or peculiaritythat is to say, as one institutional form or another, in one
society or another, and at one or another moment in its history.
The formal definition, by contrast, designates not a societal domain but a
behavioral system, which can be identified when we qualify an individual as thrifty.
The change of perspective is clearly marked here. Economicity thus designates a
calculation that, with given ends but susceptible to shift, bears upon the most
efficient use of disposable means in a context of scarcitya context outside of
which it would make little sense to desire to be thrifty; under the reign of
abundance, it is no longer necessary to calculate. Certainly, economy in the formal
sense of the term constitutes a dimension that, in one manner or another, is also
present in economy in the substantive sense of the term, for what, in effect, would
be the viability of a society whose economic sphere was structured around boundless
waste?5 But the formal definition opens a perspective at once different from and
larger than that designated by the substantive term while at the same time
presenting in itself, and without the principle of internal control, a risk of
extraversion. Is not economicity a psychic disposition after all, which a priori may
objectivize literally any object in its fieldwhatever the objects historically
constructed and hence variable contentand not just the resources necessary for
survival? Any human activity, whatever its substance and historical depth, can be
evaluated from an economic point of viewthat is to say, can be broken down into
ends and means and rationalized in terms of the use of means under the reductive
form of an itself timeless instrumental rationality. We know that some, following
Robbins (1945), believed to have discovered in economicity (sometimes termed
instrumental rationality) the objective and universal basis of a science of human
action (see Mises 1949), thus rendering economic science as a discipline of the same
epistemological rank as the natural sciences. Economics, as a kind of knowledge, has
even felt itself capable of identifying in this universal praxis the means of establishing
itself as the only true social science, having for its vocation the goal of progressively
5. This in no way presages the social direction that nonutilitarian forms of consumption may
take at any given moment in a societys development. See Bataille (1993).

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KAIL AND SOBEL

integrating all others, and effectively making little of the ontological specificity of its
object.
The supposed epistemological base furnished by economicity is, however, easily
identifiable as a universal abstract and can, as such, be dismissed as an ideological
construction. Such, indeed, is the tone of Karl Polanyis critique of economicity when
it seeks to demonstrate that this perceived universalism is nothing but a generalization falsely devolved from a discrete sociohistorical function of economics, in the
substantive sense of the term, and founded upon the principle of the self-regulating
market. In a profoundly traditional manner, Polanyi would restore historical specificity to that which had been unlawfully naturalized. Economicitys claim to justify a
core definition of economics should be sustained no further, he argues, since it does
no more than express a historical extension of the logic of the marketplace.

A Partial Critique of Naturalism: Sartre beyond Polanyi

What should claim our attention here is the obviousness of a critique that, far from
needing to be in any way reversed or attenuated, rather demands to be reinforced. In
evoking economicity as a definition of the economic (economicity as a strictly logical
notion is not in doubt here), Robbins and Mises do not efface history; they reduce it to
the sole validity of context. Meanwhile, in recontextualizing that which had been
unduly universalized, Polanyi prolongs this restrictive interpretation of historicity
hence, the interest in bringing a Sartrean argument into play here, in all its
anxiousness to evaluate the full scope of historicity. But we will return to this point
in due course; for now, let us continue our examination of Polanyis approach. Having
challenged the epistemological appropriation of the economic by economicity,
Polanyi (1957, 248) advances a definition of substantive economics as an instituted
process of interaction between man and his environment which results in a
continuous supply of want-satisfying material means.
In this definition, we can identify three levels of signification (see Postel and Sobel
2008). The first brings out nature, although Polanyi evidently knows well that in
Western society man no longer has unmediated contact with natureif indeed, in a
problematic subsistence economy, he ever had. Nonetheless, his argument serves to
inscribe the case of Western societies within a general framework engendered by the
dialectical relations between man and nature. And this proves all the more
incongruous given the rejection by Polanyi both of the naturalism of classical
philosophy and also of the concept of scarcity as a fundamental universal of
economics.6 The second level of signification pertains to the concept of material
6. In economic terms, scarcity is the condition of goods and services that do not exist in
unlimited quantities in their natural state. It is a general and absolute phenomenon, as distinct
from penury, which is a phenomenon relative to time (e.g., France in the 1940s) and/or space
(e.g., underdeveloped countries). The origin of economic activity consists precisely in struggling
against this fundamental scarcity. Scarcity is thus not equivalent to penury, just as utility should
not be confused with need. Scarcity and utility (which both affect the goods susceptible to
satisfy a need and that are thus exchangeable on the market) are sometimes considered as the
foundations of the value of goods.

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39

need, mobilized to break the hegemony of formal economics, which normally

contents itself with making reference to the choice of alternative means for dealing
with the constraints of scarcity. The demand that leads to economic activity is thus no
longer born of a subjective perception (a sense of scarcity) but of the vital, objective
need for nourishment. Polanyi is thus able to identify a human universal that does not
represent a generalization of the specific trait of an era but that can be made to
signify as a characteristic of the human condition. The third level is institutional: the
institutionalization of the economic order represents its condition of possibility. Every
society develops a form of institutional organization to regulate its material
relationship with nature. We thus understand why Polanyi thought it right to pay
particular attention to nature at the outset, for nature enables him to prop up the
universal character of the institutionalization of the economic order, which conditions the establishment of mans relations with nature. Nature, in this particular
case, functions to guarantee the universality of institutionalization. The selfregulating market is thus correctly estimated as one, and only one, of the forms
that institutional universality may take.
If this author was able to foil the first level of economism by challenging the
confusion between economics and its formal definition, he was not, however, able to
avoid another form of economism. In his preface to the French edition of The Great
Transformation, Louis Dumont (1983) invites readers to choose between the search
for a sense of social totality in the economic within itself and the search for a sense of
the economic for itself in social totality. In choosing the first possibility, Polanyi
relinquishes himself to the second form of economism. Whether by means of his
substantive definition or by his somewhat loose employment of the concept of need,
he thus fails to convince us that he has been able to determine the economic
universal.
How can Sartre be situated in this analysis, or where does he stand in relation to
these distinctions? In sum, even when conceded a certain weight, Sartres economic
philosophy appears either incomplete or outmoded (from the point of view of the
dominant economic philosophy, scarcity remains an insufficient perspective if we fail
to make the effort to rise to the level of instrumental rationality, the universal
platform for all forms of anthropology) or heterogeneous and ultimately maladroit
(from the point of view of heterodox economic philosophy, scarcity does not
represent the naturalist basis of the anthropology of labor, and Sartre was merely
recreating a modern robinsonade). The case has just been heard, it appears: Sartres
economic philosophy, insofar as it can be called that, is neither specific nor original;
it may even be dangerous.
Nevertheless we persist in our initial investigation and, in so doing, propose to
defend a precisely opposite thesis: Sartres economic philosophy is both specific and
original. In order to reveal it as such, his economic philosophy must be removed from
the formal-substantive field that classically encompasses all forms of economic
philosophy yet thatas we shall demonstrate in shifting from an anthropological to
an ontological mode of inquiryis inappropriate to rendering an account of what
Sartre has, at base, to tell us concerning economics when he constructs his concept of
scarcity. In short, then, the following pages will defend the thesis of a Sartrean
economics.

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Sartrean Scarcity: The Dialectic of the World

versus the Dialectic of Nature

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The Epistemological Specificity of the Sartrean Concept of Scarcity

Let us return to the critique of naturalism in economics that we formulated above
(see A Renewal of Sartres Criticism of Economism), following Polanyi. This critique
encourages us to seek out Sartrean analyses that have much to offer in terms of the
concepts of need and scarcity.
Before entering into detail, an epistemological point must be raised. Sartre, a
grand philosophe, is a prolix creator of concepts, and these philosophical concepts
cannot simply be defined but must be apprehended in the very movement of Sartres
argument. Crucially, they must also be connected both to the difficulties that they
permit one to identify and surmount and to the possibilities that they unveil.
Scientific language is pure praxis, action, and knowledge in the technical
sense of the term. It does not refer to man. Besides, in a general manner, in
my view, anthropology is a science destructive of man precisely insofar as it
deals with him perfectlybetter and betteron the basis of the assumption
that it is not also he who elaborates the sciences. Philosophy addresses itself
to those who elaborate the sciences, and it cannot treat of man with
scientific words; it can only treat of him with ambiguous words. Husserls
idea of philosophy as strenge Wissenschaft [rigorous science] appears to me
the crazy idea of a genius, but still a crazy idea. At any rate, nothing is more
ambiguous than everything that Husserl has written. (Sartre 1972, 70; our
translation)
Sartre adds that philosophy always comes after praxis has been formednot to carry
out a retrospective reconstitution but a prospective projectionby the introduction
of an ambiguity possessed by literary prose; one must remain on guard, however,
against a wrong use of such ambiguity, which, as the case of Heidegger frequently
shows, often serves only to mystify. But the ambiguous should not be confused with
the irrational. Rather, it promotes a rationality rich in its capacity to reinscribe the
subject in his relation to the object, a relation that exempts itself from scientific,
analytic rationality:
So long, as Merleau-Ponty has quite rightly said, as man is object for certain
men, ethnologists, sociologists, we are dealing with something that can no
longer be casually skimmed over. Without contesting the ensemble of this
knowledge, we are obliged to say that it is a man-to-man relationship, man
enters, as anthropologist, into a certain relationship with the other, he is not
in front of the other but situated in relation to the other [this emphasis
added]. Philosophically, the notion of man never withdraws within itself In
economics, for example, we do not have a knowledge of man such as
philosophy might define it, but a knowledge of the activity of man insofar as
it is reflected by the practico-inert, the activity of man reverted. (Sartre
1972, 845; our translation)

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It should be emphasized here that the subject is not reinscribed in a ready-made

objectivity, as though in a context or a setting; rather, the subject constructs a
situation that defines him precisely because he has created the situation; he makes
the situation because the situation makes him, the Sartrean argument conferring its
full reality on this relationship itself by subjectivizing objectivity and objectivizing
subjectivity (Kail 2008). The Sartrean concept of scarcity cannot therefore be
evaluated either by the yardstick of common sense or in light of a vocabulary
elaborated by economic doctrine but must be reconstituted in all of its ambiguity
(Cabestan 2009). In what follows, we thus propose to pursue the development of
Sartrean thought in order to take its whole measure.

Scarcity as an Antinatural Concept

The whole human adventure, Sartre (2004, 123) warns, is a fierce struggle against
scarcity. And the subtle emphasis introduced in his addition in the same passage of
the term until now remains valid today. Scarcity is contingent and universal, even if
it may vary at any given historical moment in function with the regions taken into
account. If, after several millennia of human history, three-quarters of the worlds
population remain malnourished, then scarcitywhatever its contingencymust
surely be recognized as mans fundamental relation with nature (by which we mean
the relation with materiality and men among themselves). It makes us into these
particular individuals producing this particular History and defining ourselves as men
(1234). The universality of scarcity is by no means the consequence of necessity, an
expression of the ingratitude of nature, say, or the hybris of human nature. It is such
a version of necessity that claims to govern the development of every philosophy of
history and from whose logic precisely Sartre seeks to preserve his thought. In
subordinating, on the conceptual plane, necessity to contingency, Sartre confirms the
definition of the human being as that which is to be: the necessity of contingency or,
in other terms, the demands that contingency imposes at once in the order of reality
and of his analysis. If this human reality cannot be, or cannot be otherwise, it can
only be in making itself be. Through the necessity of contingency, the human being
escapes the necessity of his being since this being will only ever be necessarily
produced and not, as Sartre teaches us, produced necessarily.
Our interpretative hypothesis concerning the conceptual status of scarcity is thus
the following: the concept of scarcity enables the materialist promises that are
advanced in the conclusion of The Transcendence of the Ego to be kept without
leading to the abandonment of the thesis of an absolute situated freedom. But let us
attempt to give this proposition greater substance. Scarcity determines the general
relation of a multiple-dialectic praxis with materiality. After having paid homage to
historical materialism, Sartre marks its limits in terms of that which it hasnt taken
into account (because it is prisoner of a schema of the philosophy of the subject, we
would add): to wit, the type of passive action exercised by materiality as such on
men and on their history, giving back to them a stolen praxis in the form of a
counter-finality. The point must be emphasised: History is more complex than some
kinds of simplistic Marxism suppose; man has to struggle not only against nature, and

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KAIL AND SOBEL

against the social environment which has produced him, and against other men, but
also against his own action as it becomes other (Sartre 2004, 124). This alienation
being the origin of all forms of alienation, Sartre can therefore lend full weight to the
notion of scarcity, declaring that scarcity founds the possibility of human history, so
long as it is interpreted as the lived relation of a practical multiplicity to surrounding
materiality within that multiplicity itself (125).
This is the decisive moment in Sartres determination of the notion of scarcity.
Scarcity seems to have the same status here as that reserved for it by formal
economic science, which detects the origin of economic activity in scarcity as the
combat against scarcity. But there is one essential difference: Sartrean scarcity
founds human history; again, more precisely, with regard to its contingency, it founds
this human history and not the economy. If, abstractly (in economics and, too often,
in ecological thought), scarcity is considered as the individuals relation to the
environment and to nature, practically and historically, then in context the
environment thus represents a field already constituted, always already organized,
by collective structures. Among these the most fundamental structure is scarcity in
that it imposes a negative unity upon a multiplicity of men. This unity is declared
negative by Sartre because it imposes upon man through matter so effectively that
human presence on this earth becomes indeed impossible without struggle. It is
negative also by contrast with a positive dialectical unity capable of forging
communal action. This primary passive totalization by matter characterizes the
group by its surplus: those of its members that it must eliminate in order to subsist.
The scarcity envisaged by dominant economic discourse is a problem commensu
rate with that of instrumental reason as contained in the disciplines formal
definition: in reality, it offers economics the opportunity to exercise or actualize
the potential which is its own. One might even say that scarcity incites instrumental
reason to exercise its talents. The relations of scarcity and economic activity are in
effect treated in an analytic manner, from outside. They are like the variables of a
function. But the same certainly cannot be said of Sartrean scarcity, which conditions
a totalization. It matters little that the latter scarcity is negative; it is no less
interiorized for being so. It is, Sartre affirms, interiorized material negation, since
mans inhumanity cannot come from human nature, which he lacks, and must
therefore result from mans relation with his fellow man.
In pure reciprocity, that which is Other than me is also the same. But in
reciprocity modified by scarcity, the same appears to us as anti-human in so
far as this same man appears as radically Otherthat is to say, as
threatening us with death. Or, to put it another way, we have a rough
understanding of his ends (we have the same ones) as well as of the
dialectical structures of his acts; but we understand them as if they
belonged to another species, our demonic double. (Sartre 2004, 1312)
Neither is scarcity a permanent structure, a fact that implies that it may indeed be
a temporary manifestation of some form of human relations. Scarcity represents a
moment in human relationsa moment endlessly surpassed and reborn, the first
moment, indeed, insofar as it represents the productive schism in the process of

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reification whereby man is designated by nature as a pure quantity.7 The moment of

scarcity becomes visible between the point of dissolution of positive reciprocities,
brought about by scarcity itself and the reappearance, still under the rule of scarcity,
of negative and antagonistic reciprocities.
The struggle against scarcity is enacted by means of labor that effectively unifies
the field of praxis, labor that is primarily confused with the human organism: to wit,
a directed inertia to act upon material inertia and to satisfy itself as need.
Concerning the notion of labor, Sartre anticipates all necessitarianism (labor
conceived after a certain logic as a necessary consequence of scarcity, thus
implicating a prior naturalization) as well as all finalism (labor presented as an
activity to outstrip scarcity). One need only remark that in a social domain dominated
by scarcity, such as the domain of human history, labor is necessarily defined for man
as a praxis that seeks to satisfy a need by the precise negation of scarcity. We thus
find the distinctive characteristic of Sartrean philosophy: a mode of reasoning that
first establishes the role of contingency in order to underline the necessity that this
contingency induces.

Scarcity and Dialectics

Before confronting his conception with that of Marxismthe only economic philosophy with which we can say with certitude that he was familiarSartre reminds us
that his discussion has for its purpose the reintegration into history of scarcity as a
human fact and not the mere reproduction of a type of discourse that imputes the
cause of scarcity to a cruel mother nature. Effectively, Marx refers the discourse of
scarcity to bourgeois ideology, which seeks to legitimate the mode of capitalist
production once and for all by arguing that the lack of consumable goods is an effect
of the Malthusian law of population. Scarcity, in this analysis, represents one of those
robinsonades forged by bourgeois economists who disdain history, as indeed Sartre
makes a point of clarifying at the very outset of his discussion. But if Marxism finds it
difficult to assimilate scarcity as a fundamental human fact, this is also (and perhaps
foremost) because of its productivist preconceptions, which assure scarcity will be
definitively surmounted by the progress that, in spite of everything, is seen to direct
human history. This fact highlights what is, in our view, the central difficulty of
Marxism, which on the one hand deplores scarcity as the justification of a naturalist
model with the attributes of a cruel mother nature and which on the other hand loses
itself in a naturalist model of progress that effectively transcends history in the
attempt to give it meaning. Sartre points with great perceptiveness to the positivism
of Engels, foremost:
Exactly. This is an example of a law in the positivist sense, that is to say, of a
function and the determination of its variable. Y = f (X). The rate at which a
7. If we no longer situate ourselves at the level of the human condition in general but at that of
its current capitalism-dominated, sociohistorical form, we are obliged to note that this process
of reification is exactly that which the commodification of the world seeks to systematize.

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commune changes into a village of property-owning peasants is directly

proportional to the rate at which increasing numbers of natural products
are transformed into commodities. But then, because this law, like every law
of Nature, merely describes a universal relation between possibilities, its
content is non-historical; on the contrary, it is for History to explain how and
why in a given society the rate suddenly accelerates while in another there
is practically no change. And this History must provide its own intelligibility
as a temporal process; no analytical law can explain it. (Sartre 2004, 143)
But also to that of Marx:
More globally, the problem of Marxism lies in the passage from positive to
negative, or in the means by which the social differentiation of opposing
classes will be produced and transformed into class struggle. The only means
of surmounting an insufficiency, which is fatal for dialectics, is to
conceptualise, and then demonstrate, that it is negation which is primary,
the interiorised negation of a number of men by scarcity, that is to say, the
necessity for society to choose its dead and its underfed. (147)
Having arrived at this point, we might hope to be rewarded for our text-based
reading of Sartre by a clearer understanding of the status of scarcity in his argument,
an element that does not always shine out for its clarity. In the presence of the text,
the reader may indeed frequently have the feeling that Sartre is merely pursuing an
undeniably striking but nonetheless gratuitous intellectual game. A more intensive
labor of reading, however, effaces this sentiment, and not because the reader is
overwhelmed but because he graspsor believes he grasps, at any ratethat at play
in the Sartrean discussion of scarcity is the fate of the dialectical interpretation of
history, and thus of the interpretation of history proper. In what can these supposedly
dialectical interpretations be said to err? They err in abstractly postulating from a
negation that they subsequently introduce into a real swollen with plenitude. Since
the real can only reject negation, it becomes indispensable to imprison it in the
straitjacket of dialectical materialism in its Engelsian and Stalinist but also in its
Marxian forms.8 Sartre abandoned this very form of dialectical materialism as early as
1946, as seen in two texts subsequently assembled under the title Materialism and
Revolution.9
It was because Marxism had allowed itself to be imprisoned in this dialectical
materialisman external or transcendent dialectical materialismthat it ground
to a halt: This external materialism lays down the dialectic as exteriority: the
Nature of man lies outside him in an a priori law, in an extra-human nature, in a
history that begins with the nebulae. For this universal dialectic, partial totalisations
do not have even provisional value; they do not exist. Everything must always be
referred to the totality of natural history of which human history is only a particular
form (Sartre 2004, 27). This alien addition that, following the injunction of Marx,
was better removed in order to respect the purity of dialectical materialism is none
8. See Sartre (2004, 27).
9. See Sartre (1992a, 198256). For further analysis see Kail (1990).

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other than manconcrete, living man with his human relations, his true or false
thoughts, his actions, his real purposes (28).
In other words, this alleged alien is none other than scarcity or, more precisely,
scarcity insofar as it allows us to insert this addition free of its strangeness. Again
more precisely, scarcity ensures that concrete man no longer appears as an intruder
in historical dialectics. In effect, then, scarcity allows us to argue that the negative is
always already there, not in the form of a natural and ever-widening fissure at the
heart of being but rather because the inhuman comes to man from man. The
contingency that scarcity assuresand that must never be confused with a figure of
rhetorichas the decisive effect of canceling the efficacy of dialectical materialism
from without. Since it is untrue to say that nature responds to all the needs of all
men, the natural history that claims to reconstruct such a materialism is stillborn.
Beyond natural history, the very principle of this materialismthe identity of being
and knowledge, of being and the rational (of which reconstituted natural history
constitutes an illustration)finds itself rejected.
Scarcity is therefore at the heart of this conceptual configuration, which allows us
to think of human history dialectically.10 Even if it may only appear nominatively
therein, nature has no place in the conceptual construction of the notion of
scarcity. Sartre speaks of the materiality that the human organism interiorizes by
turning itself into passive in order to assure the satisfaction of a need: the first form
of praxis, and thus immediate praxis. No concession is accorded to dualism of any
kind. This interpretation establishes from the start that human history in the world
is wholly and exclusively constituted by the relation between the subject and the
object. The world is human, but not anthropomorphic, Sartre (1992c, 43) writes
pertinently in the manuscript of Truth and Existence.
This notion of the world, distinct from that of nature or more precisely in
competition with that of nature, represents a decisive conceptual contribution of
Sartrean philosophy. Sartre certainly encountered this as formulated by Husserl, but
Sartre makes systematic use of it to define an antinaturalist materialism that is
faithful to the primary vocation of materialism as defined by Lucretius: allowing
liberty to flourish. As much as the notion of nature imposes a sequence during the
course of which the human subject is introduced after the fact into a preexisting
reality, so the notion of the world allows us to think about the subject and the object
as strictly contemporaneous; there is no subject without an object, but neither is
there an object without a subject. Also, the notion of the world suggests that reality
is not either object or subject but the relation of subject and object. We propose to
call this philosophy relationism.
10. It would be interesting, even necessary, to confront the Sartrean analysis of scarcity with
that offered by anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins. While he remains intellectually close to
Sartrethe first chapter of Stone Age Economics (Sahlins 1974) was published in French in
abridged form in Les Temps Modernes; Jean Pouillon published a further text from this collection
in the review LHomme, while the Critique of Dialectical Reason is a constant reference in
Sahlinss (1976) Culture and Practical Reasonit may be equally significant that Sahlinss
objection to assumptions of scarcity in hunter-gatherer societies marks a weakening of the
Sartrean argument.

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Sartrean scarcity can only take on its full meaning in the world; it is totally
removed from the disappointment that the human subject feels before an ungrateful
nature.11 Nature is, in effect, in complete solidarity with this materialism fromthe-outside rejected by Sartre. The dialectic of nature is indeed a theoretical
inanity based on a conceptual confusion between contradiction and conflict; Kant
tried hard to clear up this confusion in his Essai pour introduire le concept de
grandeur ngative by demonstrating that the notion of contradiction only acquires
meaning in the logical, conceptual order. Human history thus has not been shaken by
contradictions; it sets out the opposition of contrary forces.
There is only one materialistically thinkable dialectic. That is the dialectic of the
world. Sartre repeats very clearly: it is because the antiman is the product of man
that matter acquires the power of negative totalization examined above. Such is the
lesson that Sartre invites us to learn.
This lesson from relationism modifies the conception and status of the dialectic as
developed in Marxism, which claims to reconcile historical materialism and dialectical materialism. We can illustrate this by examining the notion of the possible.
Indeed, Marxs criticism depends largely on the demonstration that capitalism allows
the conditions of its own destruction to emerge. The dialectic of nature defines the
possible as separate from the movement of capitalism itself and also from history.
The possible is then unveiled as a potentiality in waiting for its own promised
materialization, when the working class acquires the awareness of its due or what is
ascribed to it, as Lukcs says, through this dual movement of capitalism and history.
The question is then of the possibility of a very Platonic tonality, inscribed as it is in
the landscape of a history completely oriented toward and organized around a logic
of progress. This comprehension of what is possible is largely inspired by the duality
of the subject and the object, since the former comes to occupy the place that
objective conditions have reserved for it at the same time as it responds to their
demands by placing itself in the role that these conditions determine.
Sartre clearly opposes this conception in arguing that the possible can only come to
the world (to the world, not to nature) through human beings who represent, in turn,
their own possibilities, in the sense that either they are not or they do not have a
determined being but are to be, or exist. It is inasmuch as they have to be that these
beings are characterized as absolutely free and responsible. Responsibility and liberty
are inextricably intertwined, in keeping with the relationist presupposition, since
under the jurisdiction of such a presupposition we cannot abstract ourselves from the
state of the world. Sartrean freedom is not at all the liberty of the individual
inscribed in superb isolation, as is often written, but is rather the contrary: a freedom
of the world, which cannot be unaware of the fact that the world also depends on the
individual. It relies on the individual and on other related liberties at the same time
as it is related to the object.

11. This naturalist ontology is at the core of every economic discourse, whether from the point
of view of the formal definition oras we hope to have shown from our critique of Marxist
dialectical materialismfrom the point of view of the substantive definition.

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Sartres Contributions to Antinaturalism, and

the Prolongation of Sartrean Political Economics
Can a Sartrean economics be said to exist, then? The answer is yes, though it largely
remains to be developed. The foregoing discussion gives the means to advance the
Polanyian critique, which having failed to emancipate itself from a presupposed
naturalism continued to promote an economism that, whatever its subtlety, remained
just as pregnant with naturalism as the dominant economic theory. Sartrean
economic principles are, by contrast, clearly antinaturalist: by assuring the primacy
of dialectical reason over analytic reason, they construct a conception of the real
that substitutes the notion of world for that of nature, a process that would go on to
underpin Sartres contention that existentialism is anthropology. One need only
recognize here that human reality is at once self-making and situated. The situation
is not a foil feeding upon human potential, contained in and by an essence; it is the
double of human transcendence, that toward which human transcendence projects
itself. To amputate human reality from the situation would be tantamount to freezing
it in the posture of the inevitably naturalized subject. Sartrean philosophy thus
functions as a lookout, incessantly signaling anthropology for the existential
dimension of the processes it seeks to comprehend.
Within the limits of this conclusion, we may illustrate all the interest of the
Sartrean approach that we have just explained in applying it to a central notion of
the dominant economism, the notion of interest. The notion of world, which
liberates us from the standoff between subject and object and which authorizes the
abandonment of all dualisms, is opportune in that it encapsulates the full menacing
charge that the Sartrean argument levels at economic analysis. After all, doesnt the
latter claim to recreate a world through the autoregulating market (Polanyi
1944)? In order to trigger this charge, we will take the liberty of drawing on the now
classic work of Albert O. Hirschman (1977), The Passions and the Interests, before
falling back on the presentation of the notion of interest in the Critique of Dialectical
Reason (Sartre 2004, 197206).
The doctrine of passions and interests is an eminently modern theory, as may be
grasped in its treatment by Adam Smith. For Smith, the clear and evident interest
of each individual furnishes the principle of a system of natural liberty. Such a
system is directed at a form of public interest not guided by sovereign political
authority but by the invisible hand. This invisible hand is in no way the manifestation
of a divine power but designates the chain of unintentional consequences issuing from
the constituent inclinations of human nature. To bring public interest into being, no
striving on the part of the individual is required; it is naturallyand thus with entire
dependabilitythat the individual pursues the improvement of his condition.
Passions are thus associated with interests, even if it may happen that the two
sometimes fall into opposition, as when the passion for immediate pleasure
contradicts the desire to improve our condition. Crucial here, however, is that
interest comes to be substituted for the Hobbesian peace imposed by the sovereign.
And this feature endures in the contemporary conception of interest, which is in
effect reputed to be apolitical. The interest of everyone lies in putting aside partisan

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differences. Further, the system in which these interests have free run exerts an
apolitical influence on politics, urging partisans to submit their choices to the verdict
of the market,12 all of which presupposes that problems can be negotiated, that
everything is for sale, and thus that all interests can be mobilized.
These few remarks offer a good example of the naturalization of interest under the
cover of analytical reason, in whose name economic science professes to occupy the
entire field of social science, laying claim to the title of an exact science. In
reestablishing the classic relation of the subject with nature, economic science
gives free run to the diligent diastases of representation, according to the famous
image evoked by Sartre in his text on Husserlian intentionality.
The field of economics, invented in the 18th century, did not discover a
continent; instead it built one from scratch, or, rather, organized one,
conquered it, and colonized it. To quote Michel Callons powerful phrase, it
is the economic discipline that frames and shapes the economy as an entity:
without economics, no economy. Contrary to the robinsonades of the 18th
century, and just as Karl Polanyi and later Marshal Sahlins had so skillfully
shown, man is not born an economist, he becomes one. On condition,
however, that he is surrounded by enough instruments and enough calculative devices to render otherwise imperceptible differences visible and
readable. To practice economics is not to reveal the anthropological essence
of humanity, it is to organise in a certain way something elusive. (Latour and
Lpinay 2009, 14)
Against this openly self-celebratory use of analytical reason by economic science
Sartre (2004, 197) opposes the genealogical dismantling of the notion of interest via
the demanding precepts of dialectical reason: Interest is being-wholly-outsideoneself-in-a-thing in so far as it conditions praxis as a categorical imperative.
Interest is thus a conditioned praxis, in complete exteriority; it can only take on the
guise of nature under the conditions of a prior moralization. Interest represents a
peculiar type of relationship (not even a disposition) between man and thing in a
given social field (in no way a natural disposition)a relationship that finds its fullest
expression in the concept of real property but that is visible in any context where
men live among an ensemble of material objects that impose their techniques
upon them.
Without rehearsing the whole Sartrean argument here, it will suffice to note that
the interested individual is, in truth, an impoverished individual, subject to the
conditioning of worked materialitythe alienated objectivisation of individual and
collective praxisand a categoric imperative of worked materiality, at best. There
can be no conditioning without moralization. Against ordinary sociological reasoning,
one must protest that social conditioning cannot be elevated to the level of
sociological law but, crucially, must be given sustained critical attention and must
not be merely employed as a simple explanatory principle if one is to avoid giving
12. It might be useful to pursue this point in reference to the theme of the market as the place
of veridiction, as developed by Michel Foucault (2008) in his courses at the Collge de France
(19789).

SARTREAN ECONOMICS

49

oneself up to the diktat of analytical reason. We can thus underline how the vigor of
this diktat is renewed and reinforced by the impact of current economic sciencea
science whose power lies not in its scientism but in its tenfold greater capacity to win
its scientism credence.

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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful for helpful comments from the anonymous referees. This
article benefited from the assistance of the French National Research Agency (ANR).
(See reference number ANR-09-JCJC-132-01, The CSR: Institutional transition or
return of paternalism?)

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