> ***** Jean-Paul Sartre: Solitary Man in a Hostile Universe
>
> from Marxism. For Marx, though ambiguous in many ways, was
> unambiguous in his rejection of the picture of mankind as divided
> into individualistic and competing atoms. Marx believed in community
> or human togetherness as the natural condition of man. All Sartre's
> talk about pledges and political societies being held together by
> Terror is the antithesis of Marxism.
Huh? Marx believed no such thing. There's nothing "natural" about human beings, or individualism, or scarcity, but there is an objective logic to the thing, called natural history. Sartre's scarcity (the violence of tool-using societies) is his specific term for natural history. It has its peccadilloes and weak points -- among other problems, he doesn't distinguish accumulation from trading-flows -- but it's not Hume staple-gunned to Hobbes, either.
> not only a question of language, although Sartre's talk of "Liberty"
> as "Terror" and "Terror" as "Fraternity" might come straight from a
> speech by Robespierre. It is the basic elements of the theory which
> belong to pre-Hegelian thought. For Sartre is putting forward a
> doctrine of social covenant which is virtually identical with that of
> the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
Hardly. Sartre was a revolutionary thinker and philosopher, who was attacking Stalinist orthodoxy from within, as it were (Robespierre as a code word for Lenin). Scarcity and the Other are mediated by the practico-inert, the Hollywood unconscious of monopoly capitalism; the flip side of the power of the Gaze is the demographic opacity of bodies, a.k.a. the Third World revolutions Sartre defended so strongly.
-- Dennis