JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Politics325remains abstract. Obviously everything would be simpler in a transcendental, idealistdialectic: the movement of integration by which every organism contains and dominatesits inorganic pluralities would be presented as transforming itself, at the level of socialplurality, into an integration of individuals into an organic totality. Thus the groupwould function as a hyper-organism in relation to individual organisms. This organicistidealism is often to be seen re-emerging as a social model of conservative thought(under the Restoration, it was opposed to liberal atomism; after 1860, it tried todissolve class formations into a national solidarity). But it would be a mistake toreduce the organicist illusion to the role of a reactionary theory. Indeed, it is obviousthat the organic character of the group—its biological unity—reveals itself as aparticular moment of the investigation. As we approach the third stage of the dialecticalinvestigation, we can describe the organic structure as above all the illusory, immediateappearance of the group as it produces itself in and against the practico-inert field.In two remarkable works 9 Marc Bloch has shown how, in and even before thetwelfth century, the nobility, the bourgeoisie and the serfs— to mention only thesethree classes—existed de facto if not de jure. In our terminology we would describethem as collectives. But the repeated efforts of rich bourgeois, as individuals, tointegrate themselves into the noble class caused this class to close up: it moved froma de facto statute to a de jure one. Through a common undertaking, it imposed draconianconditions on anyone wishing to enter knighthood, with the result that this mediatinginstitution between the generations became a selective organ. But this also conditionedthe class consciousness of the serfs. Prior to the juridical unification of the nobility,every serf had regarded his situation as an individual destiny, and lived it as anensemble of human relations with a family of landowners, in other words, as anaccident. But by positing itself for itself; the nobility ipso facto constituted serfdom asa juridical institution and showed the serfs their interchangeability, their commonimpotence and their common interests. This revelation was one of the factors ofpeasant revolts in later centuries.The point of this example is simply to show how, in the movement of History, anexploiting class, by tightening its bonds against an enemy and by becoming aware ofitself as a unity of individuals in solidarity, shows the exploited classes their materialbeing as a collective and as a point of departure for a constant effort to establish livedbonds of solidarity between its members. There is nothing surprising about this: inthis inert quasi-totality, constantly swept by great movements of counter-finality, thehistorical collectivity, the dialectical law, is at work: the constitution of a group (on thebasis, of course, of real, material conditions) as an ensemble of solidarities has thedialectical consequence of making it the negation of the rest of the social field, and, as