Book: Critique of Dialectical Reason

Overview
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) rethinks Marxism through an existential lens, grounding historical intelligibility in human praxis rather than in supra-human laws. Volume I, subtitled Theory of Practical Ensembles, studies how individuals, acting in scarcity and through matter shaped by past actions, generate social forms that both enable and constrain them. It follows his methodological preface, Search for a Method, and argues for a dialectic immanent to history and practice, not to nature. Freedom remains central, but it is always situated within material, social, and historical fields that it did not choose.

Method and Core Thesis
Dialectical reason names the intelligibility of practices as they totalize across time: individuals pursue projects, encounter others’ projects, and their combined actions produce unintended consequences that transform the field of action. Sartre denies that nature itself is dialectical; the dialectic arises from human activity working upon and through a shaped environment. Scarcity is the basal condition that sets groups in competition, underwrites conflict, and makes social mediation necessary. The method is progressive-regressive: one regresses from present structures to their genesis in past praxis, then progresses by reconstructing how they condition new actions.

Praxis and the Practico-Inert
Praxis is intentional activity oriented by ends, undertaken by embodied agents. Its results sediment into the practico-inert: tools, institutions, and material arrangements that bear the inertia of past projects. The practico-inert is neither mere matter nor pure subjectivity; it is worked matter that pushes back, canalizing freedom, feeding back counter-finalities, outcomes nobody intended yet everyone must endure. Market dynamics, logistical systems, or bureaucratic routines exemplify this field where yesterday’s actions become today’s pressure and tomorrow’s constraints.

Seriality and Alienation
Under conditions of scarcity and mediated sociality, individuals often coexist as a series: dispersed agents aligned by the same object or situation without direct interior unity. The canonical image is the bus queue, where each waits alone-together, coordinated by an inert structure (the schedule, the stop) rather than by common deliberation. Seriality is alienated sociality; it produces anonymity, impotence, and a susceptibility to manipulation, since each is interchangeable within a pattern fixed by the practico-inert.

Groups, Oath, and Institution
Moments of rupture yield the group-in-fusion: dispersed individuals fuse into a collective that acts in common, negating serial impotence. Through the oath, a pledge of reciprocal commitment, the group fights dispersion, forging fraternity that is shadowed by terror, the pressure to enforce fidelity lest the group collapse back into seriality. Over time, the fused group stabilizes as organization, then hardens into institution; roles formalize, rules proliferate, and the practico-inert reasserts itself as bureaucracy. The very success of collective action tends to turn living praxis into dead structure, demanding renewed praxis to resist ossification.

History and Totalization
History is a moving totalization without final totality. There is no telos guaranteed in advance; the sense of historical processes emerges from successive syntheses of praxis under constraint. Class struggle remains central, but Sartre stresses contingency, multiplicity of temporalities, and the interplay between local projects and global structures. Totalization names the ongoing, reversible process by which scattered practices become intelligible as a whole, only to be reopened by new actions, crises, and inventions.

Significance
The Critique preserves existential freedom within a materially rigorous account of society, challenging deterministic or naturalized dialectics. It explains how collective agents arise, act, and decay; why institutions both enable and stifle; and how unintended consequences shape futures no one chose. Its lexicon, practico-inert, seriality, group-in-fusion, counter-finality, totalization, equips a non-teleological, conflictual understanding of modern life. The result is a demanding synthesis: Marxism without metaphysical guarantees and existentialism without solipsism, anchored in the concrete mediations through which people make and are made by history.