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Sartre: The uses and abuses of

anthropology and sociology
a
Howard Davies
a
University of North London
Published online: 25 Apr 2008.

To cite this article: Howard Davies (1997) Sartre: The uses and abuses of anthropology and
sociology, Modern & Contemporary France, 5:4, 433-444, DOI: 10.1080/09639489708456397

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 Modern & Contemporary France (1997), 5(4), 433-444

Sartre: the uses and abuses of

anthropology and sociology
HOWARD DAVIES
University of North London
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Abstract
Sartre's 'synthetic anthropology' was a supra-disciplinary practice with a
revolutionary vocation; it had little tolerance of established academic
disciplines, regarding them in general as in need of legitimisation and
recasting by phenomenology. His view of academic institutions was corre-
spondingly ambivalent. Scientificity, he asserted, was to be predicated on
a critical reflexivity; hence his admiration for the subversive ethnographic
fieldwork practised by Leiris and his own predilection for subverting the
theories of primitive mentality developed by Lévy-Bruhl. His preference for
anthropology over sociology reinforced his anti-Durkheimian position,
although his enthusiasm waned as anthropology assumed a strong aca-
demicist character in the work of Lévi-Strauss. Sartre's vast study of
Flaubert illustrates his debt to ethnography and shows how his sociology
was always in the last analysis a sociology of literature; in it may also be
found confirmation of the powerful role played in his thought by the
Maussian theory of the gift.

At first sight, an assessment of the relationship between anthropology and

sociology requires a clear view of the changing contours of each discipline and
a readiness to circumscribe adjacent bodies of knowledge. To trace it as it was
observed by Sartre, however, is to introduce into its complexity a point of
view—or more emphatically, a locus of vision—which dramatically transforms
the debate. So much so that certain assumptions are best dispelled at the outset:
namely, that anthropology and sociology are discrete discourses consistently
designated, that they stand in an objective relationship one with the other, and
that the figure of Sartre occupies the position of even-handed commentator. Such
assumptions work to render viable the notion of discipline and the activity of
circumscription, both of which are systematically challenged by the Sartrean
project. There is little to be gained from mapping Sartre's preoccupations against
the segmented knowledge base of the postwar French university. Perhaps his
greatest achievement—and his most sustained perturbation—is the crisis into

0963-9489/97/040433-12 © 1997 Association for the Study of Modern & Contemporary France
 434 H. DAVIES

which he, with others, drew the prevailing notion of academic discipline,
destabilising the intellectual field so decisively that the definitions and valuations
of the different social sciences ebbed and flowed accordingly. What follows is
therefore a tour d'horizon of the theoretical spaces caught up within the Sartrean
vortex; to some extent chronological, it dwells briefly on the thinkers (for Sartre
attributed thought to persons and transacted with them accordingly) who inhab-
ited them.
Discipline, for Sartre, was something which operated at the most personal
level. Activity rather than knowledge, it had an existential value and was the
manifestation of a vocation identifiable in his earliest years. In the circumstances
of the Second World War, it led to the abandonment of an academic career in
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favour of that of writer—at once specialist, populist, polemical and professional;

it celebrated an identification with Zola and a contract with himself which
prioritised productivity: nulla dies sine linea. Sartre had established by then that
phenomenology would be the vehicle of his vocation; his discipline required
thereafter that the synthetic be asserted over the analytic and that accession to
knowledge be secured at the expense of prevailing delimitations of the known.
Reversals of perspective, defamiliarisations, dramatic promotions of the
whole over the sum of its parts, these became the order of the day—most
explicitly in 1945, with the founding of Les Temps Modernes and its commit-
ment to a synthetic anthropology. For Sartre, the campaign against the atomistic
and the bourgeois required an anti-academic stance and the disciplined pursuit
of a revolutionary supra-disciplinarity. Hence the simultaneous excursions into
different media and registers—novel, treatise, play, journalism, film, preface,
radio—and the deliberated interruptions and incompletions which marked his
trajectory.
The engagement of 1945 thus derived from a prior commitment already
consecrated by the academy—the commitment to philosophy; philosophy in turn
had, in the Ecole Normale, become the elective expression of Sartre's discipline.
It is important to hold the notion of discipline in its quasi-theological sense, that
of exercice spirituel, for it helped make of Sartre a philosopher who was
persuaded that philosophy could not be merely a discipline among others; rather,
it was the movement of inquiry and doubt that would subsequently issue
epistemological licences to particular disciplines, including the natural and social
sciences, but which would never be reducible to them. Philosophy was the alma
mater, the matrix; the questions raised by intellectual practices such as anthro-
pology and sociology were questions of legitimacy and usefulness.
In consequence of this, anthropologie in the Sartrean sense represented a
phenomenologically informed programme of socio-political transformation. It
was not at all coterminous with the anthropologie which Lévi-Strauss was to
propose as the successor to Maussian ethnologie; indeed, it was precisely to
distinguish his own work from it that Sartre chose often to refer to Lévi-Strauss
as a sociologue (I shall mention a further reason in due course). The trajectories
of Lévi-Strauss and Sartre were, in respect of their attitudes to consecrated
bodies of knowledge, increasingly and spectacularly divergent: while the former
 SARTRE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 435

applied himself—and ultimately won academic acclaim for so doing—to the

construction of a discipline by processes of détournement and accretion, the
latter strove to dissolve disciplines either by incorporation into his supra-disci-
plinary project or (as in the critically important case of linguistics) by summary
dismissal. The events of May 1968, which led Les Temps Modernes under Gorz
to call for the destruction of the higher education system, caused Lévi-Strauss
defiantly to parade his discipline within the very space which apparently so
threatened its survival:
Je me suis promené dans la Sorbonne occupée. Avec un regard ethnographique [...] Pour
moi, mai 68 a représenté la descente d'une marche supplémentaire dans l'escalier d'une
dégradation universitaire commencée depuis longtemps.1
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The image of Lévi-Strauss climbing the stairway to institutional security, as

Sartre plunged euphorically past him into the fallen amphitheatres of the
Sorbonne, is an eloquent one. To say, however, that Sartre's philosophical
commitment was essentially anti-academic is not to suggest that for four decades
his writings seethed with overt hostility to the academy. This was not the case.
If one had to nominate the bourgeois institution against which Sartre railed most
consistently and subverted on a day-to-day basis, it would be the family. The
education system from which he derived so much, on the contrary, was
perceived initially as the very agency which furnished him with his passport to
the extra-familial. Subsequently, it remained the object of his ambivalent
contemplation—vital and liberating insofar as it gave him the means to pursue
the questions which it prompted and which he assumed as his, but conservative
and restrictive inasmuch as it set limits to the intellectual space in which answers
might be sought. The 40 years that separate his failure to pass the agrégation in
1928 and the May events offer not the history of a deepening resentment directed
at the university, but the maturing of a project conceived within its walls and
brought to fruition beyond them; only outside the ivory towers could existential-
ism flourish in the way that it did, Marxism inflect its evolution, and totalisation
become the medium and substance of all inquiry.
When, in 1968, Sartre joined the occupation, he nevertheless did so armed
with an analysis of the social function of the university—of, on the one hand,
its authoritarian practices and its role in the reproduction of an elitist bourgeois
ideology, and, on the other, its increasing inadequacy to the skilled labour needs
of the capitalist economy and its inability to operate as a mass system of higher
education. Precisely because he did not work within its walls or within its
disciplines, he was able to regard its dire contradictions with the measure of
recognition and detachment consistent with his own debt to it, with the demands
being made of it by the students whose struggle he supported and with its likely
subsequent transformation by government. This sociological analysis was cer-
tainly Sartrean, insofar as it was consistent with the theoretical positions of the
Critique de la raison dialectique. Yet it was not, in detail, his own; it is
important to note that it derived from Gorz, whose political editorship of Les
Temps Modernes had prompted the publication of a number of articles on the
 436 H. DAVIES

sociology and political economy of higher education in the years preceding

1968.
Sartre himself, undertaking an editorial function complementary to that of
Gorz, made no claim to be the sociologist of the May events. He was more
directly preoccupied in 1968 with Vietnam and Czechoslovakia than with home
affairs; this was to be expected, for he displayed a perpetual option for the
extra-mural, a centrifugality which bore him away from the parochial and the
domestic. His driving intuition was that all was knowable, even if he as
would-be knower could never drive that far. This galloping pursuit of total
knowability was nevertheless subject to a controlling principle—that the knower
must be incorporated into the field of knowledge. It was this protocol which in
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Sartre's work operated paradoxically in two respects: it ensured that the sum of
knowledge was never complete, since the dialectic of the knower and the known
constantly redefined both and threw into question whatever boundaries were
provisionally set between them; it ensured too that the insistent reference
outwards incorporated moments of reflexivity.
It followed that an essential element of Sartre's knowledge of sociology was
his sociology of himself. This was duly undertaken in Les Mots, but in the modes
of existential self-analysis, literary pastiche and political autocritique rather than
in the register of Durkheimian social theory. As happens ever more concretely
in the Sartrean narrative—fictional or theoretical—the social backdrop is incar-
nate in the hero and fuels the anagnoresis: here, in the network of seductions and
mutual admirations enwrapping the Wunderkind of the rue Le Goff erupts the
discovery of his ugliness and of his class position. Society is the Other in all its
manifestations, against and with which the subject seeks, gains and loses
definition. In this narrative, empathy is highly active, for both conflict and
conviviality require that the members of the family group have the capacity to
comprehend those positions which they do not occupy. In Les Mots, it signals
both potential security and potential vulnerability, placing all of the actors in
question. In the Durkheimian scheme of things, however, the same empathy—in
the view of Sartre—could lead only to the projection and imposition of
idiosyncratic features thereby established as supposed norms. 'Nous reconnais-
sons cette attitude', he had noted in 1943, picking up again methodological
objections to Durkheim entertained as early as 1927, 'le sujet établit une loi par
induction sur l'observation empirique des autres hommes et puis il use d'un
raisonnement analogique pour se placer lui-même sous la loi qu'il vient d'établir.
C'est l'attitude du sociologue'.2 Empathy, when thus misdirected by scientistic
purpose—even if it did not go so far as to locate the observer wholly outside the
field of observation—had two negative consequences: it placed reflexivity out of
reach and established a consensus which was more wished for than real. 'Est-ce
un hasard', Sartre continued, 'si ces sociologues, les Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl,
Bougie, sont ceux qui, vers la fin du siècle dernier, ont vainement tenté de jeter
les bases d'une morale laïque?' The battle lines were here clearly drawn: it was
in seeking to forge a sociology capable of yielding an ethic and hoping thereby
 SARTRE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 437

to derive philosophy from science, that Durkheim inevitably fell foul of Sartre's
own vigorous preference for the opposite position.
La Sociologie de Durkheim est morte: les faits sociaux ne sont pas des choses, ils ont
des significations et, comme tels, ils renvoient à l'être par qui les significations viennent
au monde, à l'homme, qui ne saurait à la fois être savant et objet de science.3
Much more attractive to Sartre than Durkheim was the work of Lévy-Bruhl,
despite the fact of the guilt by association noted above. Here was a philosopher
(not a sociologist) who regarded consideration of other cultures as the necessary
precondition of all worthwhile work in ethics and who thus moved towards
anthropology. Was this, then, an anticipation of the intuition for which Bataille
was commended by Sartre in 1943, the reincorporation into sociology and
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anthropology of the existential and of the encounter with the cultural Other? Not
directly so, for Lévy-Bruhl fell far short of what was required: his theorisation
of the mentalité primitive was learned but bookish, unnourished by fieldwork,
schematic at best; at worst, it was a patronising and revealing denial of logicality
to those cultures caught at a distance in the imperialist gaze. The powerful twist
given by Sartre to this sadly inventive speculation was, however, to prove of
paramount importance in the gradual shaping of his programme. In 1960 Simone
de Beauvoir recalled that at the beginning of the 1930s Sartre 'recensait avec
soin toutes les pensées prélogiques qui foisonnent dans notre monde civilisé'.4
What did this sudden burst of local fieldwork represent? Many things: the fertile
ground for philosophically motivated observation which would be illuminated
subsequently by phenomenology; evidence of a strong conviction that magic
begins at home; a firm decision to reverse the telescope and to seek in Paris,
alleged city of light, manifestations of that which had been formally displaced
to 'dark' continents. When the Sartre of the 1960s observed that 'le tiers monde
commence en banlieue', his remark was of course a commentary on the
sociology of postwar urban France, but it was also informed by, and was a
restatement of, the particular skew given to the work of Lévy-Bruhl.
Parallel programmes of subversion were pursued by Breton and by Bataille
and perhaps the greatest benefit accruing to Sartre from the latter's Collège de
Sociologie was his long admiration for Leiris. Leiris was to work for many years
in the editorial team of Les Temps Modernes, and in bringing to the review the
work of such writers and anthropologists as Césaire and Métraux, he helped
create the climate which allowed Pouillon to maintain anthropological debate at
or near the forefront of attention.5 In Sartre's estimation, Leiris was exemplary
by virtue of the extent to which, in L'Afrique fantôme, ethnographic method was
subverted by its inability to write out of its observations the anxieties and
longings of the observer. Leiris' programmatic L'Ethnographe devant le colo-
nialisme was published in August 1950: a series of injunctions calculated to shift
the position of the ethnographer from devant to contre, from understander to
transformer, it was wholly consistent with the political perspectives within which
the engagement of Les Temps Modernes was developing. It reinforced the
intuitions which Sartre had derived from Lévy-Bruhl and looked forward to the
 438 H. DAVIES

time when ethnographers from the colonised societies would be able to conduct
fieldwork in France.
Sartre's high valuation of studies which problematically foregrounded alterity,
as against those which failed to problematise immanence, predisposed him to
favour anthropology against sociology. The quality of example given by Leiris,
a radical and subversive ethnographer who was also an autobiographer and a
littéraire, confirmed this. It should be noted that no sociologist associated with
Les Temps Modernes ever fulfilled this role or acceded to this preeminence:
those who did figure were introduced by other editorial agencies—Crozier by
Merleau-Ponty, Michel and Texier by Beauvoir, others much later by Gorz. The
American sociologists (Wright Mills, Whyte, Spectorsky, Riesman, Glazer and
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Denney) who featured in the late 1950s, at the time when Sartre was pondering
Questions de méthode, were voices of a foreign culture which could be heard as
anthropologists. Those thinkers, meanwhile, who explicitly debated the social
with Sartre—writers such as Lefort—were not academic sociologists. This
significant absence is explained in large measure by the fact that, at least in the
early days of the review, it was literature which was called upon to fulfil the
function of existential sociology. Literature was the all-important micro-social
configuration of writer and reader which, as a consequence of the dévoilement
of the world undertaken in the fiction, would rehearse macro-social transforma-
tions and prefigure the socialist revolution. A committed sociology would thus
be embodied in the literary material which Les Temps Modernes intended to
promote. In the event, the material was perhaps too eclectic; of tighter focus, but
unfortunately shorter life, was the series of récits de vie published in the first ten
years—vie(s) d'une sinistrée, d'un juif, d'un bourgeois français/magistrat isré-
alite, d'un Allemand, d'un légionnaire, d'une prostituée, d'un Français SS, d'un
repris-de-justice, d'un prêtre.
Two sociologists nevertheless did impinge on Sartre's situation in respect of
anthropology and sociology. Each constituted a category of his own. Aron,
briefly on the editorial board of the review, soon withdrew to a distance at which
he and Sartre were able to shelve their early intimacy and avoid substantive
debate. It is an irony of history that Aron should have preceded Sartre at the
Institut Français in Berlin in the 1930s and been the harbinger of phenomenol-
ogy, for it was Husserl and Heidegger who enabled Sartre to announce the death
of Durkheimian sociology and to regard Aron as a disciplinary as well as a
political conservative. The rivalry of Bourdieu followed a different trajectory:
seemingly barely noticed by Sartre, Bourdieu moved from early phenomenolog-
ical studies of Algeria, by way of influential contributions to the sociology of
higher education in the pre-1968 years, to expositions of praxeology, all within
the pages of Les Temps Modernes. The last-mentioned essay, while vying with
Sartre on Sartre's chosen ground—the study of Flaubert—hoped to transcend the
positions taken up in Questions de méthode. Bourdieu's bid for supremacy
culminated, by proxy, in Boschetti's study of the accumulation of intellectual
capital by Les Temps Modernes.6
 SARTRE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 439

I have indicated that the qualitative distinction between anthropology (as

Sartre first understood it, that is to say, as the ethnography of foreign social
groups) and sociology was informed by phenomenology: where there was
tangible existential motivation and outcome, as in Leiris' problematisation of
himself between Dakar and Djibouti, then the enterprise's intellectual, moral and
political validity survived and the researcher was not abruptly consigned to the
category of sociologist. The distinction was one of object of study and of method
and was determined by the criterion of reflexivity. The question of whether the
social object of study was at home or abroad had less importance; more crucial
was whether the observer's inherence and problematisation in the observed,
either as native or as stranger, were deemed material to the study or edited out
of it. In this respect, there was little to distinguish Sartre in Naples from
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Roquentin in Bouville. Bougie (an eminent authority on the Indian caste system),
Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl and Mauss, on the other hand, stood branded as sociolo-
gists. Leiris, by virtue of his fieldwork, undertaken in one sense as much in Paris
as in Africa, entered the superior category, the one in which Sartre had also
implicitly located himself by tracking the Parisian manifestations of the menta-
lité primitive. One could cite James Agee in the United States, Carlo Levi and
Elio Vitorini in Italy, as equally implicated writers who, in the first flush of
postwar existentialism, helped Les Temps Modernes establish itself as the
vehicle of a synthetic anthropology.
In the history of Sartrean definitions, however, the Second World War came
as a caesura. The existence or otherwise of fieldwork in the curriculum vitae of
a social scientist came thereafter to lose its persuasive value as far as Sartre was
concerned. To be sure, the Brazilian fieldwork undertaken by Lévi-Strauss
enjoyed a relative recency in 1945 and was one among other factors (notably,
friendship and a readiness to relocate Freud in an apparently materialist dis-
course) which brought him close to Les Temps Modernes. The recency, however,
quickly faded. Moreover, the discipline which he championed went on to
establish fieldwork as a necessary professional credential and imposed upon it
protocols and guidelines which drew it into the positivist ethos of academia.
Thereafter, reflexivity was permitted only in specifically licensed spaces such as
the confidential Tristes Tropiques, in which literary merit might be regarded as
the compensatory legitimation. Other ethnographers were not so licenced: one
thinks of the professional resistance to the posthumous publication of Métraux's
memoirs.
More importantly, the war itself acted on Sartre in such a way as to further
energise the quest for supra-disciplinarity and to allow the matricial frame of
philosophy to be reconfigured with greater focus. I have mentioned already his
sad and early discovery of ugliness and his later delight in the scope and power
of phenomenology, without pursuing in what ways they were evidently linked.
Two further revelations were ascribed by Sartre to the phoney war period and
to his mobilisation—those of sociality and of historicity; by these he meant the
rubbing of male shoulders in Alsace and the sense of having been caught up in
a series of anguishing events far exceeding his powers to determine. These, and
 440 H. DAVIES

the concomitant participant observation of a seemingly doomed group of men

kicking their heels in an already foreign France, were worked through in
Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre.
What the Carnets revealed of greater importance in the light of Sartre's
survival was his avid reading, at the front, of Emil Ludwig's biography of Kaiser
Wilhelm. This it was which gave force and direction to the project of the
existential biography and autobiography, allowing the individual to be written as
a trajectory plotted between the particular and the universal, the micro-and
macro-social, the determinatory and the purposive, the physical and the consci-
ential. Hence the massive charge given after the war to the notion of situation
and Sartre's intense intuition of the subject as that which embodies social, as
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well as psychological and ontological, contradictions. Hence too the crystallis-

ation of the conundrum famously flung in the face of 'lazy Marxists' in
Questions de méthode: 'Valéry est un intellectuel petit-bourgeois, cela ne fait pas
de doute. Mais tout intellectuel petit-bourgeois n'est pas Valéry'.7 The long
series of probes undertaken into a variety of projets fondamentaux, beginning
with Baudelaire and the Réflexions sur la question juive, proceeding through
Saint Genet and Les Mots by way of various essays on the poets of négritude,
on Mallarmé, Tintoretto and Lumumba, together with the Scénario Freud, and
culminating in L'Idiot de la famille, undoubtedly gained in sociological texture
and depth as it proceeded. This may clearly be seen to be the case if one
compares the slender figure of Baudelaire with that of Flaubert, étoffé in his very
person by social, political, economic and ideological history; or again, when one
laments the lack of sociological substance in the Réflexions sur la question juive.
On the other hand, while the sociological was acquired progressively as Sartre
himself discovered the weight of social reality, the anthropological had been
present, as I have indicated, since the 1930s. True, the existential biographies
gradually took on references to exotic cultural phenomena as Les Temps
Modernes began to familiarise Sartre with the rites of voodoo, but Leiris' zar
and Métraux's loa, possessors of the soul, were ushered into the theoretical
framework already established by the influence of Lévy-Bruhl. The same
framework allowed Sartre to denounce the French as sauvages at the height of
the Algerian War and to pillory as Grands Sorciers de Gaulle and Lacan, both
in his view past-masters in colonisation. Lévy-Bruhl thus unwittingly provided
Sartre with a theoretical apparatus which could take its source as object of study.
I reiterate this point because of its importance: Sartre's apparent accession to the
sociological in the postwar period and his ultimate elaboration of an existential
Marxism took as their platform a previous fréquentation of the sociological, one
come upon from quite another direction—from a subversion of Lévy-Bruhlian
anthropology.
Insofar as he also displayed a commitment to the elaboration of an ethic,
Lévy-Bruhl constituted a key element in the continuity of Sartre's thought
between the prewar and the postwar periods. In this respect, he was joined by
Mauss, who, perhaps by virtue of the influence of Leiris, also escaped the
strictures addressed to Durkheim and whose contribution to Sartre, directly or
 SARTRE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 441

indirectly, was substantial. It is not clear when Sartre read the major texts of
Mauss, notably the Essai sur le don, but their influence can safely be said to date
from before Lévi-Strauss' controversial re-edition of them in 1950. By that time,
considerations of the economy and the phenomenology of giving had already
informed the Cahiers pour une morale in 1947/8, from whence they would make
their way into Saint Genet and into Le Diable et le Bon Dieu in the early 1950s.
The importance of this incorporation should not be underestimated. Not only was
the practice of exchange the required object of study of those who presumed to
overthrow regimes based on appropriation, it also posited the viability of an ethic
based on reciprocity and suggested the possibility of systems of social interac-
tion from which the vicious cycles of spiritual possession and material disposses-
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sion might be purged. Sartre, who was generous to a fault, who bestowed literary
patronage with political deliberation, also required of himself sufficient
reflexivity to know the contradictions and the temptations experienced by those
who are able to give more than the recipient can give in return. He was thus able
to give an existential dimension to the economic as much as he had to the
sociological.
It might be said to have been Mauss, through the Essai sur le don, who
brought Sartre to the threshold of the 1950s, that is to say, to the point at which
he abandoned the existentialist ethic in the face of the realisation that an ethic
was possible only when the necessary political and economic preconditions had
been secured. This ushered in the moment of fellow-travelling and of militant
anti-anti-communism, soon to be terminated at the time of the repossession of
Hungary by the Soviets in 1956. It heralded, too, the existential psychoanalysis
of himself which located his origins both in the ideological frame of the
Schweitzer household and—for by this time Pontalis had made of Freud an even
more serious interlocutor—in the nexus of founding transactions inscribed in the
process of weaning. Finally, it confirmed the intuitions of counter-productivity
which would in due course yield the Critique de la raison dialectique. The
Sartrean quest became a quest for a world which would allow non-agonistic
transactions and in which persons would not be treated as données. That world
was to derive from this one—hence the pressing need for a revolutionary
anthropologie historique et structurelle, one which would comprehend, in
Jaspers' sense of Verstehen, the subject's experience insofar as it is shaped by
the Other as well as by its ability to become other than it is.
The project crystallised, in response to promptings by Pontalis and Garaudy
in 1954 and 1956, in what might be called the re-convocation of Flaubert, for
whom Sartre's ambivalent regard was already well established. It surfaced in
Questions de méthode, where the elaboration of the progressive-regressive
method confirmed that there would be no surrender to a discipline-bound view
of knowledge and that the motivation remained synthetic and the ambition
totalising. It then continued throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, with the
first volumes appearing in 1971 and 1972. While it is perhaps hard to read
L'Idiot de la famille outside the university, it is impossible to assign to the study
a disciplinary locus within it. L'Idiot de la famille works quite evidently against
 442 H. DAVIES

the university; it amasses beyond what the academy regards as realistic limits
and has no regard for circumscriptions of intellectual competence; it is clam-
orously indiscreet and indiscrete.
From the point of view of its investment in anthropology and sociology, its
value is considerable, for it demonstrates both what they became for Sartre and
what he became as a result of his association with them. In it may be discerned
evidence of the phases of Sartre's thought insufficiently stressed in this broad
survey—those which follow the correction of Lévy-Bruhl and the deployment of
Mauss in the ultimately abandoned attempt to formulate an existentialist ethic.
They are easily listed: the decisive break with the politics of the PCF and with
Stalinism; the enthusiastic interest in the PCI and in the Cuban revolution; the
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support for the FLN and for other movements of national liberation; the
thematisation of the structures of counter-productivity in the Critique de la
raison dialectique. More specifically, the sponsorship of Debray's activities in
Latin America, activities which might be described, in terms of the mission of
Les Temps Modernes, as synthetic anthropological fieldwork; the space given to
Memmi as sociologist of the colonised; and finally, the intermittent jousting with
Lévi-Strauss. This last is worth amplifying briefly. Spurred on by the insistent
probing of Pouillon, both parties remained cognizant of the extent to which each
other's work impinged on his own; before eventually losing patience, each
nudged the other towards a debate, whether by attempted take-overs of
conceptual trade marks {authenticité, réciprocité, synthèse, compréhension, dial-
ectique), by binarily opposed definitions (hot and cold history, single and
multiple intelligibilities) or by combinations of the two (structure structurelle,
structure structurale). Sartre's interview with the editors of Cahiers de philoso-
phie in 1966, given at a time when the writing of L'Idiot de la famille had the
highest priority, reiterated the positions worked out in his tractations with the
structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. Anthropology, he maintained, had no room for the
individual subject and could not handle problems of social historicity; it studied
human reality from without and in consequence had no access to truth. Sartre's
view was that structure became intelligible only when regarded as pratico-inerte
and that anthropological knowledge could be useful only if taken up in synthetic
comprehension. L'Idiot de la famille, in this perspective, was to achieve
demonstrably all that structuralist anthropology could not.
It was for this reason that the young Flaubert, seen in terms of his relation-
ships with his schoolfellows, was presented as a magician, defensively transmut-
ing his inferiority and his status as object of mockery into the role of subtle and
influential fool who sustained his position by force of scorn; colonised, he found
freedom in his imagination. For the description of this son of a dominating
father, Sartre enlisted the support of the anthropologist and psychoanalyst
Mannoni, both to designate as dependence complex the relationship which
bound Gustave to his father and to categorise as dénégations what previously
would have been classified as mauvaise foi. When Sartre noted that i a passivité
constituée de Flaubert le rapproche de la condition coloniale',8 he ascribed this
passivity to the quality of the linguistic transactions undertaken within the
 SARTRE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 443

economy of the Flaubert family—they were one-way. Gustave's passivity

derived from, and was expressed in, his attitude to language: he could not tell
magic from meaning, his captivation by words prevented their purposeful
deployment. In Sartre's view, the source of this disability lay in the belief that
language was a non-reciprocated gift from parent to child. Without reciprocity,
what Sartre referred to as 'le gage du Vrai'9 was lacking. Reciprocity in turn,
said Sartre, motioning towards the work of Mead, derived from maternal love:
Pour Gustave, le langage demeure l'instrument principal mais, faute d'avoir été initié dès
le berceau aux innombrables figures de l'échange, une distance infime et infranchissable
le séparera toujours de ses interlocuteurs; il tient son pathos pour incommunicable et,
surtout, il ignore que toute parole est un droit sur l'Autre, que toute phrase, même
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purement informative, s'insère comme question, solicitation, commandement, accepta-

tion, refus, etc., dans l'interminable conversation que les hommes poursuivent depuis des
millénaires.10

The young Flaubert, having failed to accede to the symbolic order via the
mother, failed accordingly to cross from nature into culture; instead, preferring
identification with the domestic animals to social intercourse, he inhabited an
Aveyron in Rouen and, enfant sauvage, duly elaborated for himself a pensée
sauvage notable for its morbidity.
These cursory soundings of L'Idiot de la famille are sufficient to show how
far Sartre had accumulated a sum of anthropological references and how
predisposed he was to use them, sometimes in line with their proponents'
intentions and sometimes in flagrant disregard of them, in the evocation of the
social interactions of the Flaubert family. They have interesting effects. First,
they help frame the occasional windows through which can be glimpsed the
affective axioms on which the massive study is built: 'quand les pères ont des
projets, les enfants ont des destins'11 is a splendid example. Secondly, they show
how far the analysis of the névrose objective, that is to say, the historical
sociology of Flaubert's contemporary readership, derived from anthropological
as well as from historical material. Just as his two war-time revelations were
sociality and historicity, so Sartre would never produce a sociology which would
not also be a historiography. Thirdly, they confirm the extent to which, for
Sartre, the anthropological meant in practice small group interactions—the
familial, for example, subsequently extrapolated to inform the complexity of
macro-social relationships. Indeed, Sartre's own anthropologie took the form of
the totalisation of micro-sociologies piled higher and higher until they coalesced
and converted from the numerable into the statistical where, unless they could
be held within an ethico-political framework adequately designed and sustained
to overcome material scarcity, they corrupted individual purpose.
This eventuality serves to recall what I have called one of the purposes of
L'Idiot de la famille: to achieve demonstrably all that structuralist anthropology
could not. I take this to indicate a number of purposes: to ensure that philosophy
remained sovereign, neither subordinate to the sciences humaines nor specifiable
as ideology; to develop a totalising methodology capable of studying complex
 444 H. DAVIES

societies, together with systems of positive and negative reciprocities, in which

the observer was necessarily implicated; to give to those societies instruments
which might be used to transform them and to avert their extinction; to assert the
premium set on the ethical and political significance of individual choices and
actions; and, finally, to arm the species against colonisation from within. In brief,
to establish an intelligibility, a set of theoretical instruments which would allow
history to be both thought and made. The roles played within this discipline of
disciplines by anthropology and sociology would of necessity transform them.

Notes and references

1. ERIBON, D. and LEVI-STRAUSS, C., De près et de loin (Seuil-Points, 1988), pp. 115-16.
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2. SARTRE, J.-P., Situations I (Gallimard, 1947), p. 165.

3. Ibid., p. 186.
4. BEAUVOIR, S. DE, La Force de l'âge (Gallimard, 1960), p. 137.
5. Pouillon was an energetic editor who later undertook his own fieldwork in Chad. In Les Temps Modernes
he featured the work of such authorities as Balandier, Clastres, Condominas, Elwin, Favret-Saada,
Godelier, Heusch, Jaulin, Lizot, Mead, Monod, Panoff, Pitt-Rivers, Sahlins, Sebag—and, of course,
Lévi-Strauss.
6. BOSCHETTI, A., Sartre et 'Les Temps Modernes' (Minuit, 1985).
7. SARTRE, J.-P., Critique de la raison dialectique, vol. 1 (Gallimard, 1960), p. 44.
8. SARTRE, J.-P., L'Idiot de la famille, vol. 1 (Gallimard, 1971), p. 758.
9. Ibid., p. 622.
10. Ibid., p. 668.
11. Ibid., p. 107.