Speaker: Dr Matthias Lieven

Sartre’s second magnum opus, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, is generally understudied amongst Marxist scholars. It is a work of tremendous complexity and huge theoretical ambitions, but generally considered a failure. Yet, in the context of his attempt to prove ‘the dialectic’, Sartre develops a number of fascinating arguments of lasting importance for social and political theory, including an original theory of social classes. Key to this theory is the ambivalence of class, torn between practical activity and inert massification, action and passion. The working class can exist both in a disaggregated form, as a purely inert mass, and it can manifest itself as a multiplicity of subjects of radical change. Always internally plural and divided, it is engaged in a struggle on different fronts: not only against other classes, but also against its own forces of inertia. This paper reconstructs the main tenets of Sartre’s theory of class, which brings Marxism and existentialism together, includes elements from the French sociological tradition and its study of mass behavior, and radically distances itself from autonomist accounts of class (such as that of the early Claude Lefort). How do individuals ‘live’ the fact that they are part of a class? What does it mean for a sociological class to become a political subject? How does Sartre understand the complex, multilayered and asymmetrical nature of class conflict? How can relations of class forces be analysed, and how can Sartre help us understand the difficult position of working classes today?

Matthias Lievens is an assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven (Belgium), and currently a visiting researcher at King’s College London.

 

The Seminar in Contemporary Marxist Theory is a speaker series organised by King’s College London (Departments of European and International Studies, Geography and French; School of Management & Business), Queen Mary University of London (Law), and Loughborough University London (Institute for International Management). All seminars are open to the public. No registration is required. 

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