ABSTRACT
M. Jean-Paul Sartre, at the end of Being and Nothingness, promised a book on ethics. What he wrote, in fact, was a book on sociology. He has succeeded in rendering his thought, and the style of his writing, more abstract and obscure than it was in Being and Nothingness. Sartre treats Marxist concepts as essentially ambiguous, susceptible of numerous different interpretations; they are directive principles, indications of tasks; they set problems, rather than providing actual concrete truths, ‘In a word, they appear as regulative ideas’. Marxist theory, by being so determinedly abstract, has reduced history to a fantastically general sketch, within which what actually happened on any given occasion is made to seem a matter of chance. Sartre claims to have found in the centre of Marxist theory an empty place, and it is this empty place which he wishes to fill up with a concrete anthropology.
