Beauvoir holds that no social order precedes the political order

Evidence

Th is abstraction deceives us, casts a spell over us, and ultimately prevents us from seeing that no order of any kind (social, economic, or cultural) precedes the political order. Th e mistake of all prior political philosophy is to think the political only aft er having supposed an ontology, which, thanks to the development of the human sciences, is based in anthropology, sociology, or economics. On the contrary, against political philosophy we must affi rm that the existence of humanity is a political act, an existence buried beneath a social being. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 467

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that all prior political philosophy errs by positing a pre-political ontology, and that human existence is itself a political act, is a dense inversion of the social-contract tradition worth sitting with.
• XREF: This ‘primacy of the political’ argument parallels a strain of recent left thought (e.g., Claude Lefort) and contrasts directly with the state-of-nature contract theory named in the passage — a rich comparative node.