Sartre’s group theory radicalizes Rousseau by reducing the social contract to guerrilla-sized units

Evidence

But the Terror is only part of the oath itself, which plays something of the role of a social contract in Sartre’s thinking. Even the differences with Rousseau are somehow profoundly akin to the spirit of the latter. Rousseau, of course, thought in terms of a larger community, a state or city-state, whereas the Sartrean concept of the group aims at a much smaller guerrilla-type unit, and even tends, as we shall see shortly, to preclude the idea of a social class as an actor in history, let alone such an abstract unit as a state or a society or a nation. Yet implicit in Rousseau’s concept was a reduction of the viable society to relatively manageable proportions, as in the city-state; and Sartre’s further reduction to little groups, to relatively existential, lived proportions is really an operation undertaken in the same spirit, but at a later moment in the development of the middle-class society, when henceforth there is no longer any national or social unit, only a jumble of various groups and ruins of groups, serial collectivities, and groups of all kinds coming into being simultaneously. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 511

Categorization

• XREF: Connects Sartre’s group concept back to Rousseau’s social contract and forward to Jameson’s broader treatment of mediation and totality across Marx and the other Frankfurt School figures.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does Sartre’s rejection of social class as historical actor square with a Marxist totalization? This tension seems central to Jameson’s appraisal of Sartre.