The May Events of 1968 vindicated Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique

Evidence

It is here, therefore, that we reemerge from the abstract structures of isolated individual and group action studied in the first five hundred pages of the book back out into the “level of the concrete, the place of history itself’ (p. 632). This reemergence is both a fact of our reading and a significant conclusion to the argument: for it annuls whatever objections might have been made to the previous chapters on the basis of their abstractness, and confirms the presence of the earlier structures within that dense existential reality which we recognize as history itself. Indeed, this conclusion of the book, which many readers are perhaps too fatigued to reach or at least to consider with the intellectual alertness they may have been willing to devote to the earlier chapters, is as indispensable to an understanding of Sartre’s position as its ending to a novel that one ought (in an ideal world) to read at a single sitting. For it is at this point, with a prodigious whirring of dialectical machinery in which quantity turns around into quality, that the earlier, self-contradictory impressions of revisionism and Stalinism are wholly canceled out and replaced by the first genuinely political writing in the Critique, which, with its passion, intransigence, and attachment to the lived fact, matches the Sartre already familiar to us from Les Communistes et la paix and the political articles in Les Temps modernes. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 557 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Sartre rationalized abandoning revision as politically virtuous — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 844; Sartre’s Critique aims to reconcile individual responsibility with uncontrollable collective and contingent historical events.; Sartre’s Critique reworked Marxist economism into praxis-language for a new era of revolutionary ferment (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Sartre’s Critique aims to reconcile individual responsibility with uncontrollable collective and contingent historical events. #expands (0.80)
• Sartre’s Critique reworked Marxist economism into praxis-language for a new era of revolutionary ferment #corroborates (0.75)
• Sartre rationalized abandoning revision as politically virtuous #contradicts (0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 844
• The Critique’s final section turns abstract structures into concrete history #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 557