Toward a Sartrean Economics

Abstract

Despite the absence of a systematic analysis of economics in Sartre's work, we argue that a Sartrean economics can indeed be said to exist, even if it is an economics that still awaits development. The status that Sartre accords to the concept of scarcity allows him to advance the critique of economism begun by Karl Polanyi, who, for his part, had been satisfied simply to challenge the reduction of economics to its formal definition. Scarcity, Sartre teaches us, should not be submitted to the process of instrumental reason but should be considered as a fact of human history. Economic analysis, meanwhile, should not be based solely on the theme of man's confrontation with a typically ungrateful nature but should rather be articulated through the concept of the world as elaborated in Sartrean philosophy.

Key words:

• Economism
• Karl Polanyi
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Scarcity
• World

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for helpful comments from the anonymous referees. This article benefited from the assistance of the French National Research Agency (ANR). (See reference number ANR-09-JCJC-132-01, “The CSR: Institutional transition or return of paternalism?”)

Notes

1. For a concise account of the life and work of Karl Polanyi (1886–1964), see Maucourant (2005).

2. See Polanyi (1944, 1957, and especially 1977).

3. For Aron (1970), readings of Marx consist of two fundamental, if intermixed, types: “phenomenological” (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) and “structuralist” (Althusser).

4. It matters little here whether or not Sartre mobilizes Marx at first or second hand.

5. This in no way presages the social direction that nonutilitarian forms of consumption may take at any given moment in a society's development. See Bataille (1993).

6. In economic terms, scarcity is the condition of goods and services that do not exist in unlimited quantities in their natural state. It is a general and absolute phenomenon, as distinct from penury, which is a phenomenon relative to time (e.g., France in the 1940s) and/or space (e.g., underdeveloped countries). The origin of economic activity consists precisely in struggling against this fundamental scarcity. Scarcity is thus not equivalent to penury, just as utility should not be confused with need. Scarcity and utility (which both affect the goods susceptible to satisfy a need and that are thus exchangeable on the market) are sometimes considered as the foundations of the value of goods.

7. If we no longer situate ourselves at the level of the human condition in general but at that of its current capitalism-dominated, sociohistorical form, we are obliged to note that this process of reification is exactly that which the “commodification of the world” seeks to systematize.

8. See Sartre (2004, 27).

9. See Sartre (1992a, 198–256). For further analysis see Kail (1990).

10. It would be interesting, even necessary, to confront the Sartrean analysis of scarcity with that offered by anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins. While he remains intellectually close to Sartre—the first chapter of Stone Age Economics (Sahlins 1974) was published in French in abridged form in Les Temps Modernes; Jean Pouillon published a further text from this collection in the review L'Homme, while the Critique of Dialectical Reason is a constant reference in Sahlins's (1976) Culture and Practical Reason—it may be equally significant that Sahlins's objection to assumptions of scarcity in hunter-gatherer societies marks a weakening of the Sartrean argument.

11. This naturalist ontology is at the core of every economic discourse, whether from the point of view of the formal definition or—as we hope to have shown from our critique of Marxist dialectical materialism—from the point of view of the substantive definition.

12. It might be useful to pursue this point in reference to the theme of the market as the place of veridiction, as developed by Michel Foucault (2008) in his courses at the Collège de France (1978–9).