Biography and Marxism: Sartre’s progressive-regressive method

Abstract

This article analyzes Jean-Paul Sartre’s contribution to designing a biographical method in keeping with the demands of Marxism. Sartre criticized Marxists for their pan-objectivism, which reduces subjectivity and man’s specific nature to epiphenomena. His contribution lies in grasping the genesis of individuality in order to incorporate it into the historical movement. The progressive-regressive method restores this two-fold nature: social and unique, universal and singular. Yet the success of Sartre’s contribution at the cost of a tension with the hypothesis that anthropologically underpins Marxism: man’s social nature.