Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler

Mussett, Shannon M.
Published by State University of New York Press
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91
Beauvoir and Marx
William L. McBride
For someone like me whose early exposure to philosophy as a student occurred in
the United States of the mid-twentieth century, when the heavy Cold War atmo-
sphere so well described by Simone de Beauvoir in The Mandarins
1
was still quite
prevalent (though somewhat modied by virtue of the real though tenuous thaw
resulting from Nikita Khrushchevs acknowledgment of Stalinist atrocities), it is
difcult to realize just how infrequently the names of Marx or even Hegel had ever
been mentioned in the institutions of higher education that she attended during
the late 1920s. We students of the next generation took it for granted that the
existentialists, the label that had by then become irrevocably attached to Beauvoir
and her associates, were part of a Continental European tradition going back to
those nineteenth-century gures. True, some doubted Marxs credentials as a real
philosopher, but, despite the obvious role that the invocation of his name played
in the pronouncements of Communist parties worldwide, the study of his ideas (if
only, all too often, under the rubric of Know your enemy!), was commonplace in
American universities in the late 1950s. But that had clearly not been the case at the
Sorbonne or the cole Normale of Beauvoirs student days, as she herself asserted
on many later occasions, and as is evidenced by near-total absence of Marxs name
from the hundreds of pages of her diary from those years (a diary that contains a
truly astonishing number of author names and book titles). She was, of course,
already acquainted with the reality of the Communist Party and with some commit-
ted Communists, but she simply failed, at least as all evidence suggests, to connect
this reality with the idea of Marx as a philosopher, or indeed as a relevant writer of
whatever sort. And in reading her autobiographical writings produced over so many
subsequent years, in numerous sections of which one nds philosophical discus-
sions and analyses, one cannot help but be struck by the continued relative dearth
of references to Marx, despite the enormous and well-documented importance of
Communism and Communists during those same years.
However, there is a very paradoxical aspect to this, an aspect that is epitomized
in one signicant reference to Marxism (though, N.B., not to Marx himself ) that
Beauvoir makes in reviewing the varied reactions, so many of them negative and
9 2 BEAUVOI R AND WES TERN THOUGHT
hostile, that greeted the publication of The Second Sex: Our relations with the
Communists couldnt have been worse; all the same, my thesis [in The Second Sex]
owed so much to Marxism and showed it in such a favorable light that I did at least
expect some impartiality from them! (Beauvoir 1994, 190).
2
It should be noted
immediately that, while in this sentence Beauvoir seems simply to be equating
Communists with Marxists, as so many ordinary people did at the time, and as the
Communists themselves preferred, she then goes on to speak of some non-Stalinist
Marxistswhose reactions, however, were equally negative. In short, there has
been little or no direct discussion of Marxs thought over many hundreds of pages
of texts, and yet there is a taken-for-granted assumption that her own thought was
deeply indebted to Marxism. Moreover, whenever Beauvoir does refer in passing
to Marx or Marxism in her later years, particularly in interviews, I nd her quick
generalizations to be almost invariably on-target.
In Beauvoirs more strictly philosophically oriented writings there are, in fact,
three brief but serious discussions of Marx and Marxism that I propose to consider
in turn. They occur in Pour une morale de lambigut (I have rst cited the French
title because that of the English translation, The Ethics of Ambiguity, is so distortive
of its spirit), The Second Sex itself, and the long essay titled La pense de droite,
aujourdhui. Then, in conclusion, I shall discuss the historical paradox, larger and
much more important than the textual one, whereby Beauvoirs thinking, even if
we accept at face value (as I think we should) her assertion of a debt to Marxism,
in fact contributed in a major way to rethinking fundamental Marxist premises.
ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY
It is noteworthy that Beauvoir later criticized this book for, among other things,
its idealistic tendencies, but for the moment let us set this aside. In any event, she
is clearly seeking, in this work, to move away from any such remaining tenden-
cies, toward a philosophy focused on the given situationan emphasis that, as she
asserts, existentialism shares with Marxism, which she characterizes, interestingly
enough, as one form of radical humanism (Beauvoir 1994, 18). She of course
shares with Marxism a deep antipathy toward oppression, and she nds common
cause with Marx (mentioned by name), in various passages, concerning at least two
of her own books most central ideas: that freedom from oppression must come
to all human beings before it can be said that any individual is fully free; and that
ethical actiondespite Beauvoirs awareness that Marx hesitated to use the language
of traditional moralityneeds to be oriented toward a future that is projected as
open and indenite rather than as an end state. The negative side of her treatment
of Marx and Marxism revolves around one point above all: Marxisms alleged denial
of the reality of human freedom at the ontological level.
There is a sense in which, Beauvoir says, Marxism emphasizes subjectivity, in
the tradition of Kant and Hegel. But at the same time, according to her, it puts
so much stress on the determination of choices and actions by objective material
BEAUVOI R AND MARX 9 3
conditions that Marxists are distrustful of bourgeois intellectuals who appear to be
sympathetic to their ideas, because by denition they, as bourgeois, are incapable
of grasping the standpoint of the proletariat from the inside. Marxists, she claims,
simply deny the reality of free choice, so strongly asserted by existentialists. She goes
so far as to attribute to dialectical materialism a psychology of behavior (Beauvoir
1994, 20). But, she goes on to say, it is counterintuitive (my word, not hers) to
think that there is no element of freedom involved in the choice, for example, to
become a member of the Communist Party. Moreover, Marxists, in practice, often
do admit the reality of freedom that they deny in theory. Indeed, as she points out
when she returns to some of these issues later in the book, Marxists have been quite
aware, from early on, that it is sometimes a great struggle to develop within actual
members of the proletariat the revolutionary consciousness that they theoretically
should have by virtue of their class status.
Beauvoir also shows here that she has some familiarity with the ideas of
Lenin, as well as, of course, much experience in interacting with her Communist
contemporaries. Perhaps this goes some way toward explaining her point about
Marxists distrust of bourgeois intellectuals, because such distrust was fairly com-
mon in Communist circles at that time. Nevertheless, she would have done well
to say something more here about the capital role of bourgeois intellectuals within
the entire Marxist tradition, beginning with Marx himself. As Marx (and Engels)
pointedly observe in a famous paragraph in The Communist Manifesto, in obvious
self-reference:
Finally, when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dis-
solution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of
old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section
of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class. . . .
a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular,
a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the
level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
(Marx 1988, 64)
The wording of this text, especially of its conclusion, strongly implies that those
Communists who, according to Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity, maintain
that the bourgeois intellectual can only attain to a proletarian standpoint from
the outside, by abstract recognition (Beauvoir 1957, 19) have not read their Marx
carefully enough, have not fully understood him. (As we shall see, she was in fact
well aware of this.)
But can the same be said with respect to these same Communists denial of the
reality of human freedom, even in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence to
the contrary? Ah, how many millions of words have been written and spoken on
this question of determinism in Marxist theory, beginning with Marx himself! I
do not intend to try to summarize them here. I shall merely note that, once again,
9 4 BEAUVOI R AND WES TERN THOUGHT
Beauvoir was surely on solid ground in imputing such a determinist view, of a fairly
hard sort, to the contemporary Marxists with whom she was familiar; but she
was on somewhat shakier ground when imputing it, if indeed she intended to do
so, to Marx himself. (Throughout this text, she refers much more frequently to
Marxists than to Marx, and in a couple of those sentences in which she invokes
Marxs name she actually contrasts him with the Marxists, though not directly
concerning the question of the reality of freedom.) I shall further note that her
colleague Sartre, in the interview that he gave late in life for the Library of Living
Philosophers, declared very unambiguously and in answer to several different ques-
tions that he no longer considered himself a Marxist, as he once had, and referred to
the freedom that seems to be missing in Marxist thought (Sartre 1981, 21). Thus,
his attempt to reconcile Marxism with existentialism, about which Beauvoir herself
had never seemed quite so enthusiastic, eventually foundered in large measure on
this reef of freedom that had been central to her critique of Marxism in The Ethics
of Ambiguity so many years earlier.
THE SECOND SEX
The references to Marx in this book, which is of so much greater length than The
Ethics of Ambiguity, are equally sparse, but they are strategically situated. Of course,
there is the well-known short chapter near the beginning of this book titled The
Point of View of Historical Materialism, but it focuses almost exclusively on Engelss
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the Statea work of considerable
historical importance, no doubt, especially in the context of feminist theory, but
one that is not usually regarded as very central to the Marxist canon. (Engels wrote
it some years after Marxs death, though he claimed to have taken his inspiration
for it from Marxs notes on Lewis Morgans book, Ancient Society, which he had
come across.) In that chapter, Beauvoir characterizes Engelss contribution as an
advance, but nonetheless disappointing, and she subjects it to a close analysis that
discloses illicit inferences and gaps in thinking, including in particular his failure
to justify the close connection between the historical defeat of the female sex and
the development of the institution of private property. She acknowledges that there
are parallels between the oppression of women and class oppression, but insists that
they are merely thatparallelsand that there is no exact similarity. (I shall return
to this crucial point later.) She concludes this discussion by attributing to Engels
(and by extension to historical materialism in general) an economic monism that,
as a monism, falls as far short in explaining the condition of the second sex as
does the sexual monism of Freud that had been the focus of her previous chapter
(Beauvoir 1957, 60; Beauvoir 1976a, 105).
Later, in the historical section of The Second Sex, Beauvoir cites one long foot-
note from Marxs Capital in which, according to her, Marx recounts a conversation
that he had with manufacturer, Mr. E., in which the latter informed me that he
BEAUVOI R AND MARX 9 5
employed females exclusively at his power looms . . . gives a decided preference to
married females, especially those who have families at home dependent on them
for support; they are attentive, docile, more so than unmarried females, and are
compelled to use their utmost exertions to procure the necessaries of life. Then,
writes Beauvoir, Marx adds: Thus are the virtues, the peculiar virtues of the female
character to be perverted to her injurythus all that is most dutiful and tender in
her nature is made a means of her bondage and suffering (Marx 1961, 402).
3
I think
it is of some importance both because it afrms that Marx was a strong sympathizer
with the plight of women (and there are numerous other footnotes and texts in
Capital with a similar theme) and because it treats his magnum opus as a serious
reference work. Then, a little further on in The Second Sex, early in the chapter on
myths, there is a long paragraph on the myth of woman as Other that ranges from
the ancient Greeks to modern times; in the middle of it, Beauvoir rather casually
refers to the egalitarianism of socialist ideology and says that in the authentically
democratic society proclaimed by Marx there is no place for the Other (Beauvoir
1957, 142; Beauvoir 1976a, 241). In these few, very straightforward words, so
typical of her style, Beauvoir at once identies Marx as a principal spokesperson
for the socialist ideal and, rightly in my opinion, identies the Marxian socialist
ideal as a democratic one.
But the single reference to Marx in The Second Sex that is probably best known
is the quotation from his 1844 Manuscripts with which, after making a concluding
comment, she ends her book. In this very brief, somewhat cryptic text, Marx says
that the relationship of man to woman, being the most natural of human relation-
ships, is the best index of the extent to which what is natural has become human
and human beings have become naturalhuman nature being regarded as an
ideal. Beauvoir remarks that it could not have been said better, and she concludes
that, in order for the triumph of the reign of freedom to occur, it will be necessary
that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally
afrm their brotherhood (Beauvoir 1957, 732; Beauvoir 1976b, 663). Let us not
be diverted by the word fraternit here: the French language has no gender-neutral
word for this (neither does the English language, for that matter), and of course
this word in French immediately recalls the great slogan of the French Revolution.
What interests me more, at any rate, is Beauvoirs allusion to the reign, or realm,
of freedom, because that is an expression used by Marx in both his early and later
works as the shorthand expression for what he conceived (here following Hegel, but
with a strong awareness of the severe inadequacy of Hegels understanding of it) as
the highest aspiration of humanity. (In Marxs later work the standard formulation
became the ascent from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.) At the
end of The Second Sex, then, it seems clear that Beauvoir, having just cited Marx
concerning the relationship between men and women, is consciously appropriat-
ing this phrase of his for her own liberatory purposes; in other words, she makes
evident just how much, as she afrmed in the passage in her autobiography that I
cited earlier, her thesis in this work owed to Marxism.
9 6 BEAUVOI R AND WES TERN THOUGHT
LA PENSE DE DROITE, AUJOURDHUI
This long, interesting study, originally published in Les Temps Modernes in 1954,
focuses on some gures who at the time would have been, and in some cases still
are, well known to Anglophone readersfor example, Spengler, Nietzsche, Toynbee,
Jaspersand others with, now as then, less name recognition outside France, such
as Drieu La Rochelle, Monnerot, and Maulnier. What may surprise some readers
is the extent to which Beauvoir attributes an inuence on some of the latter group
to the conservative, virulently anti-Communist American political scientist, still
remembered by some for his works in defense of Machiavelli and on the Cold
War and the managerial revolution, James Burnham. The world of right-wing
thought into which this essay plunges us bears some uncanny resemblances to the
contemporary version of the same world, but in at least one way it seems remote:
while Beauvoir very well depicts right-wing ambivalences about intellectuals and
about thinking itself, it is primarily with intellectuals that she is dealing; whereas
there are very few of those, at least of any comparable quality, in the ranks of todays
Right. In this regard, Beauvoir asserts early in her essay that, on the Right, the
word intellectual easily takes on a pejorative meaning (Beauvoir 1955, 102).
4

It is true, she continues, that among the proletariat there is also a suspicion of
intellectuals, but only because they are bourgeois; however, she points out, Marx
himself afrmed the capacity of some bourgeois intellectuals to rise to the level of
comprehending the historical movement as a whole, and she quotes the nal line
of the passage from the Communist Manifesto that I cited. She thus corrects the
more negative characterization of Marxisms stance toward intellectuals with which
she had left her readers in The Ethics of Ambiguity.
Most of Beauvoirs references to Marx and Marxism in La pense de droite,
aujourdhui occur in the early pages of the essay. That is precisely because she takes
Marxism as her principal point of departure, since it is also the current point of
departure for most if not all of the writers whom she analyzes here. For them, she
asserts, prior to the Second World War there was a sense of impending doom, of
a mortal menace to Western civilization, but they were somewhat uncertain as to
its exact nature; now, however, barbarism has a name: communism (Beauvoir
1955, 98). It is the Marxist-Communist menace that preoccupies them and occa-
sions such great fear and loathing on their parts. However, while a few right-wing
writers claim to be experts in Marxist doctrine, that is not the case for the vast
majority of them; it is, she cites Thierry Maulnier as admitting, most certainly
virtually unknown to those who are ghting against it or think they are doing so
(Beauvoir 1955, 113).
5
But this does not prevent them, of course, from offering
psychological explanations of both Marx and Marxism, the most popular of these
being that it is actually a (false) religion. To Monnerot, for example, Communism
is the Islam of the 20th Century (Beauvoir 1955, 115).
One aspect of Marxist theory with which they are familiar is its claim that
there is such a thing as class struggle, and that is a claim that, in one way or another,
BEAUVOI R AND MARX 9 7
they all try to deny. What they all assert, on the other handat least all of those
whom Beauvoir is analyzingis pluralism, that is, the alleged fact that the world
is so very complicated that there are different kinds of slaveries, different kinds of
feudalisms, and different kinds of capitalisms, as Jules Monnerot, among others,
maintains. This position serves their ideological interests very well, concludes
Beauvoir: For Marxs simplistic schema which contrasts exploiters and exploited
they substitute a pattern so complex that, with the oppressors differing as much
among themselves as they differ from the oppressed, this latter distinction loses its
importance (Beauvoir 1955, 140141).
While it would be a very interesting exercise to consider at length Beauvoirs
in-depth portrait of right-wing thought as it appeared to her in 1954, the present
chapter is obviously not the place in which to undertake this task. Here, I would
like only to reect on two points: rst, very briey, the relevance of this analysis to
our time, nearly sixty years later; second, the additional light that it may cast on
Beauvoirs relation to Marx and Marxism. Concerning the rst point, ironies and
similarities abound. Very much in keeping with Beauvoirs observation that the
Right relies much too heavily on analogies, we can nd quite a few contemporary
right-wing politicians in both the United States and Europe who, with the retreat
of Communism, play heavily on a theme that is the reverse of Monnerots, to wit,
that Islam is the Communism of the twenty-rst century. Today, one nds similar
warnings to the effect that Western civilization is under severe threat, similar denials
that there is any such thing as class struggle, a similar effort on the part of many
on the Right to conjoin religion with capitalism,
6
and a similar anti-intellectualism
and distrust of thinking itself. The greatest single difference between the Right of
the mid-century as depicted by Beauvoir and the Right of today is, as it seems to
me and to repeat an earlier remark, the far greater prevalence today of this last-
mentioned characteristic.
As for what La pense de droite, aujourdhui may tell us about the evolution
of Beauvoirs relationship to Marx and Marxism, I think that it should be seen, at
a minimum, as reinforcing what she was to say years later, in her autobiography,
concerning her deep indebtedness to him and it, even in The Second Sex, the pub-
lication of which antedated this essay by ve years. But in La pense de droite . .
. her reliance on Marx as a basic reference point is much more unreserved, much
less ambiguous than it could possibly have been in a book that included a chapter
highly critical of his closest collaborator and indeed, at least as it was presented, of
the point of view of historical materialism as such. Near the beginning of this later
essay, Beauvoir writes approvingly and without any apparent reservation concerning
Marxs denunciation of idealism (Beauvoir 1955, 98), and she takes a text of his,
in which he observes that every new class proposes its ideas as the only universally
true and valid ones (Beauvoir 1955, 101), as a sort of guide to the unraveling of
bourgeois ideological justication that she is about to undertake. In short, Beauvoir
does not engage in the somewhat theatrical, if not downright sophistic, intellectual
acrobatics wherewith Sartre attempted to demonstrate, in the opening pages of an
9 8 BEAUVOI R AND WES TERN THOUGHT
essay rst published three years later, that Marxism was the one and only dominant
thought system of that era
7
(and, hence, she also did not feel obliged later, as Sartre
did, to recant any such extravagant proclamations). Rather, Beauvoir here simply
takes that worldview, with its commitment to ideological critique and so many
of its other fundamental premises such as the reality of class struggle, as a given.
AND YET . . .
On the basis of what I have shown up to now, it would seem that Beauvoir would
have to be regarded, at least by 1954, as closer to Marx than to any of the other
philosophers considered in the present volume, even though she had less to say
about him explicitly than about many of the others. Why, thento paraphrase a
key sentence of Sartres that occurs shortly after his above-mentioned declaration
of obeisance to Marxism in Search for a Methodis she not simply a Marxist?
8

The principal, though far from the only, answer to this question is to be
found, of course, in The Second Sexnot just in certain of its texts, important as
they may be, but even more in its global effects on the history of thoughteffects
so profound that a good case could be made for her being the philosopher who
exerted the greatest inuence on the culture of the twentieth centurygreater,
perhaps, than Sartre, Heidegger, or Wittgenstein, to mention three of the most
prominent alternative candidates.
9
What Beauvoir demonstrated throughout that
long work, after the initial three chapters detailing the inadequacies of biological,
Freudian, and Engelsian historical materialist accounts of gender difference, was
precisely that such monistic theories must be modied and partially replaced
by an existentialist-phenomenological approach, rooted in past and present lived
experience, and leading to a freely chosen reorientation of future societies in the
direction of equality. Despite her well-known protestations to the effect that she was
not a philosopher, meaning a system-builder in the tradition of Hegel or Sartre,
what she gave the world in The Second Sex was a new comprehensive worldview,
involving, as she put it in concluding her rst chapter on biology, an ontological,
economic, social, and psychological context (Beauvoir 1957, 36; Beauvoir 1976a,
77), and at the same time avoiding the sort of confused, ideologically driven plural-
ism that she attributed to right-wing thought in her essay on that topic. And, as
I have noted, she very cleverly established a link between this quite revolutionary
contribution to thought and the core element of Marxs philosophy, its liberatory
message, by citing him at the very end of her book.
But of course what emerged from The Second Sex and the vast intellectual move-
ment that it ultimately generated was in fact no longer the Marxism of Marx, for
whom The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles
(Marx 1988, 55).
10
Now, it is clear that Marx never intended to claimand it would
have been supremely fatuous to have done sothat in order to understand history
one needs only to look at it through the lens of class struggle. His own historical
writings show subtlety and sophistication even while retaining an orientation in
BEAUVOI R AND MARX 9 9
which classes and subclasses play a leading role. But the net effect of Beauvoirs
analyses is, to a degree that I suspect that she herself was not fully aware at the time
(or perhaps ever), to reject that claim as being in some important sense false; she
does this by showing that there is at least one other major key to understanding
historythe very key that Marx, in the once-obscure passage in the 1844 Manu-
scripts, which were not even published until decades after his death, identied as
the relation of man to woman. The many varieties of Marxist feminism, socialist
feminism, or both that were spawned in the latter part of the twentieth century
took their inspiration from Beauvoirs seminal work, as did other approaches to
feminism for which Marx no longer held any importance.
11
Thus, the destiny of
Beauvoirs Marxist contribution was, as one might put it in a paraphrase of En-
gelss single most famous line in The Origin of the Family . . . , in which he referred
to the great historical defeat of the female sex, the great historical defeat of the
Marxian worldview, at least as the overwhelmingly dominant worldview that Sartre
had considered it to be in Search for a Method.
Destiny: that is the general title that Beauvoir assigned to the rst three
chapters of The Second Sex, in which she discusses, respectively, biology, Freudian
psychoanalysis, and Engelss work. She explains her reason for choosing this word
at the end of her introduction. After enumerating the several key questions con-
cerning the limitations on womens freedom and the possibilities of surmounting
them that will be the driving themes of her work, she says that these issues would
be meaningless si nous supposions que pse sur la femme un destin physiologique,
psychologique ou conomique (Beauvoir 1976a, 32).
12
The old Parshley English
translation, if we were to believe that womens destiny is inevitably determined
by physiological, psychological, or economic forces (Beauvoir 1957, xxix) retains
the essential sense of what Beauvoir wrote but subtly alters it by implying that
womens destiny, although not inevitably shaped by these forces, is nevertheless
somehow a reality of sorts; whereas what Beauvoirs French implies is that the very
notion of any such destiny is a myth, an illusion. If we take this idea literally
and apply it to chapter 3, The Point of View of Historical Materialism, then it
is not only Engelss faulty account of womens history as understood through the
lens of class struggle that Beauvoir is challenging, but indeed the whole underlying
presupposition (to which Marx himself also appeared to subscribe all too often,
even though it was not necessary for him to do so, and there are texts in which he
explicitly denies it), that there is an underlying pattern, a fatum, which the human
race is doomed to follow. This challenge certainly ran counter to the triumphalist
Marxism of her contemporaries in the French Communist Party, which helps
to explain their very negative reaction to The Second Sex when it was published.
Their so-called orthodox version of Marxism had in fact descended, as it were,
from the realm of freedom to that of necessity and dogma. Probably some of them
even sensed, at a time at which the Party was still very strong, the future decline
that was betokened by such a radically alternative reading of history and society
as Beauvoirs was to theirs.
1 00 BEAUVOI R AND WES TERN THOUGHT
Did Beauvoirs challenge, as I have put it, run counter to the spirit of Marx
himself, to the point of being ultimately non-Marxist? Well, yes and no. For, as
paradoxical as it may be to say this, it is true both that Beauvoirs thought is deeply
Marxist in inspiration (or at least marxisant, as the apt French expression would
have it), and yet that it amounted to a revolutionary, world-historically original,
break with the entire Marxian tradition.
NOTES
1. Les Mandarins was written between 1951 and 1954 and published in the latter
year. For some reections on this work that connect with the theme of the
present essay, see McBride 2005.
2. Two studies of Beauvoir that are especially worthwhile for understanding the
background of this statement are by Deutscher 2008 and Lundgren-Gothlin
1996. Eva Lundgren-Gothlins is a voice that was silenced far too soon.
3. I am citing directly from the English version of Capital, whereas Beauvoir
presumably cited from a French translation. However, the translation as she
reports it is quite faithful to the English, the one somewhat noteworthy dif-
ference being that, instead of the words the virtues, the peculiar virtues of
the female character, the French reads les qualits propres de la femme.
4. This and all subsequent translations from this essay are my own.
5. Beauvoir does not annotate this citation.
6. In this context, Beauvoir offers us a marvelous citation from an eighteenth-
century priest, Hyacinthe de Gasquet: Jesus Christ himself is the guarantor
of your debt [est votre caution]; it is still between his divine hands and on his
adorable head that you invest [placez] capital (Beauvoir 1955, 122).
7. See Sartre 1963.
8. Why, then, are we not simply Marxists? (Sartre 1963, 35). In fact, the French
text reads Quest-ce donc qui fait que nous ne soyons pas tout simplement marx-
iste? (Sartre 1985, 40). Note that he writes marxiste in the singular, which
implies that he is using the word as an adjective rather than, as the English
translation would have it, as a noun. This may seem to be a pedantic point,
but I am not sure that it is. While Sartre, during this period, often came closer
than Beauvoir ever did to identifying himself as a Marxist tout simplement,
Beauvoirs perspective in La pense de droite, aujourdhui could very well, as
I think I have shown, be characterized as a Marxist perspectiveespecially
if one were to read this essay in isolation from the rest of her work.
9. I make similar comments concerning Beauvoirs preeminent importance in
McBride 2006.
10. In later editions, published after Marxs death, Engels already qualied this
claim, in a footnote, by restricting the assertion to all written history, in light
of the more recent ndings of anthropologists and especially of Morgan. In
BEAUVOI R AND MARX 10 1
this same footnote, he also called attention, signicantly enough, to his The
Origin of the Family.
11. As Alison M. Jaggar, herself not a close student of Beauvoirs at the time,
wrote in her long, denitive (at least for American feminist philosophy of the
period) work: Indeed, The Second Sex, published in 1949 by the existentialist
Simone de Beauvoir, must be considered a forerunner of the contemporary
womens liberation movement (Feminist Politics and Human Nature [Totowa,
NJ: Rowman & Allenheld, 1983], p. 10). Or, as another prominent feminist
philosopher, Sandra Bartky, writes in recalling her intellectual evolution out
of classical phenomenology: I turned instead to an examination of the em-
bodied consciousness of a feminine subject, indeed, of a subject with a specic
social and historical location. Simone de Beauvoir had pointed me down this
path (Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression
[New York and London: Routledge], 1990). Such testimonials in the relevant
philosophical literature are legion.
12. Literally, if we were to suppose that a physiological, psychological, or economic
destiny weighs on woman.
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