Scarcity and Human History

Sartre does not claim that scarcity is necessary in some metaphysical sense — it is a contingent feature of our world that the material resources required to sustain human life are insufficient to support all human beings at once. But contingency here is not insignificance: scarcity has structured every human society and every human relationship in actual history. Where there is not enough for everyone, the Other's existence is a threat to mine — not through anyone's malice or institutional arrangement but through the simple arithmetic of need and resource.

Scarcity generates what Sartre calls the fundamental relation of the inhuman: each person, as a practical organism sustained by material need, perceives the Other as a potential consumer of the resources that sustain her own life. This does not require conscious hostility; it is inscribed in the structure of the situation. The Other is not merely a competitor but, from within the logic of scarcity, a kind of anti-human: a being whose claim on the same matter negates my own. Racism, class conflict, and nationalist violence all draw, in Sartre's account, on this fundamental structure — they are historical forms of the inhuman that scarcity has made available.

The significance of scarcity for Sartre's social ontology is that it gives history its specific character: a totalisation-without-a-totaliser, a process that is produced by intentional human praxis but that generates a result no one intended and no one controls. History is neither the unfolding of a Hegelian Geist nor the mechanical product of productive forces: it is the contingent, open-ended result of billions of individual praxes colliding in a world of scarce resources, leaving practico-inert sediments that constrain future praxes, and occasionally crystallising into fused groups that momentarily grasp and direct the process before being reabsorbed into seriality.

Sartre's treatment of scarcity was influenced by his reading of Malthus and Marx, and by his reflections on decolonisation and the Algerian War in the late 1950s. It represents his attempt to give a phenomenological foundation to the materialist claim that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.