Reason and Violence is R. D. Laing and David Cooper’s guide to a decade of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy. It connects questions about individual lives with questions about groups, institutions and history. The book helps explain the philosophical background to Laing’s relational and social thinking, while requiring careful attention to whose argument is being presented.
What the book is
First published in 1964, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy 1950–1960 appeared in a second edition in 1971. References here use Routledge’s 1999 reprint of that edition. The volume includes a foreword by Sartre and an introduction by Laing and Cooper. Its purpose is to present and condense three substantial works by Sartre for an English-reading audience. [1]
Laing and Cooper acknowledge what is involved in condensing Sartre’s work:
Condensation to about one-tenth of the scale of the original clearly creates its own difficulties.
R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper — Reason and Violence, joint introduction, p. 9 [1]
The division of authorship matters. Cooper wrote the sections on Questions of Method and Saint Genet; Laing wrote the exposition of Critique of Dialectical Reason. The introduction is jointly authored. A sentence found in this volume therefore should not automatically be quoted as Laing’s independent position. It may be Cooper’s exposition or Laing’s account of Sartre’s argument. [1]
The authors acknowledge the difficulty of compressing the originals. They follow the main lines of Sartre’s thought while reducing the space given to his examples. This produces a demanding introduction: the book is shorter than its sources, but it still works with densely connected concepts. [1]
From individual biography to collective life
The three works bring together questions of method, the interpretation of a particular life, and the organisation of social activity. The shared problem is how to understand people within the situations they both inherit and help to make. The authors present Sartre’s project as an attempt to relate individual experience, interpersonal relations and larger historical processes without turning them into disconnected subjects. [1]
This scope is relevant to Laing’s other writing, but it should not erase differences between the books. The Divided Self is principally concerned with forms of personal experience and their intelligibility. Reason and Violence addresses philosophical questions about history and collective life. Its concepts can help a reader follow Laing’s developing concerns; they do not supply a clinical explanation simply by being applied to a patient or family.
Totalisation: making sense of a changing whole
A central term is totalisation. In the introduction, Laing and Cooper use it for the activity of bringing a field of experience into an intelligible whole, as well as the field organised in that way. They distinguish this continuing activity from a finished totality. An account can be coherent and significant without being final. [1]
In their joint introduction, Laing and Cooper stress the situated character of a perspective:
Each particular perspective, each particular point of view, is the centre of a world, but not the centre of another world.
R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper — Reason and Violence, joint introduction, p. 11 [1]
Different perspectives can organise the same situation differently. A later interpretation may challenge an earlier one, preserve something of its validity and place it within a more extensive account. The authors therefore emphasise movement between perspectives, rather than presenting a complete picture that could stand outside history. [1]
This is not a licence to declare every interpretation equally adequate. It directs attention to the work an interpretation performs, the relations it brings into view and what a broader inquiry may require it to revise. The difficulty is to investigate a changing human situation without treating one provisional account as the situation’s final form.
Praxis and the return of our own activity
In Laing’s exposition of the Critique, praxis concerns human activity directed towards ends, including the transformation of material circumstances. People work upon the world, but the results of their activity can subsequently constrain them. Products, arrangements and accumulated consequences may confront their makers as apparently independent necessities. [1]
The analysis therefore moves in both directions. People are shaped by circumstances, while circumstances also contain the results of human activity. It is insufficient to describe an institution as though it were only an external force, or to assume that individuals can remake their situation by an act of will. The conceptual task is to follow the relations between activity, its material conditions and its consequences.
Scarcity is an important part of this account. Laing presents Sartre’s argument that relations can become antagonistic when others appear as rivals for what is needed. The text also insists that scarcity must be investigated in its particular circumstances. These are claims within Sartre’s philosophical analysis, not a demonstrated universal cause of every form of human conflict. [1]
The series and the group
The familiar example of a bus queue illustrates seriality. People share an object and a situation while remaining substantially separate in their projects. Their order and practical relations are organised through something outside their collective initiative. They are together, but their togetherness is different from a shared undertaking. [1]
The subsequent discussion asks how a collection of people can become a group acting together. Laing’s exposition rejects the idea that a group should be treated as a larger organism. Collective action must be understood through its formation and the relations among participants. The existence of a series does not make transformation into a group inevitable. [1]
A further problem concerns the preservation of a group once the circumstances that brought it together have changed. The discussion of the pledge examines attempts to secure continued loyalty. In the argument presented here, efforts to prevent dispersal can become coercive. A theory of solidarity must therefore also investigate pressures exercised by the group upon its members. [1]
How to use the book when reading Laing
The volume gives readers a vocabulary for asking how social unities are formed, sustained and experienced. It also cautions against treating a family, institution or movement as a single person with one intention. These are valuable questions to bring to Laing’s later social writing, provided the philosophical argument is distinguished from evidence about any particular relationship.
Read it alongside The Politics of the Family explained and the overview of Laing’s work. The book is an interpretation of Sartre, jointly produced with Cooper, and should be approached on those terms. Its intellectual ambition is substantial; the specific historical and clinical conclusions a reader draws from it still require their own support.
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References and source notes
- Laing, R. D., and Cooper, D. G. (1964; second edition 1971). Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy 1950–1960. References use the Routledge 1999 reprint of the 1971 edition. The introduction is jointly authored; Cooper wrote chapters 1–2 and Laing chapter 3.Cited: publication details; contents; introduction, p. 9; p. 9; contents; introduction, p. 9; introduction, pp. 9–10; introduction, pp. 10–11; p. 11; introduction, pp. 11–13; chapter 3, pp. 113–117; chapter 3, pp. 113–115; chapter 3, pp. 121–123; chapter 3, pp. 129–130; chapter 3, pp. 135–136. Online source