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This article starts out from the limits limiting the social sciences in the genetic analysis of conflicts, an enterprise which requires that we cast light on the subjective and intersubjective dynamics at work in their emergence, prior to their crystallisation in an exceptional moment of collective mobilisation. The novel thus offers some vital keys supplementing sociological analysis, insofar as it frequently builds its social worlds from the points of view that are proper to the characters caught up in a process of reciprocal relation, thus presenting these worlds as being subject to a process of becoming. Here Martin Eden, Jack London’s novel, offers an exemplary instance of this.