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Further Adventures of the Dialectic: Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Althusser
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
This essay is not about contemporary French philosophy, strictly speaking, but something which concerns it—an important episode in its modern history. Its intention is to deal, in very schematic terms, with the nature and evolution of French Marxism from the mid-1950s to the end of the 70s, focusing on two of its best-known and most influential representatives, Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, and relating the internal history of their ambitious reconstructions of Marxism to the wider, non-theoretical history of which they were a part— and for whose comprehension they sought to supply the conceptual instruments. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's balance-sheet of a century of Marxism, Adventures of the Dialectic, published in 1955, provides my starting point and explains my title.
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- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 21: Contemporary French Philosophy , March 1987 , pp. 195 - 214
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1987
References
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64 This lecture, draws on a book devoted to Althusser, Louis, Althusser—The Detour of Theory (London: Verso, 1987).Google Scholar I would like to thank Sarah Baxter for all her help.