First published in France in 1947, Humanism and Terror is a vital work of political philosophy by one of the leading French philosophers of the twentieth century. Attempting to understand what he called the "dislocated world" that followed immediately after the Second World Warincluding his own, divided FranceMerleau-Ponty asks a fundamental question: how did Marxism and humanism come apart?
Through a fascinating reading of Arthur Koestler's famous novel, Darkness at Noon, an allegory of the Stalinist show trials and purges of the 1930s, Merleau-Ponty weighs up the costs of a regime of permanent revolution and false confessions. His profound and controversial point, however, is that the purges were the inevitable outcome of abandoning crucial subjective elements of Marxs theory of history, with the result that "humanism is suspended and government is terror."
As we again confront the reality of authoritarianism, political polarisation and curtailing of human freedom, the dislocated world brilliantly depicted by Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror sends a powerful and articulate message that continues to resonate today.
This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by William McBride.
Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition William McBride Author's
Preface Part 1: Terror
1. Koestler's Dilemmas
2. Bukharin and the Ambiguity
of History
3. Trotsky's Rationalism Part 2: The Humanist Perspective
4. From
the Proletarian to the Commissar
5. The Yogi and the Proletarian Conclusion.
Index
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908 in Rochefort-sur-Mer, France. Drawn to philosophy from a young age, Merleau-Ponty would go on to study alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil at the famous École Normale Supérieure. He completed a Docteur čs lettres based on two dissertations, La structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la perception (1945). After a brief post at the University of Lyon, Merleau-Ponty returned to Paris in 1949 when he was awarded the Chair of Psychology and Pedagogy at the Sorbonne. In 1952 he became the youngest philosopher ever appointed to the prestigious Chair of Philosophy at the Collčge de France. He died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 aged fifty-three, at the height of his career. He is buried in Pčre Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
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