Adventures of the Dialectic

Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty (trans. Joseph Bien, Northwestern UP 1973) Year: 1955 (original French: Les Aventures de la dialectique, Gallimard) Type: book

Merleau-Ponty's major 1955 political-philosophical statement and the site of his public break with Sartre. Written July 1953 – April/December 1954 and published in 1955, concurrently with the 1954–55 courses on institution and passivity. The book traces the "adventures" — failed attempts — of the dialectic from Weber's recognition of understanding's limits, through Lukács's History and Class Consciousness, through Lenin's orthodoxy, through Trotsky's practical derailment, to Sartre's ultrabolshevism. The Epilogue abandons "Marxist wait-and-see" (the position of Humanism and Terror, 1947) and proposes a "new-liberalism" as the post-Marxist political stance, anchored in the slogan "revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes."

The book matters for the wiki in three ways. First, it is MP's most sustained engagement with Weber and the philosophy of history. Second, it is the political counterpart of the 1954–55 institution and passivity courses — the vocabulary of institution (as "the sphere proper to history" between nature and ideas, p. 89) and symbolic matrices (deployed in a Weberian-historical context at p. 41) is at work here. Third, its coinages and slogans travel across the corpus: ultrabolshevism names the anti-type of MP's politics; interworld is the 1955 ancestor of the late ontology's middle order; action at a distance appears here (p. 217) five years before Signs; and the Epilogue's definition of dialectic ("several centers, several points of entry, needs time to explore them all") is the political-historical ancestor of V&I's hyper-dialectic.

Core Arguments

The Preface: the book in miniature

  1. Claim: The politics of understanding (Alain) and the politics of reason (Hegelo-Marxism) are both undemonstrable. Because: understanding cannot avoid the problem of the whole; reason cannot avoid the problem of events. Against: Raymond Aron's defense of Alain ("there is only one politics, that of understanding").

  2. Claim: Marxist politics is also undemonstrable but "has more than any other politics explored the labyrinth" (p. 6). Because: it tried to unite judgment/discipline, present/future, reality/values through a single historical factor — the proletariat — which is both power and value. Against: the attempt fails; "these opposites decay without one another, the attempt at a revolutionary resolution destroys one of the two series" (p. 8).

  3. Claim: The book's five chapters trace the adventures — failed attempts — of the dialectic, concluding in the Epilogue with "the liquidation of the revolutionary dialectic" (p. 7).

Ch 1 — The Crisis of Understanding (Weber)

  1. Claim: Weber's liberalism is of a new kind: it legitimizes its adversaries; it admits history is the natural seat of violence; it perseveres to become law through a history in which it is not predestined. Because: truth always leaves a margin of doubt; the past is known only through ideal types, which must be understood as partial. Against: the "previous liberalism" that considered itself the natural law of things.

  2. Claim: The relationship between Protestantism and capitalism is an elective affinity (Wahlverwandtschaft), not a causal derivation: each element of a "historical imagination" draws the others to confirm an outline of rationality none alone embodies (pp. 13–18). Because: history works "not according to a model" but through "the advent of meaning"; Franklin's text expresses a work ethic whose "useful" had first to be sanctified.

  3. Claim: Historical understanding is a methodical extension of the understanding we have of our own present — it is not subordinate to timeless truth; "scientific history is itself a product of history, a moment of 'rationalization'" (p. 21). Because: the investigator is inside history, but this circle is not vicious — it is "the postulate of all historical thought." Against: the Kantian ideal of a truth without point of view.

  4. Claim: There is no philosophical end of history. "There is no situation without hope; but there is no choice which terminates these deviations or which can exhaust man's inventive power and put an end to his history. There are only advances" (p. 23).

  5. Claim: Weber stops short of what Lukács will take up — he does not pursue "the relativization of relativism to its limits." But it is only by starting from Weber that "the adventures of the dialectic of the past thirty-five years can be understood" (p. 29).

Ch 2 — "Western" Marxism (Lukács)

  1. Claim: Lukács's 1923 History and Class Consciousness inherits Weber's problem (relativism without truth-collapse) and radicalizes it: he relativizes the notions of subject and object themselves and thereby "regains a sort of totality" — not pre-given but the work of totalization (pp. 30–32).

  2. Claim: Capitalism is "the socialization of society" (Vergesellschaftung der Gesellschaft, p. 37) — the historical fact in which society tends toward transparency, becomes a center from which it can be thought. Because: unlike precapitalist societies (held together by "interworlds" of blood, sex, myth), capitalism places all its members under the common denominator of work; ideologies can in principle be recognized. Against: mechanical conceptions of development.

  3. Claim — textually critical: Marxism's intelligible nuclei of history appear as symbolic matrices that have no pre-existence and can, for a shorter or longer time, influence history itself and then disappear (p. 41). [Cross-book significance: this is the Weberian-historical deployment of symbolic-matrix, simultaneous with the concept's psychoanalytic use in the 1954–55 course.]

  4. Claim: The proletariat is "the intention of totality" (p. 44) — neither subject nor object but praxis, a third mode of historical existence (Weber's objective possibility). The Party is "the mystery of reason" (p. 51) — communication in which proletarian praxis finds critical elaboration.

  5. Claim: Truth in this perspective is not correspondence but nonfalsity — "the maximum guarantee against error that men may demand and get" (p. 52). The Stimmung of Marxism is "the conviction of being, not in the truth, but on the threshold of truth" (p. 53).

Ch 3 — Pravda (Lenin)

  1. Claim: Lenin's 1908 Materialism and Empiriocriticism reinstates a pre-Hegelian, pre-Kantian "gnostilological question" — placing the knowing subject outside the fabric of history and exempting Marxism from self-criticism (pp. 59–65). Against: Lukács and "Western Marxism" (Korsch's term).

  2. Claim — cross-book significance: What Marxism lacks, and what it needs to think its own failure, is the concept of institution — "the sphere proper to history, which develops neither according to causal laws, like a second nature, but always in dependence on its meaning, nor according to eternal ideas, but rather by bringing more or less under its laws events which, as far as it is concerned, are fortuitous and by letting itself be changed by their suggestions... is, in modern language, the sphere of symbolism, and Marx's thought was to find its outlet here" (p. 89).

  3. Claim: The conflict between dialectical and realist Marxism is already in Marx himself — the transition from the young Marx's "destroy philosophy by realizing it" to the older Marx's "scientific socialism" is where philosophical dialectic is surrendered.

Ch 4 — The Dialectic in Action (Trotsky)

  1. Claim: Trotsky's practical dialectic (end and means constantly change places, "action is the pedagogy of the masses") is admirable, but inconsistent with his underlying naturalism — and it is the naturalism that wins when he faces the rise of Stalin.

  2. Claim — the core thesis: Trotsky's blindness was not accidental but a philosophical necessity: the materialistic dialectic "does not envisage" a derailment of the dialectic in which the Party born of the proletariat turns against it. Because: Marxism placed the dialectic in the matter of the social whole and in the proletariat as Selbstaufhebung; it postulates that the revolution cannot betray itself.

  3. Claim: Revolutions in backward countries are not anticipations of the canonical revolution but have an essential prematureness (pp. 116–117). MP's analogy: "an infant's birth is premature: not that, had it come later, it would have been 'fully natural' but, on the contrary, that, however late and well prepared it may be, birth is always a wrenching-forth and a re-creation."

  4. Claim: There is "no pure or continued negation in things themselves" (p. 114). Marx sustained the illusion of a realized negation only by making the noncapitalistic future an absolute Other.

Ch 5 — Sartre and Ultrabolshevism

  1. Claim: Sartre's Les Communistes et la paix defends communism on reasons that are the refutation of Marxist-Leninist justification: "Sartre founds communist action precisely by refusing any productivity to history and by making history, insofar as it is intelligible, the immediate result of our volitions" (p. 122). Therefore: if Sartre is right, Sartre is wrong — for communism as Sartre defends it is not what communists claim it to be. MP names Sartre's position ultrabolshevism (p. 125).

  2. Claim: Sartre's philosophy of the cogito + the Other makes him unable to accept a middle order: "the social is not articulated relationships but immediate or magical relationships of our gazes" (p. 178). Where orthodox Marxism places the dialectic in the in-itself of "second nature," Sartre denies the dialectic altogether and grounds action on pure action, ex nihilo creation.

  3. Claim — the critical move: "The question is to know whether, as Sartre says, there are only men and things or whether there is also the interworld, which we call history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made. If one sticks to the dichotomy, men... are condemned to an incredible tension" (p. 200). MP defends a mediation of personal relationships through the world of human symbols (p. 200).

  4. Claim — distinction of two orders: Action of unveiling (the writer's domain) and action of governing (the politician's domain) are distinct orders with distinct rhythms. Sartre's commitment demands they be one; Marxism tried to unite them in the Party; but they are "two layers of a single symbolic life" (p. 201).

  5. Claim — Sartre's commitment is Obscurius per clarum: one chooses principles and particular points without seeing where they lead. MP proposes instead Clarum per obscurius: "a praxis... [that] agrees to commit itself to more than what it knows of a party and of history... not to be false" (p. 219).

  6. Claim: The proper alternative is a-communism: not anticommunism, not fellow-traveling, but "agnosticism as a positive behavior, a task" that forces one to have a positive politics (p. 209).

Epilogue

  1. Claim — the new definition of dialectic: "Dialectic is not the idea of a reciprocal action... There is dialectic only in that type of being in which a junction of subjects occurs, being which is... their common residence, the place of their exchange and of their reciprocal interpretation. The dialectic does not, as Sartre claims, provide finality... rather it provides the global and primordial cohesion of a field of experience wherein each element opens onto the others" (p. 203). Dialectic is "a thought with several centers and several points of entry" that "needs time to explore them all" (p. 204).

  2. Claim — the slogan: "Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes" (p. 207). "It is no accident that all known revolutions have degenerated: it is because as established regimes they can never be what they were as movements; precisely because it succeeded and ended up as an institution, the historical movement is no longer itself: it 'betrays' and 'disfigures' itself in accomplishing itself."

  3. Claim — the program: MP proposes "a sort of new liberalism" that (a) refuses the dictatorship of the proletariat, (b) accepts revolutionary movements as legitimate pressure, (c) takes Parliament as "the only known institution that guarantees a minimum of opposition and of truth" (p. 225), and (d) defines a noncommunist left by its double position: posing social problems in terms of struggle and refusing the dictatorship.

  4. Claim — MP's self-revision: The Korean War destroyed the margin on which the 1947 "Marxist wait-and-see" position depended. "This Marxism which remains true whatever it does, which does without proofs and verifications, is not a philosophy of history — it is Kant in disguise, and it is Kant again that we ultimately find in the concept of revolution as absolute action" (p. 232). The Epilogue supersedes humanism-in-extension.

Key Findings

  • Politics has two modes — understanding (partial, case-by-case) and reason (totalizing) — and both are undemonstrable; Marxism is the most developed but not exempt.
  • Weber is the precursor of a serious dialectic; his recognition of understanding's limits is the beginning of a post-dogmatic philosophy of history.
  • Lukács's History and Class Consciousness is the most rigorous attempt at a Weberian Marxism; its failure to hold praxis as neither subject nor object marks the limit of revolutionary Marxism.
  • The "derailment of the dialectic" is unthinkable for Marxism because Marxism places the dialectic in the object — this explains Trotsky's blindness to Stalinism until too late.
  • Sartre's defense of communism is ultrabolshevism — it abandons every Marxist warrant while keeping every Bolshevik demand.
  • The institution / interworld / symbolism is the middle order both Lenin's gnosticism and Sartre's cogito deny.
  • Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes; a post-revolutionary politics is a "new liberalism" defined by permanent opposition.

Methodology (if applicable)

MP's method here is immanent genealogy: he reconstructs each position (Weber, Lukács, Lenin, Trotsky, Sartre) by reading its own best texts, locates the internal fault-line where the position fails by its own criteria, and builds the next chapter on that failure. No chapter refutes its predecessor from outside; each diagnoses the next crisis that emerges from the preceding attempt. The result is a history of the dialectic that tracks how the dialectic loses itself by naturalizing, by objectifying, and finally by subjectifying.

A notable secondary technique: MP reads political texts as philosophical texts and philosophical texts as political acts. Materialism and Empiriocriticism is read as philosophy with political stakes; Being and Nothingness is read as a political declaration.

Concepts Developed

Concepts Referenced

  • symbolic-matrix — "symbolic matrices which have no pre-existence" deployed at p. 41 in Weberian context, simultaneous with the 1954–55 course's psychoanalytic use.
  • institution — the 1955 polemical deployment at p. 89 names institution as "the sphere proper to history" between nature and ideas; this is the political counterpart to the 1954–55 course.
  • action-at-a-distance — the 1955 political ancestor at p. 217: "commitment is action at a distance, politics by proxy." Predates the Signs Introduction.
  • humanism-in-extension — the 1947 position this book revises. The Epilogue acknowledges the 1955 rupture explicitly.
  • two-historicities — the movement/regime contrast resonates with advent/event.
  • hyper-dialectic — the Epilogue's definition of dialectic is a political-historical ancestor of the 1959–61 ontological formulation.
  • good-ambiguity — the Epilogue's claim that "equivocalness ceases to be duplicity and complicity only when it is avowed" (p. 232) resonates with the later concept.
  • philosophy-of-reflection — Sartre and the "Kant in disguise" of Marxism are both diagnosed in philosophy-of-reflection terms.
  • conditioned-freedom — MP's commitment against Sartre's in Ch 5 is the political register of the 1945 break.
  • cartesian-oscillation — Sartre is read as Cartesian: "For Sartre, as for Descartes, the principle of changing oneself rather than the order of things..." (p. 217).
  • intentional-transgression — presupposed in the interworld argument.
  • lateral-universal — implicit in the Epilogue's account of a non-subsumptive universality.
  • seinsgeschichte — in the background (MP reads Weber and Marxism against the horizon of destinal history).

Key Passages

"We now know that subject and object, conscience and history, present and future, judgment and discipline, all these opposites, decay without one another, that the attempt at a revolutionary resolution destroys one of the two series, and that we must look for something else." (Preface, p. 8)

"Truth and freedom are of another order than strife and cannot subsist without strife. It is equally essential to them to legitimize their adversaries and to confront them." (Ch 1, p. 9)

"These intelligible nuclei of history are typical ways of treating natural being, of responding to others and to death. They appear at the point where man and the givens of nature or of the past meet, arising as symbolic matrices which have no pre-existence and which can, for a longer or a shorter time, influence history itself and then disappear, not by external forces but through an internal disintegration or because one of their secondary elements becomes predominant and changes their nature." (Ch 1, p. 41)

"There is, Weber says, an elective affinity between the elements of a historical totality." (Ch 1, p. 17)

"Lack of distance from oneself, from things, and from others is the professional disease of academic circles and of intellectuals." (Ch 1, p. 28)

"the Stimmung of Lukács, and, we believe, of Marxism, is thus the conviction of being, not in the truth, but on the threshold of truth, which is, at the same time, very near, indicated by all the past and all the present, and at an infinite distance in a future which is to be made." (Ch 2, p. 77)

"Marxism focuses everything through the perspective of the proletariat, it focuses on a principle of universal strife and intensifies human questioning instead of ending it." (Ch 2, p. 81)

"In order to understand the logic and the shifts of history, its meaning and what, within it, resists meaning, they still had to conceptualize the sphere proper to history, the institution, which develops neither according to causal laws, like a second nature, but always in dependence on its meaning, nor according to eternal ideas, but rather by bringing more or less under its laws events which, as far as it is concerned, are fortuitous and by letting itself be changed by their suggestions... This order of 'things' which teaches 'relationships between persons', sensitive to all the heavy conditions which bind it to the order of nature, open to all that personal life can invent, is, in modern language, the sphere of symbolism, and Marx's thought was to find its outlet here." (Ch 3, p. 89)

"One is then at that sublime point which we have mentioned several times. Trotsky always draws his perspectives from these perfect moments." (Ch 4, p. 114)

"revolutionary society has its weight, its positivity, and... it is therefore not the absolute Other." (Ch 4, p. 115)

"the ruin of the dialectic is accomplished openly with Sartre and clandestinely with the communists." (Ch 5, p. 123)

"The question is to know whether, as Sartre says, there are only men and things or whether there is also the interworld, which we call history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made. If one sticks to the dichotomy, men, as the place where all meaning arises, are condemned to an incredible tension." (Ch 5, p. 200)

"To recognize literature and politics as distinct activities is perhaps finally the only way to be as faithful to action as to literature." (Ch 5, p. 201)

"Today, as yesterday, commitment is action at a distance, politics by proxy, a way of putting ourselves right with the world rather than entering it." (Ch 5, p. 217)

"Action is another commitment, both more demanding and more fragile: it obliges one always to bear more than what is promised or owed, and at the same time it is susceptible to failure because it addresses itself to others as they are, to the history we are making and they are making, and because it does not relate to principles and particular points but to an enterprise which we put ourselves into entirely, refusing it nothing, not even our criticism, which is part of the action and which is the proof of our commitment." (Ch 5, p. 219)

"There is dialectic only in that type of being in which a junction of subjects occurs, being which is not only a spectacle that each subject presents to itself for its own benefit but which is rather their common residence, the place of their exchange and of their reciprocal interpretation. The dialectic... provides the global and primordial cohesion of a field of experience wherein each element opens onto the others. It is always conceived as the expression or truth of an experience in which the commerce of subjects with one another and with being was previously instituted." (Epilogue, p. 203)

"Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes. Thus the question arises whether there is not more of a future in a regime that does not intend to remake history from the ground up but only to change it and whether this is not the regime that one must look for, instead of once again entering the circle of revolution." (Epilogue, p. 207)

"Parliament is the only known institution that guarantees a minimum of opposition and of truth." (Epilogue, p. 225)

"This Marxism which remains true whatever it does, which does without proofs and verifications, is not a philosophy of history — it is Kant in disguise, and it is Kant again that we ultimately find in the concept of revolution as absolute action." (Epilogue, p. 232)

What's Not Obvious

Three things the book says that a conventional summary would miss.

1. "Symbolic matrices" is deployed here (1955) in a Weberian-historical context, not only in the psychoanalytic-institutional register of the 1954–55 course. At p. 41, discussing Weber on Protestantism and capitalism, MP writes: "These intelligible nuclei of history... arising as symbolic matrices which have no pre-existence and which can, for a longer or a shorter time, influence history itself and then disappear, not by external forces but through an internal disintegration." This is the macro-historical twin of the "symbolic matrix" the 1954–55 course elaborates for Frau B, Dora, and the Oedipal emergence. The wiki's symbolic-matrix page was scoped to the course; this passage shows the concept is transverse. Either the 1955 book reflects the course's vocabulary into the historical domain or the direction runs the other way — either way, the concept is not "psychoanalytic." It is already ontological.

2. "Institution" appears here as a polemical concept against Marxist realism — a parallel development to the 1954–55 course, but with a distinct political target. At p. 89, having just argued that Lenin's gnosticism and the realist Marxism it grounds cannot think the dialectic, MP writes that Marxism still lacks "the sphere proper to history, the institution, which develops neither according to causal laws, like a second nature, but always in dependence on its meaning, nor according to eternal ideas... This order of 'things' which teaches 'relationships between persons'... is, in modern language, the sphere of symbolism, and Marx's thought was to find its outlet here." The 1954–55 course treats institution as the answer to Husserl's constitution. Adventures of the Dialectic treats institution as the answer to Marxist realism. These are the same concept at work on two fronts. See institution for the Husserl-facing development; this book is the Marx-facing development, and they should be read together.

3. The closing dialogue is structurally Platonic — and that structure carries MP's self-revision. The Epilogue ends with an italicized exchange between an unnamed interlocutor accusing MP of "renouncing being a revolutionary" and MP replying that today to be a revolutionary is "to accept a State of which one knows very little or to rely upon a historical grace of which one knows even less." The device is a last-minute retreat from authorial voice into dialogue — a move MP does not make elsewhere in the book. Its function is to stage the revision. The 1947 Marxist MP is audible in the interlocutor; the 1954 a-communist MP is the respondent. By dialogizing the self-revision at the last page, MP refuses to close his own argument; the dialogue is the form the Epilogue takes because MP's own position is still in motion. This is worth registering because the later MP's "the question is open" and "on the threshold of truth" formulations (cf. interrogation) are structurally continuous with this Epilogue's final gesture.

Critique / Limitations

  • The "new liberalism" of the Epilogue is programmatically rather than argumentatively defended. MP himself acknowledges that "this is not 'a solution'" (p. 226) and that "a system of conscious lives will never admit of a solution the way a crossword puzzle does." The political shape of the noncommunist left is sketched but not developed; its viability in 1955 France was always in question.
  • The book reads Sartre's position as a philosophical position more than as a political position, which may be unfair to Sartre's occasional pragmatism in the Temps Modernes editorials and in Le Fantôme de Staline (1956). MP acknowledges in the Epilogue that future Sartre texts might change the assessment.
  • The treatment of Lenin in Ch 3 is considerably thinner than the treatment of Lukács in Ch 2 or Trotsky in Ch 4. MP relies heavily on Korsch and Löwith for his characterization, and the passages cited from Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism are selective.
  • The genealogical reading of Trotsky in Ch 4 depends on Lefort's 1948 Les Temps Modernes essay; readers who doubt Lefort's framing will doubt the chapter's most distinctive claims.
  • MP's Weber is, as Weber-scholars have sometimes noted, more phenomenological than historical — the "symbolic matrices" and "elective affinities" readings emphasize retrospective meaning over causal explanation in a way Weber himself was more ambivalent about.

Connections

  • revises humanism-in-extension — the Epilogue is the explicit abandonment of the 1947 "Marxist wait-and-see" position.
  • extends institution — the Ch 3 polemical deployment (p. 89) is the political-Marxist twin of the 1954–55 course's Husserl-facing development.
  • extends symbolic-matrix — the Ch 1 Weberian-context deployment (p. 41) shows the concept operating in the macro-historical register.
  • anticipates action-at-a-distance — the Ch 5 deployment (p. 217) predates the Signs Introduction.
  • anticipates hyper-dialectic — the Epilogue's definition of dialectic (p. 203) is a substantial political-historical ancestor.
  • anticipates two-historicities — the movement/regime contrast resonates with advent/event.
  • critiques Sartre's philosophy of commitment; contains the coinage ultrabolshevism.
  • is the political-public-break complement of sartre-1984-merleau-ponty-vivant — Sartre's 1961 manuscript-draft eulogy reads MP's pre-1955 silent Marxist temptation and silent abandonment (manuscript p. 150) as preceding the public Adventures-polemic. If Sartre 1961 is right, Adventures (1955) and Humanisme et terreur (1947) are not the first MP-statements on Marxism but the public-philosophical registrations of an earlier silent-and-private engagement.
  • reads Weber as the precursor of a serious dialectic and a model for "Weberian Marxism."
  • reads Lukács as Weber's student who radicalizes relativism into a dialectic of praxis.
  • diagnoses Lenin's 1908 gnostilological realism as the origin of Marxist orthodoxy.
  • reads Trotsky as the exemplary case of the dialectic's practical derailment.
  • contrasts with chouraqui-2021-body-and-embodiment on the political register; Chouraqui extends MP's critique of pure action to the phenomenology of power.
  • is Marx-facing companion to merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity — the 1954–55 courses are the Husserl-facing companion; both are written simultaneously.

Synthetic Claims

  • live claim, see claims#mp-1947-1955-break-evidential-weight-of-contingency — the 1947 Humanism and Terror "Marxist wait-and-see" position and the 1955 Adventures of the Dialectic "new liberalism" are not opposed political doctrines but two operations of the same underlying analytic of action under the contingency of the future. The Epilogue's explicit self-revision — "this Marxism… is Kant in disguise" (p. 232) — is the public registration of a wager that fails empirically (the Korean War destroys the margin), not the abandonment of the analytic that authorizes the wager. Historical responsibility, the agent's being-bound-to-the-role-as-read-by-the-inheritors, and the structural impurity of political action are preserved across the break; what changes is which political form best honors them.
  • candidate claim, see claims#h-and-t-anticipates-sartre-mp-rupture — H&T's 1947 articulation of historical responsibility as the agent's structural ownership of the role-as-read-by-the-inheritors already presupposes a critique of voluntarist responsibility that becomes explicit in AD Ch 5's Sartre engagement. The 1955 public political break with Sartre is not the first registration of the divergence but the politicization of a philosophical difference (voluntarist first-personal responsibility vs. historical inter-personal responsibility) that H&T held in latent form. Held at candidate because attribution of latent-content to H&T requires sustained Sartre-side textual cross-reference; the seminal Sartre engagement in AD Ch 5 is the explicit articulation that licenses the retrospective reading.
  • live claim, see claims#mp-silent-marxist-temptation — Sartre's 1961 manuscript claims MP underwent a silent Marxist temptation before WWII that was abandoned in solitary disappointment. Bears on AdV because it complicates the standard "abandonment-of-Marxism" reading of AdV: the abandonment can be read as the doctrinal-Party form being shed while the structural Marxist orientation is retained. In tension with claims#mp-marxism-unabandonable (candidate) — the two are not contradictory if "abandoned the temptation" means abandoned the doctrinal-Party form while retaining structural orientation, but this needs articulation.