ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three works by Beauvoir, written over the period 1943-49. These are: two essays on ethics, Pyrrhus et Cineas and The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Second Sex. Early in 1943, when Being and Nothingness had been completed but was not yet published, Beauvoir was invited to contribute to a series of books on existentialism. Beauvoir’s notion of society in The Ethics of Ambiguity is sketchy and underdeveloped. However, it still offers a considerable advance in overcoming the atomistic notion implicit in Being and Nothingness. Neither Pyrrhus et Cineas nor The Ethics of Ambiguity is a work explicitly about Marxism or socialism. But the call for a ‘radical humanism’ which is the unifying theme of both works provides the standpoint from which Beauvoir elaborates important elements of an existential critique of orthodox Marxism. The Second Sex, published in 1949, offers a painstaking case-study of oppression, that of women by men.
