ABSTRACT
In 1945, together with Simone De Beauvoir, they founded the journal Les Temps modernes, and Jean-Paul Sartre was deeply impressed, even radicalized, by the political essays Maurice Merleau-Ponty published there and then reprinted in 1947 under the title Humanism and Terror. And yet that approach remained obscure and problematic in his early political writings, emerging more clearly only as he became increasingly disenchanted not just with communism but with Marx’s theory of history. Rubashov’s nihilistic identification with the regime and his consequent robotic self-liquidation serve as a hard-hitting indictment of what Arthur Koestler considered the total moral and ideological bankruptcy of communism. Merleau-Ponty’s disenchantment with communism grew in part with reports of the vastness and inhumanity of forced collectivization in the USSR: arrests, executions, mass starvation in the Ukraine, ten million prisoners in labor camps by 1950. Merleau-Ponty replies that Bukharin’s demise, the Moscow Trials, and revolutionary politics are all more complex and ambiguous than Koestler would like to admit.
