Volume 15, Number 4 · September 3, 1970
Obsolete Therefore Instructive
By Leszek Kolakowski
Humanism and Terror
by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, translated and with Notes by John O'Neill
Beacon Press, 189 pp., $2.95 (paper)
The ambiguity of this book[*] is intentional and self-conscious. It is an ambiguity, however, which is not meant to lie in Merleau-Ponty's own thinking but in History itself, which he is writing about. He traces this ambiguity in the history of communism. Not, it must be said, communism as we may now know it, or indeed as it was, but as Merleau-Ponty had observed it in 1946 and 1947, on the threshold of the cold war—before the coup in Prague, before the Berlin crisis and the Korean War, at a time when there was frequent talk in the West about preventive atomic war against the USSR.
Review, 2174 words
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