Sartre never responded to this attack, except by writing theCritique of
Dialectical Reason. But in her equally intemperate reply, Beauvoir
accuses Merleau-Ponty of writing in bad faith because he was aware that
Sartre was in the process of revising the social ontology ofBN, which he
admitted was its weakest part.^12
Search for a Method(“Question of Method”)
In November of 1956 , Sartre and Beauvoir accepted an invitation to
the Polish Embassy where they met Jan Kott and Jerzy Lisowski, the
editors of a Polish journal,Tw o ́rczoe ́c ́. As part of an issue on current
French culture, the editors asked Sartre to write an essay on the state
of existentialism in 1957. The result was “Marxism i Egzystencjalizm”
(April 1957 ), published as “Questions de me ́thod" inLTM(September–
October 1957 ), altered considerably so as to adapt it to the “needs of French
readers” (SMxxxiv). Graced with an augmented preface and a diminished
title, “Question [in the singular] de me ́thode” appeared as a quasi-
introduction to bookiof theCritiquein 1960. The “one question” which
Sartre is posing here and in theCritiqueis “Do we have today the means
to constitute a structural, historical anthropology?” (SMxxxiv). Motiv-
ating Sartre’s concern are the twin themes of (a kind of)Humanismand
(a kind of)Ethics. We have witnessed their directive role in much of his
previous work and shall recognize their guiding presence in what follows.
In the 1950 s the philosophical challenge was to offer a theory of
human life (anthropology) that respected the claims of an aggressive
“structuralism” that was spatial in its imagery and synchronic in its
argument, such as he witnessed in the work of Le ́vi-Strauss, Althusser,
Barthes and others with the reality of History (with a HegelianH)ina
diachronic, totalizing sense.^13 In what is his second major work, Sartre is
(^12) Simone de Beauvoir, “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartrianism,”International. Studies in
Philosophy 21 ( 1989 ): 3 – 48. Her original essay appeared inLTM(June–July 1955 ) to coincide
13 with the publication ofAdventuresin June.
One of the definitions of “anthropologie” is “Ensemble des sciences qui e ́tudient l’homme”
(Collins-Robert French dictionary). This contest between structuralism and history, in the
context of the “man” of the “human sciences,” is discussed throughoutSFHRii(see index,
sv “Anthropology”). Michel Foucault famously exhibited his animus against the “human
sciences” when he called for “a method of analysis purged of anthropologism” ( 52 ). In
response to the accusation that he was murdering traditional humanist history with his
322 A theory of history:Search for a Method