That hopeless dilemma between freedom and determinism is not an accident of twentieth-century European politics, Merleau-Ponty now argued, but the inevitable consequence of Marxism itself, which in truth never had at its disposal the theoretical resources for reconciling human beings with history. Trying to be a Marxist in the middle of the twentieth century, Merleau-POnty concludes, is a much an anachronism as trying to be a Platonist or a Cartesian. "Are you or are you not a Cartesian? The question does not make much sense" (S 17, 11). Like Plato's dialogues and Descartes's Meditations, Marx's works have become classics in the humanist tradition, they pose essential questions and offer deep insights of enduring philosophical significance, but they are no more keys for understanding contemporary political life than the texts of ancient and medieval metaphysics are tools for the advancement of modern science. Actual political and social history have "so completely shifted the perspectives of proletarian revolution that there is no longer much more reason to preserve these perspectives and to force the facts into them than there is to place them in the context of Plato's Repulic" ( AD 133, 93)
Taylor Carman
