History, politics, and the liquidation of the dialectic: was the 1955 break with Sartre principled, and is dialectical politics possible without sliding into either ultra-bolshevism or liberal proceduralism?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The 1955 break with Sartre in Adventures of the Dialectic was principled and was continuous with the dialectical politics I had been working out since Humanism and Terror (1947). Dialectical politics requires patience with the contingency of the historical process — the proletariat as the bearer of meaning whose meaning must be worked out through the actual sequence of events rather than read off from a pre-determined necessity.

Sartre's 1952 ultra- bolshevism in the Communists and Peace essays — the position that revolutionary commitment requires adherence to the French Communist Party as the moral test of seriousness — liquidates the dialectic by making the Party the external authority that can pre-determine the meaning of historical action. The break was philosophical before it was personal; the personal rupture followed from the philosophical divergence that had been developing across the late 1940s.¹²³⁴

Sources

1. He thus did not forget the struggle. He said that it begins at the level of production, that this struggle, which is the proletariat's condition, is the ground or ballast of its political action, and that therefore the Other cannot, as Sartre says, "at any minute" pulverize the proletariat. political facts do not count in the movement of the masses?

   Adventures of the Dialectic, p. 149

2. VIII, nos. 84-85 (October-November, 1952), pp. 695-763; and Part III appeared in Vol. IX, no. 101 (April, 1964), pp. 1731-1819. "Réponse a Claude Lefort" appeared in Vol. VIII, no. 89 (April, 1953), pp. 1571— 162g. They were later published in book form—"Les Communistes et la paix" in Situations VI: Problémes du marxisme, 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp.

   Adventures of the Dialectic, pp. 121–122

3. At least it was—to speak as Sartre does, but without smiling—the Marxist "something or other." 68. The Marxists had a word (which is no longer used except Titually) for designating the line which takes into account the objective situation as well as the spontaneous reactions.

   Adventures of the Dialectic, p. 157

4. And yet he has elsewhere said, profoundly, that the whole of the perceived world is probable. Let us add that that is its way of existing: the probable is another name for the real, it is the modality of what exists.

   Adventures of the Dialectic, pp. 141–142

Where the argument is made

• Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem (1947) — the case for dialectical patience with revolutionary violence
• Sense and Non-Sense (1948) essays "The War Has Taken Place," "Marxism and Philosophy," "The Yogi and the Proletarian" on the postwar political situation
• Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) Ch 5 "Sartre and Ultrabolshevism" — the explicit 1955 break with Sartre
• Signs essays on the political and historical questions (1960)

How the argument was received

settled