Critique of Dialectical Reason

by Jean-Paul Sartre

Blurb

Critique of Dialectical Reason is a 1960 book by Jean-Paul Sartre in which he further develops the existentialist Marxism he first expounded in his essay Search for a Method. Critique of Dialectical Reason and Search for a Method were written as a common manuscript, with Sartre intending the former to logically precede the latter. Sartre's second large-scale philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness having been the first, Critique of Dialectical Reason has been seen by some as an abandonment of Sartre's original existentialism, while others have seen it as a continuation and elaboration of his earlier work. It was translated into English by Alan Sheridan-Smith.
The first volume, "Theory of Practical Ensembles", was first published in English in 1976; a corrected English translation was published in 1991, based on the revised French edition of 1985. The second volume, "The Intelligibility of History", was published posthumously in French in 1985 with an English translation by Quintin Hoare appearing in 1991.
Sartre is quoted as having said this was the principal of his two philosophical works for which he wished to be remembered.

First Published

1960

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