Editing Critique of Dialectical Reason (section)

==Background==
In the wake of ''[[Being and Nothingness]]'', Sartre became concerned with reconciling his concept of freedom with concrete social subjects and was strongly influenced in this regard by his friend and associate [[Maurice Merleau-Ponty]], whose writings in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including ''Sense and Non-Sense'', were pioneering a path towards a synthesis of [[existentialism]] and [[Marxism]].<ref name="Poster">{{cite book |author=Poster, Mark |title=Sartre's Marxism |publisher=Cambridge University Press |location=New York |year=1982 |pages=12–13 |isbn=0-5212-4559-1 }}</ref> Merleau-Ponty, however, then became increasingly skeptical of Marxism, culminating in his ''[[Adventures of the Dialectic]]'' (1955), while Sartre continued to grow more engaged with Marxist thought. Though Sartre had, by 1957, decisively broken with the [[Soviet Union]] and "official" Marxism in the wake of the Soviet suppression of the [[Hungarian Revolution of 1956|Hungarian uprising]], he nonetheless declared Marxism "the philosophy of our time"<ref name="Search" /> and stated the need to resuscitate it from the moribund state that Soviet dogma had left it in, a need he attempted to answer by writing ''Critique of Dialectical Reason''. The conflict between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on this issue ended their long-standing friendship, though Ronald Aronson states that, in part, ''Critique of Dialectical Reason'' was Sartre's answer to his former friend and political mentor's attack on Marxism.<ref name="Aronson">{{cite book |author=Aronson, Ronald |title=Sartre's Second Critique |publisher=University of Chicago Press |location=Chicago |year=1987 |pages=17, 24 |isbn=0-2260-2805-4 }}</ref>

More generally, ''Critique of Dialectical Reason'' was written following the rejection of Communism by leftist French intellectuals sympathetic to Marxism, a process that not only ended Sartre's friendship with Merleau-Ponty but with [[Albert Camus]] as well. The work was part of Sartre's attempt to learn "the lessons of history" from these events, and to try to create an adequate Marxist history and sociology.<ref name="O'Neill">{{cite book |author=O'Neill, John |title=The Communicative Body: Studies in Communicative Philosophy, Politics and Sociology |publisher=Northwestern University Press |location=Evanston |year=1989 |pages=140–141 |isbn=0-8101-0802-X }}</ref>