Introduction: Merleau-Ponty and Social Thought

Abstract

This is a study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s social thought, its often troubled relations with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy, and its equally ambivalent stance toward those approaches in the human sciences which take Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics as their point of departure. It seeks to do justice to one of the more complex and elusive figures in contemporary philosophy and social theory. By the time of his death, Merleau-Ponty was regarded as ‘the greatest of French phenomenologists’; yet his last writings questioned the very coherence of Husserl’s project.1 He built a case for Marx’s philosophy of history which is among the most subtle in the Marxian tradition; and he produced one of the most powerful and merciless critiques Marxism has ever received.2 He was the first French philosopher to appreciate the importance of Saussure’s linguistics; but even his admirers admit that the things he purported to find in Saussure are simply not there to be found.3 He was the author of a corpus of works whose relevance for contemporary social theory has been matched only by the striking indifference which they all too often have received.4 He was and remains an enigmatic and compelling thinker. As one of his most able readers once confessed, ‘Thinking about him produces a kind of verbal vertigo.’5