Introduction

Abstract

In the late 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and other members of the team that edited the journal, Les temps modernes, advocated what they called a “third way” in politics: they sought to develop a democratic socialist path, to delineate a middle way between capitalism and Soviet-style communism. Given this project, the journal was anti-American but also kept a certain distance from the Communists, offering them only what it described as “critical support.” However, with the hardening of the lines of the Cold War, notably after the outbreak of hostilities in Korea in 1950 (which brought growing fears of a nuclear war), Sartre became convinced that no effective political space remained for a “third way.” From 1952, when he wrote the first part of ...