Maurice Merleau-Ponty on Violence and Marxism

This article aims to examine the main tenets of Merleau-Ponty’s political thought. To this end, his early Marxism and his later support for Liberalism are contextualised within Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical work, put into relation and both criticised. The focus of the discussion is shifted onto the role and locus of the political thinker in order to evaluate the scope of a political project such as Marxism might have. It is divided into three sections. The first explores the themes of the philosophy developed until the early 1950s. The two sections that follow aim to critique his later work and to integrate and relate its arguments to earlier writings.