One of 14 copies on vélin pur fil (no. 10) — the only paper used.
The book collects articles published in Les Temps modernes in 1946 and 1947 under the title “Le Yogi et le Prolétaire.” Written in response to Arthur Koestler’s analyses in Le Zéro et l’Infini and Le Yogi et le Commissaire, it revisits in particular the Moscow trials and Bukharin’s confessions. Merleau-Ponty still defends the Marxist revolutionary perspective, while examining the violence exercised in its name in the USSR.
“Humanisme et terreur is therefore not merely a history lesson, an archival document, a postwar testimony. It is a great lesson in applied political philosophy, whose method, in a time of growing ideological confrontation, can and must be remembered.” (Roger Pol-Droit, in Le Monde, July 2008, on the centenary of the philosopher’s birth; Merleau-Ponty died in 1961).