McBride - Beauvoir and Marx

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Beauvoir and Marx

William L. McBride

For someone like me whose early exposure to philosophy as a student occurred inthe United States of the mid-twentieth century, when the heavy Cold War atmo-sphere so well described by Simone de Beauvoir in The Mandarins1was still quiteprevalent (though somewhat modified by virtue of the real though tenuous thawresulting from Nikita Khrushchevs acknowledgment of Stalinist atrocities), it isdifficult to realize just how infrequently the names of Marx or even Hegel had everbeen mentioned in the institutions of higher education that she attended duringthe late 1920s. We students of the next generation took it for granted that the

existentialists, the label that had by then become irrevocably attached to Beauvoirand her associates, were part of a Continental European tradition going back tothose nineteenth-century figures. True, some doubted Marxs credentials as a realphilosopher, but, despite the obvious role that the invocation of his name playedin the pronouncements of Communist parties worldwide, the study of his ideas (ifonly, all too often, under the rubric of Know your enemy!), was commonplace inAmerican universities in the late 1950s. But that had clearly not been the case at theSorbonne or the cole Normale of Beauvoirs student days, as she herself assertedon many later occasions, and as is evidenced by near-total absence of Marxs name

from the hundreds of pages of her diary from those years (a diary that contains atruly astonishing number of author names and book titles). She was, of course,already acquainted with the reality of the Communist Party and with some commit-ted Communists, but she simply failed, at least as all evidence suggests, to connectthis reality with the idea of Marx as a philosopher, or indeed as a relevant writer ofwhatever sort. And in reading her autobiographical writings produced over so manysubsequent years, in numerous sections of which one finds philosophical discus-sions and analyses, one cannot help but be struck by the continued relative dearthof references to Marx, despite the enormous and well-documented importance of

Communism and Communists during those same years.However, there is a very paradoxical aspect to this, an aspect that is epitomizedin one significant reference to Marxism (though, N.B., not to Marx himself) thatBeauvoir makes in reviewing the varied reactions, so many of them negative and


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hostile, that greeted the publication of The Second Sex: Our relations with theCommunists couldnt have been worse; all the same, my thesis [in The Second Sex]owed so much to Marxism and showed it in such a favorable light that I did at leastexpect some impartiality from them! (Beauvoir 1994, 190).2It should be notedimmediately that, while in this sentence Beauvoir seems simply to be equatingCommunists with Marxists, as so many ordinary people did at the time, and as theCommunists themselves preferred, she then goes on to speak of some non-StalinistMarxistswhose reactions, however, were equally negative. In short, there hasbeen little or no direct discussion of Marxs thought over many hundreds of pagesof texts, and yet there is a taken-for-granted assumption that her own thought wasdeeply indebted to Marxism. Moreover, whenever Beauvoir does refer in passingto Marx or Marxism in her later years, particularly in interviews, I find her quickgeneralizations to be almost invariably on-target.

In Beauvoirs more strictly philosophically oriented writings there are, in fact,three brief but serious discussions of Marx and Marxism that I propose to considerin turn. They occur in Pour une morale de lambigut (I have first cited the Frenchtitle because that of the English translation, The Ethics of Ambiguity, is so distortiveof its spirit), The Second Sex itself, and the long essay titled La pense de droite,aujourdhui. Then, in conclusion, I shall discuss the historical paradox, larger andmuch more important than the textual one, whereby Beauvoirs thinking, even ifwe accept at face value (as I think we should) her assertion of a debt to Marxism,in fact contributed in a major way to rethinking fundamental Marxist premises.

ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY

It is noteworthy that Beauvoir later criticized this book for, among other things,its idealistic tendencies, but for the moment let us set this aside. In any event, sheis clearly seeking, in this work, to move away from any such remaining tenden-cies, toward a philosophy focused on the given situationan emphasis that, as sheasserts, existentialism shares with Marxism, which she characterizes, interestinglyenough, as one form of radical humanism (Beauvoir 1994, 18). She of courseshares with Marxism a deep antipathy toward oppression, and she finds commoncause with Marx (mentioned by name), in various passages, concerning at least twoof her own books most central ideas: that freedom from oppression must cometo all human beings before it can be said that any individual is fully free; and thatethical actiondespite Beauvoirs awareness that Marx hesitated to use the languageof traditional moralityneeds to be oriented toward a future that is projected asopen and indefinite rather than as an end state. The negative side of her treatmentof Marx and Marxism revolves around one point above all: Marxisms alleged denialof the reality of human freedom at the ontological level.

There is a sense in which, Beauvoir says, Marxism emphasizes subjectivity, inthe tradition of Kant and Hegel. But at the same time, according to her, it putsso much stress on the determination of choices and actions by objective material


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conditions that Marxists are distrustful of bourgeois intellectuals who appear to besympathetic to their ideas, because by definition they, as bourgeois, are incapableof grasping the standpoint of the proletariat from the inside. Marxists, she claims,simply deny the reality of free choice, so strongly asserted by existentialists. She goesso far as to attribute to dialectical materialism a psychology of behavior (Beauvoir1994, 20). But, she goes on to say, it is counterintuitive (my word, not hers) tothink that there is no element of freedom involved in the choice, for example, tobecome a member of the Communist Party. Moreover, Marxists, in practice, oftendo admit the reality of freedom that they deny in theory. Indeed, as she points outwhen she returns to some of these issues later in the book, Marxists have been quiteaware, from early on, that it is sometimes a great struggle to develop within actualmembers of the proletariat the revolutionary consciousness that they theoreticallyshould have by virtue of their class status.

Beauvoir also shows here that she has some familiarity with the ideas ofLenin, as well as, of course, much experience in interacting with her Communistcontemporaries. Perhaps this goes some way toward explaining her point aboutMarxists distrust of bourgeois intellectuals, because such distrust was fairly com-mon in Communist circles at that time. Nevertheless, she would have done wellto say something more here about the capital role of bourgeois intellectuals withinthe entire Marxist tradition, beginning with Marx himself. As Marx (and Engels)pointedly observe in a famous paragraph in The Communist Manifesto, in obviousself-reference:

Finally, when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dis-solution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range ofold society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small sectionof the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class. . . .a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular,a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to thelevel of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.(Marx 1988, 64)

The wording of this text, especially of its conclusion, strongly implies that thoseCommunists who, according to Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity, maintainthat the bourgeois intellectual can only attain to a proletarian standpoint fromthe outside, by abstract recognition (Beauvoir 1957, 19) have not read their Marxcarefully enough, have not fully understood him. (As we shall see, she was in factwell aware of this.)

But can the same be said with respect to these same Communists denial of thereality of human freedom, even in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence tothe contrary? Ah, how many millions of words have been written and spoken onthis question of determinism in Marxist theory, beginning with Marx himself! Ido not intend to try to summarize them here. I shall merely note that, once again,


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Beauvoir was surely on solid ground in imputing such a determinist view, of a fairlyhard sort, to the contemporary Marxists with whom she was familiar; but shewas on somewhat shakier ground when imputing it, if indeed she intended to doso, to Marx himself. (Throughout this text, she refers much more frequently toMarxists than to Marx, and in a couple of those sentences in which she invokesMarxs name she actually contrasts him with the Marxists, though not directlyconcerning the question of the reality of freedom.) I shall further note that hercolleague Sartre, in the interview that he gave late in life for the Library of LivingPhilosophers, declared very unambiguously and in answer to several different ques-tions that he no longer considered himself a Marxist, as he once had, and referred tothe freedom that seems to be missing in Marxist thought (Sartre 1981, 21). Thus,his attempt to reconcile Marxism with existentialism, about which Beauvoir herselfhad never seemed quite so enthusiastic, eventually foundered in large measure onthis reef of freedom that had been central to her critique of Marxism in The Ethicsof Ambiguityso many years earlier.

THE SECOND SEX

The references to Marx in this book, which is of so much greater length than TheEthics of Ambiguity, are equally sparse, but they are strategically situated. Of course,there is the well-known short chapter near the beginning of this book titled ThePoint of View of Historical Materialism, but it focuses almost exclusively on EngelssThe Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the Statea work of considerablehistorical importance, no doubt, especially in the context of feminist theory, butone that is not usually regarded as very central to the Marxist canon. (Engels wroteit some years after Marxs death, though he claimed to have taken his inspirationfor it from Marxs notes on Lewis Morgans book,Ancient Society, which he hadcome across.) In that chapter, Beauvoir characterizes Engelss contribution as anadvance, but nonetheless disappointing, and she subjects it to a close analysis thatdiscloses illicit inferences and gaps in thinking, including in particular his failureto justify the close connection between the historical defeat of the female sex andthe development of the institution of private property. She acknowledges that thereare parallels between the oppression of women and class oppression, but insists thatthey are merely thatparallelsand that there is no exact similarity. (I shall returnto this crucial point later.) She concludes this discussion by attributing to Engels(and by extension to historical materialism in general) an economic monism that,as a monism, falls as far short in explaining the condition of the second sex asdoes the sexual monism of Freud that had been the focus of her previous chapter(Beauvoir 1957, 60; Beauvoir 1976a, 105).

Later, in the historical section of The Second Sex, Beauvoir cites one long foot-note from Marxs Capital in which, according to her, Marx recounts a conversationthat he had with manufacturer, Mr. E., in which the latter informed me that he


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employed females exclusively at his power looms . . . gives a decided preference tomarried females, especially those who have families at home dependent on themfor support; they are attentive, docile, more so than unmarried females, and arecompelled to use their utmost exertions to procure the necessaries of life. Then,writes Beauvoir, Marx adds: Thus are the virtues, the peculiar virtues of the femalecharacter to be perverted to her injurythus all that is most dutiful and tender inher nature is made a means of her bondage and suffering (Marx 1961, 402).3I thinkit is of some importance both because it affirms that Marx was a strong sympathizerwith the plight of women (and there are numerous other footnotes and texts inCapitalwith a similar theme) and because it treats his magnum opusas a seriousreference work. Then, a little further on in The Second Sex, early in the chapter onmyths, there is a long paragraph on the myth of woman as Other that ranges fromthe ancient Greeks to modern times; in the middle of it, Beauvoir rather casuallyrefers to the egalitarianism of socialist ideology and says that in the authenticallydemocratic society proclaimed by Marx there is no place for the Other (Beauvoir1957, 142; Beauvoir 1976a, 241). In these few, very straightforward words, sotypical of her style, Beauvoir at once identifies Marx as a principal spokespersonfor the socialist ideal and, rightly in my opinion, identifies the Marxian socialistideal as a democratic one.

But the single reference to Marx in The Second Sex that is probably best knownis the quotation from his 1844 Manuscriptswith which, after making a concludingcomment, she ends her book. In this very brief, somewhat cryptic text, Marx saysthat the relationship of man to woman, being the most natural of human relation-ships, is the best index of the extent to which what is natural has become humanand human beings have become naturalhuman nature being regarded as anideal. Beauvoir remarks that it could not have been said better, and she concludesthat, in order for the triumph of the reign of freedom to occur, it will be necessarythat by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocallyaffirm their brotherhood (Beauvoir 1957, 732; Beauvoir 1976b, 663). Let us notbe diverted by the wordfraternithere: the French language has no gender-neutralword for this (neither does the English language, for that matter), and of coursethis word in French immediately recalls the great slogan of the French Revolution.What interests me more, at any rate, is Beauvoirs allusion to the reign, or realm,of freedom, because that is an expression used by Marx in both his early and laterworks as the shorthand expression for what he conceived (here following Hegel, butwith a strong awareness of the severe inadequacy of Hegels understanding of it) asthe highest aspiration of humanity. (In Marxs later work the standard formulationbecame the ascent from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.) At theend of The Second Sex, then, it seems clear that Beauvoir, having just cited Marxconcerning the relationship between men and women, is consciously appropriat-ing this phrase of his for her own liberatory purposes; in other words, she makesevident just how much, as she affirmed in the passage in her autobiography that Icited earlier, her thesis in this work owed to Marxism.


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LA PENSE DE DROITE, AUJOURDHUI

This long, interesting study, originally published in Les Temps Modernes in 1954,focuses on some figures who at the time would have been, and in some cases stillare, well known to Anglophone readersfor example, Spengler, Nietzsche, Toynbee,Jaspersand others with, now as then, less name recognition outside France, suchas Drieu La Rochelle, Monnerot, and Maulnier. What may surprise some readersis the extent to which Beauvoir attributes an influence on some of the latter groupto the conservative, virulently anti-Communist American political scientist, stillremembered by some for his works in defense of Machiavelli and on the ColdWar and the managerial revolution, James Burnham. The world of right-wingthought into which this essay plunges us bears some uncanny resemblances to thecontemporary version of the same world, but in at least one way it seems remote:while Beauvoir very well depicts right-wing ambivalences about intellectuals andabout thinking itself, it is primarily with intellectuals that she is dealing; whereasthere are very few of those, at least of any comparable quality, in the ranks of todaysRight. In this regard, Beauvoir asserts early in her essay that, on the Right, theword intellectual easily takes on a pejorative meaning (Beauvoir 1955, 102).4It is true, she continues, that among the proletariat there is also a suspicion ofintellectuals, but only because they are bourgeois; however, she points out, Marxhimself affirmed the capacity of some bourgeois intellectuals to rise to the level ofcomprehending the historical movement as a whole, and she quotes the final lineof the passage from the Communist Manifesto that I cited. She thus corrects themore negative characterization of Marxisms stance toward intellectuals with whichshe had left her readers in The Ethics of Ambiguity.

Most of Beauvoirs references to Marx and Marxism in La pense de droite,aujourdhui occur in the early pages of the essay. That is precisely because she takesMarxism as her principal point of departure, since it is also the current point ofdeparture for most if not all of the writers whom she analyzes here. For them, sheasserts, prior to the Second World War there was a sense of impending doom, ofa mortal menace to Western civilization, but they were somewhat uncertain as toits exact nature; now, however, barbarism has a name: communism (Beauvoir1955, 98). It is the Marxist-Communist menace that preoccupies them and occa-sions such great fear and loathing on their parts. However, while a few right-wingwriters claim to be experts in Marxist doctrine, that is not the case for the vastmajority of them; it is, she cites Thierry Maulnier as admitting, most certainlyvirtually unknown to those who are fighting against it or think they are doing so(Beauvoir 1955, 113).5But this does not prevent them, of course, from offeringpsychological explanations of both Marx and Marxism, the most popular of thesebeing that it is actually a (false) religion. To Monnerot, for example, Communismis the Islam of the 20th Century (Beauvoir 1955, 115).

One aspect of Marxist theory with which they arefamiliar is its claim thatthere is such a thing as class struggle, and that is a claim that, in one way or another,


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they all try to deny. What they all assert, on the other handat least all of thosewhom Beauvoir is analyzingispluralism, that is, the alleged fact that the worldis so very complicated that there are different kinds of slaveries, different kinds offeudalisms, and different kinds of capitalisms, as Jules Monnerot, among others,maintains. This position serves their ideological interests very well, concludesBeauvoir: For Marxs simplistic schema which contrasts exploiters and exploitedthey substitute a pattern so complex that, with the oppressors differing as muchamong themselves as they differ from the oppressed, this latter distinction loses itsimportance (Beauvoir 1955, 140141).

While it would be a very interesting exercise to consider at length Beauvoirsin-depth portrait of right-wing thought as it appeared to her in 1954, the presentchapter is obviously not the place in which to undertake this task. Here, I wouldlike only to reflect on two points: first, very briefly, the relevance of this analysis toour time, nearly sixty years later; second, the additional light that it may cast onBeauvoirs relation to Marx and Marxism. Concerning the first point, ironies andsimilarities abound. Very much in keeping with Beauvoirs observation that theRight relies much too heavily on analogies, we can find quite a few contemporaryright-wing politicians in both the United States and Europe who, with the retreatof Communism, play heavily on a theme that is the reverse of Monnerots, to wit,that Islam is the Communism of the twenty-first century. Today, one finds similarwarnings to the effect that Western civilization is under severe threat, similar denialsthat there is any such thing as class struggle, a similar effort on the part of manyon the Right to conjoin religion with capitalism,6and a similar anti-intellectualismand distrust of thinking itself. The greatest single difference between the Right ofthe mid-century as depicted by Beauvoir and the Right of today is, as it seems tome and to repeat an earlier remark, the far greater prevalence today of this last-mentioned characteristic.

As for what La pense de droite, aujourdhui may tell us about the evolutionof Beauvoirs relationship to Marx and Marxism, I think that it should be seen, ata minimum, as reinforcing what she was to say years later, in her autobiography,concerning her deep indebtedness to him and it, even in The Second Sex, the pub-lication of which antedated this essay by five years. But in La pense de droite . .. her reliance on Marx as a basic reference point is much more unreserved, muchless ambiguous than it could possibly have been in a book that included a chapterhighly critical of his closest collaborator and indeed, at least as it was presented, ofthe point of view of historical materialism as such. Near the beginning of this lateressay, Beauvoir writes approvingly and without any apparent reservation concerningMarxs denunciation of idealism (Beauvoir 1955, 98), and she takes a text of his,in which he observes that every new class proposes its ideas as the only universallytrue and valid ones (Beauvoir 1955, 101), as a sort of guide to the unraveling ofbourgeois ideological justification that she is about to undertake. In short, Beauvoirdoes not engage in the somewhat theatrical, if not downright sophistic, intellectualacrobatics wherewith Sartre attempted to demonstrate, in the opening pages of an


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essay first published three years later, that Marxism was the one and only dominantthought system of that era7(and, hence, she also did not feel obliged later, as Sartredid, to recant any such extravagant proclamations). Rather, Beauvoir here simplytakes that worldview, with its commitment to ideological critique and so manyof its other fundamental premises such as the reality of class struggle, as a given.

AND YET . . .

On the basis of what I have shown up to now, it would seem that Beauvoir wouldhave to be regarded, at least by 1954, as closer to Marx than to any of the otherphilosophers considered in the present volume, even though she had less to sayabout him explicitly than about many of the others. Why, thento paraphrase akey sentence of Sartres that occurs shortly after his above-mentioned declarationof obeisance to Marxism in Search for a Methodis she not simply a Marxist?8

The principal, though far from the only, answer to this question is to befound, of course, in The Second Sexnot just in certain of its texts, important asthey may be, but even more in its global effects on the history of thoughteffectsso profound that a good case could be made for her being the philosopher whoexerted the greatest influence on the culture of the twentieth centurygreater,perhaps, than Sartre, Heidegger, or Wittgenstein, to mention three of the mostprominent alternative candidates.9What Beauvoir demonstrated throughout thatlong work, after the initial three chapters detailing the inadequacies of biological,Freudian, and Engelsian historical materialist accounts of gender difference, wasprecisely that such monistic theories must be modified and partially replacedby an existentialist-phenomenological approach, rooted in past and present livedexperience, and leading to a freely chosen reorientation of future societies in thedirection of equality. Despite her well-known protestations to the effect that she wasnot a philosopher, meaning a system-builder in the tradition of Hegel or Sartre,what she gave the world in The Second Sexwas a new comprehensive worldview,involving, as she put it in concluding her first chapter on biology, an ontological,economic, social, and psychological context (Beauvoir 1957, 36; Beauvoir 1976a,77), and at the same time avoiding the sort of confused, ideologically driven plural-ism that she attributed to right-wing thought in her essay on that topic. And, asI have noted, she very cleverly established a link between this quite revolutionarycontribution to thought and the core element of Marxs philosophy, its liberatorymessage, by citing him at the very end of her book.

But of course what emerged from The Second Sexand the vast intellectual move-ment that it ultimately generated was in fact no longer the Marxism of Marx, forwhom The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles(Marx 1988, 55).10Now, it is clear that Marx never intended to claimand it wouldhave been supremely fatuous to have done sothat in order to understand historyone needs onlyto look at it through the lens of class struggle. His own historicalwritings show subtlety and sophistication even while retaining an orientation in


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which classes and subclasses play a leading role. But the net effect of Beauvoirsanalyses is, to a degree that I suspect that she herself was not fully aware at the time(or perhaps ever), to reject that claim as being in some important sense false; shedoes this by showing that there is at least one other major key to understandinghistorythe very key that Marx, in the once-obscure passage in the 1844 Manu-scripts, which were not even published until decades after his death, identified asthe relation of man to woman. The many varieties of Marxist feminism, socialistfeminism, or both that were spawned in the latter part of the twentieth centurytook their inspiration from Beauvoirs seminal work, as did other approaches tofeminism for which Marx no longer held any importance.11Thus, the destiny ofBeauvoirs Marxist contribution was, as one might put it in a paraphrase of En-gelss single most famous line in The Origin of the Family . . . , in which he referredto the great historical defeat of the female sex, the great historical defeat of theMarxian worldview, at least as the overwhelmingly dominant worldview that Sartrehad considered it to be in Search for a Method.

Destiny: that is the general title that Beauvoir assigned to the first threechapters of The Second Sex, in which she discusses, respectively, biology, Freudianpsychoanalysis, and Engelss work. She explains her reason for choosing this wordat the end of her introduction. After enumerating the several key questions con-cerning the limitations on womens freedom and the possibilities of surmountingthem that will be the driving themes of her work, she says that these issues wouldbe meaningless si nous supposions que pse sur la femme un destin physiologique,psychologique ou conomique (Beauvoir 1976a, 32).12The old Parshley Englishtranslation, if we were to believe that womens destiny is inevitably determinedby physiological, psychological, or economic forces (Beauvoir 1957, xxix) retainsthe essential sense of what Beauvoir wrote but subtly alters it by implying thatwomens destiny, although not inevitably shaped by these forces, is neverthelesssomehow a reality of sorts; whereas what Beauvoirs French implies is that the verynotion of any such destiny is a myth, an illusion. If we take this idea literallyand apply it to chapter 3, The Point of View of Historical Materialism, then itis not only Engelss faulty account of womens history as understood through thelens of class struggle that Beauvoir is challenging, but indeed the whole underlyingpresupposition (to which Marx himself also appeared to subscribe all too often,even though it was not necessary for him to do so, and there are texts in which heexplicitly denies it), that there is an underlying pattern, afatum, which the humanrace is doomed to follow. This challenge certainly ran counter to the triumphalistMarxism of her contemporaries in the French Communist Party, which helpsto explain their very negative reaction to The Second Sexwhen it was published.Their so-called orthodox version of Marxism had in fact descended, as it were,from the realm of freedom to that of necessity and dogma. Probably some of themeven sensed, at a time at which the Party was still very strong, the future declinethat was betokened by such a radically alternative reading of history and societyas Beauvoirs was to theirs.


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Did Beauvoirs challenge, as I have put it, run counter to the spirit of Marxhimself, to the point of being ultimately non-Marxist? Well, yes and no. For, asparadoxical as it may be to say this, it is true both that Beauvoirs thought is deeplyMarxist in inspiration (or at least marxisant, as the apt French expression wouldhave it), and yet that it amounted to a revolutionary, world-historically original,break with the entire Marxian tradition.

NOTES

1. Les Mandarinswas written between 1951 and 1954 and published in the latteryear. For some reflections on this work that connect with the theme of thepresent essay, see McBride 2005.

2. Two studies of Beauvoir that are especially worthwhile for understanding thebackground of this statement are by Deutscher 2008 and Lundgren-Gothlin1996. Eva Lundgren-Gothlins is a voice that was silenced far too soon.

3. I am citing directly from the English version of Capital, whereas Beauvoirpresumably cited from a French translation. However, the translation as shereports it is quite faithful to the English, the one somewhat noteworthy dif-ference being that, instead of the words the virtues, the peculiar virtues ofthe female character, the French reads les qualits propres de la femme.

4. This and all subsequent translations from this essay are my own. 5. Beauvoir does not annotate this citation. 6. In this context, Beauvoir offers us a marvelous citation from an eighteenth-

century priest, Hyacinthe de Gasquet: Jesus Christ himself is the guarantorof your debt [estvotre caution]; it is still between his divine hands and on hisadorable head that you invest [placez] capital (Beauvoir 1955, 122).

7. See Sartre 1963.8. Why, then, are we not simply Marxists? (Sartre 1963, 35). In fact, the French

text reads Quest-ce donc qui fait que nous ne soyons pas tout simplement marx-iste? (Sartre 1985, 40). Note that he writes marxiste in the singular, whichimplies that he is using the word as an adjective rather than, as the Englishtranslation would have it, as a noun. This may seem to be a pedantic point,but I am not sure that it is. While Sartre, during this period, often came closerthan Beauvoir ever did to identifying himself as a Marxist tout simplement,Beauvoirs perspective in La pense de droite, aujourdhui could very well, asI think I have shown, be characterized as a Marxist perspectiveespeciallyif one were to read this essay in isolation from the rest of her work.

9. I make similar comments concerning Beauvoirs preeminent importance inMcBride 2006.

10. In later editions, published after Marxs death, Engels already qualified thisclaim, in a footnote, by restricting the assertion to all written history, in lightof the more recent findings of anthropologists and especially of Morgan. In


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this same footnote, he also called attention, significantly enough, to his TheOrigin of the Family.

11. As Alison M. Jaggar, herself not a close student of Beauvoirs at the time,wrote in her long, definitive (at least for American feminist philosophy of theperiod) work: Indeed, The Second Sex, published in 1949 by the existentialistSimone de Beauvoir, must be considered a forerunner of the contemporarywomens liberation movement (Feminist Politics and Human Nature [Totowa,NJ: Rowman & Allenheld, 1983], p. 10). Or, as another prominent feministphilosopher, Sandra Bartky, writes in recalling her intellectual evolution outof classical phenomenology: I turned instead to an examination of the em-bodied consciousness of a feminine subject, indeed, of a subject with a specificsocial and historical location. Simone de Beauvoir had pointed me down thispath (Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression[New York and London: Routledge], 1990). Such testimonials in the relevantphilosophical literature are legion.

12. Literally, if we were to suppose that a physiological, psychological, or economicdestiny weighs on woman.

WORKS CITED

Beauvoir, Simone de. 1955. La pense de droite, aujourdhui, 99200. In Privilges.Paris: Gallimard.

. 1957. The Second Sex. Tran. H. M. Parshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.. 1964. Force of Circumstance. Trans. R. Howard. New York: G. P. Putnams

Sons.. 1976a. Le deuxime sexeI. Paris: Gallimard.. 1976b. Le deuxime sexeII. Paris: Gallimard.. 1994. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. B. Frechtman. New York: Citadel

Press.Deutscher, Penelope. 2008. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity, Con-

version, Resistance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Lundgren-Gothlin, Eva. 1996. Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoirs The Second

Sex. Trans. L. Schenck. London: Athlone Press.Marx, Karl. 1961. Capital,vol. I. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.. 1988. The Communist Manifesto. Ed. F. L. Bender. New York: W. W.

Norton & Co.McBride, William. 2005. The Conflict of Ideologies in The Mandarins: Com-

munism and Democracy, Then and Now. In The Contradictions of Freedom:Philosophical Essays on Simone de Beauvoirs The Mandarins, 33-45. Edited byS. Scholz and S. Mussett. Albany: State University of New York Press.

. 2006. Sartre e Beauvoir allasse del ventesimo secolo. Trans. P. Invittofrom the original French (Sartre et Beauvoir laxe du vingtime sicle). In


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La fenomenologia e loltre-fenomenologia: Prendendo spunto dal pensiero francese,91101. Ed. G. Invitto. Milan: Mimesis Edizioni.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1963. Search for a Method. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: AlfredA. Knopf.

. 1981. Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre. In The Philosophy of Jean-PaulSartre, 551. Ed. P. Schilpp. La Salle: Open Court.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1985. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, prcd de Questionsde mthode, Tome I. Paris: Gallimard.

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