Merleau-Ponty too, having been radicalised by the war, was still desperately trying to be less nice. Having mastered the art of being beastly to Germans, he now far outdid Beauvoir and Sartre in writing fervent arguments for an uncompromising Soviet-style Communism. In an essay of 1945, ‘The War Has Taken Place’, he wrote that the war had ruled out any possibility of living a merely private life.
Forgoing the freedom of a private life
