This book begins with a quotation from the essay which Sartre wrote at Merleau-Ponty's death: "Merleau-Ponty's memory is still too vivid for anyone to be able to portray him; he will be more easily approached, perhaps, by one unknown to me..." and we have no doubt, in reading what follows, that Rabil is the one we have been waiting for. Let it be said at the outset, therefore, that this is a conscientious, richly documented, wellwritten, and interesting piece of work. It is the kind of book which the student of Merleau-Ponty will find it impossible to put down until he has read it to the end -and that is something which, at least in my experience, can rarely be said of a work in philosophy. The book is well-arranged; the argument is exhaustively and cogently presented; Merleau-Ponty's whole published corpus is ranged in its proper historical order and examined; no scrap of his writing is deemed unworthy of mention; each is carefully fitted into its place in the mosaic.
In short, this is an easy and a satisfying book. It is easy because the author leaves out of consideration all of Merleau-Ponty's more technical and methodological discussions of naturalism, intellectualism, perception, reason, freedom, etc. to concentrate on his social ideas. It is satisfying because the author lucidly and effortlessly leads us through the evidence for his thesis and leaves us convinced of its historical correctness, at least as concerns matters of chronology and the interdependence of Merleau-Ponty's various philosophical doctrines. In so doing, the author relies much more on the marginal essays, the newspaper articles, the speeches, the outlines of his courses at the Coll6ge de France, the work left unfinished at his death -and with his obiter dictathan with his principal philosophical works, The Structure of Behavior and the Phenomenology of Perception. He does this because it is his aim to trace the historical development of Merleau-Ponty's social thought through his writings as a whole. He should not, therefore, be reproached with the unsatisfactory character of his summaries of the major philosophical works (chapters 1 and 2) since these deal only marginally with social philosophy.
The author writes, moreover, against the "critics" (e.g.