Search for a Method

Search for a Method or The Problem of Method (French: Questions de méthode) is a 1957 essay by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in which the author attempts to reconcile Marxism with existentialism. The first version of the essay was published in the Polish journal Twórczość; an adapted version appeared later that year in Les Temps modernes, and later served as an introduction for Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason (Paris, 1960). Sartre argues that existentialism and Marxism are compatible, even complementary, even though Marxism's materialism and determinism might seem to contradict the abstraction and radical freedom of existentialism.