“A Principle of Universal Strife”: Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty’s Critiques of Marxist Universalism, 1953–1956

The early 1950s revealed that communist regimes too engaged in power politics, leading some in the French left to examine the theoretical requirements for the constitution of a “noncommunist left.” This paper analyses the response of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur to their shared diagnosis that the current failings of communist regimes required a reexamination of political difference. Ricoeur’s alternative is to present difference as positive, and overcome mystically. Merleau-Ponty, regards difference as determining the structure of all history as a process of power leading into a renewed concept of universalism: “a principle of universal strife.”