Critique de la raison dialectique (précédé de Question de méthode). Tome I. Théorie des ensembles pratiques.

First edition, first impression of Sartre's second major philosophical work, with the title misprinted Question rather than Questions de méthode, one of 85 copies printed on vélin pur fil Lafuma-Navarre, this copy numbered 55.

The Critique "is the result of sustained thinking which began in the fifties, that is, at the same time he was drawing closer to the communists politically. Beginning then, Sartre set to re-reading Marx and the chief Marxist writings, and from then on he never stopped looking for a way to synthesize his own approach, whose starting point is subjectivity, and the objective method of dialectical materialism." (Contat and Rybalka).

"Sartre incorporates socio-economic conditioning into his thought via the Critique of Dialectical Reason and its prefatory Search for a Method. Here he develops an existentialist social philosophy. Its pivotal concepts are 'praxis,' 'practico-inert,' and 'mediating third.' Each is formulated to guarantee the 'existentialist' values of individual freedom and moral responsibility within a neo-Marxian context. The result is a highly original social theory which is more existentialist than Marxist, but whose significance is clouded by the badly written text of the Critique." (Thomas R. Flynn in Thinkers of the 20th Century).

The Questions de méthode were first published in Les Temps modernes of September 1957, and are here reprinted without any major changes but with a conclusion added.