Critique of Dialectical Reason (French: Critique de la raison dialectique) is a 1960 book by Jean-Paul Sartre that further develops the Existentialist Marxism Sartre first expounded in his 1957 essay Search for a Method. Critique of Dialectical Reason and Search for a Method were written as a common manuscript, with Sartre intending the former to logically precede the latter. Sartre's second large-scale philosophical treatise, his 1943 work Being and Nothingness having been the first, Critique of Dialectical Reason has been seen as an abandonment of Sartre's original Existentialism. It was translated into English by Alan Sheridan-Smith.
The first volume, Theory of Practical Ensembles, was first published in English in 1976; a corrected English translation was published in 1991, based on the revised French edition of 1985. The second volume, The Intelligibility of History, was published posthumously in French in 1985 and in English in 1991. Critique of Dialectical Reason was written in the wake of the rejection of Communism by leftist French intellectuals who also wanted to revive Marxism, a process that destroyed Sartre's friendship with Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Sartre conceded that he had "learned History" from Merleau-Ponty, and that the Critique of Dialectical Reason was the testimony to this.
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“What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)