In the wake of Being and Nothingness, Sartre became concerned to reconcile his concept of freedom with concrete social subjects and was strongly influenced in this regard by his friend and associate Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose writings in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including Sense and Non-Sense, were pioneering a path towards a synthesis of existentialism and Marxism.

Sartre is quoted as having said this was the principal of his two philosophical works for which he wished to be remembered. The second volume, 'The Intelligibility of History', was published posthumously in French in 1985 with an English translation by Quintin Hoare appearing in 1991. 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. It was translated into English by Alan Sheridan-Smith. The book has been seen by some as an abandonment of Sartre's original existentialism, while others have seen it as a continuation and elaboration of his earlier work. Critique of Dialectical Reason was Sartre's second large-scale philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943) having been the first.

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. Critique of Dialectical Reason ( French: Critique de la raison dialectique) is a 1960 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in which the author further develops the existentialist Marxism he first expounded in his essay Search for a Method (1957).

Being and nothingness hazel barnes