We speak as if judgment were simple, as if we could stand outside history and measure human action against timeless truths, but the moment we try to do so the footing gives way, and we are compelled to ask whether our standards are themselves part of the very history we seek to judge, formed within practices, institutions, and relations of power that determine in advance what can count as truth.

This problem is not merely theoretical but emerges wherever we attempt to judge human action in the world, especially under conditions of political crisis. Our struggle to step outside history reveals that we are always already within it, indicating we remain responsible for creating and answering for meaning within the conditions that shape us.

Can we judge history at all without smuggling in our own position?

Building directly from this tension, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty grapples with this problem in his response to Arthur Koestler’s gripping 1940 novel and literary expose, Darkness at Noon, where the question of how to judge history is unavoidable. Koestler’s indictment of the Stalinist Soviet Union, Merleau-Ponty argues, relies on moral projection, as if one were looking into a mirror and judging another society by standards treated as universally binding.

From here, Merleau-Ponty responds with Humanism and Terror, a major work of 20th century political........

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