The texts collected in this volume remain faithful to the principles of the magazine "Les Temps Modernes" that appeared shortly after the end of the Second World War: "texts totally committed and totally free."

Simone de Beauvoir, in her always effective prose, develops a convincing defense of existentialism, trying to detect the risks that threaten it from the moment it begins to become a fashion and thus becomes vulgar.
Not only are we facing what is perhaps the clearest and most forceful exposition of the principles of existentialism in the eyes of Simone de Beauvoir and a work that illuminates with extraordinary clarity the later Sartrean work, but also before the most precise denunciation of the dangers to which existentialism is faced and the formulation of intelligent strategies to combat them.