 Sartre’s relation to orthodox Marxism was marked by tension, however, since he held that existing Marxism had abandoned the promise of its dialectical approach to social reality in favor of a dogmatic “apriorism” that subsumed historical reality under a blanket of lifeless abstractions. He thus undertook his Critique of Dialectical Reason to restore the promise of Marxism by reconceiving its concept of praxis in terms of the existential notion of project. What had become a rigid economic determinism would be restored to dialectical fluidity by recalling the existential doctrine of self-making: it is true that man is “made” by history, but at the same time he is making that very history. This attempt to “reconquer man within Marxism” (Sartre 1960 [1968, 83])—i.e., to develop a method which would preserve the concrete details of human reality as lived experience—was not well received by orthodox Marxists. Sartre’s fascination with the details of Flaubert’s life, or the life of Baudelaire, smacked too much of “bourgeois idealism.” But we see here how Sartre’s politics, like Heidegger’s, derived from his concept of history: there are no iron-clad laws that make the overthrow of capitalism the inevitable outcome of economic forces; there are only men in situation who make history as they are made by it. Dialectical materialism is the unsurpassable philosophy of those who choose, who commit themselves to, the value of freedom. The political claim that Marxism has on us, then, would rest upon the ideological enclave within it: authentic existence as choice.