 In the Epilogue that summarizes Merleau-Ponty’s own position, he explains his rejection of revolutionary action, understood as proletarian praxis, for remaining equivocal rather than truly dialectical. The illusion that has brought dialectic to a halt is precisely the investment of history’s total meaning in the proletariat, ultimately equating the proletariat with dialectic as such, which leads to the conviction that revolution would liquidate history itself. But it is essential to the very structure of revolutions that, when successful, they betray their own revolutionary character by sedimenting into institutions. Drawing on the extended example of the French revolution, Merleau-Ponty argues that every revolution mistakes the structure of history for its contents, believing that eliminating the latter will absolutely transform the former. Thus, “The very nature of revolution is to believe itself absolute and to not be absolute precisely because it believes itself to be so” (AdD: 298/222). While Soviet communism may continue to justify itself in absolute terms, it is concretely a progressivism that tacitly recognizes the relativity of revolution and the gradual nature of progress. The alternative that Merleau-Ponty endorses is the development of a “noncommunist left”, an “a-communism”, or a “new liberalism”, the first commitment of which would be to reject the description of the rivalry between the two powers as one between “free enterprise” and Marxism (AdD: 302–3/225). This noncommunist left would occupy a “double position”, “posing social problems in terms of [class] struggle” while also “refusing the dictatorship of the proletariat” (AdD: 304/226). This pursuit must welcome the resources of parliamentary debate, in clear recognition of their limitations, since Parliament is “the only known institution that guarantees a minimum of opposition and of truth” (AdD: 304/226). By exercising “methodical doubt” toward the established powers and denying that they exhaust political and economic options, the possibility opens for a genuine dialectic that advances social justice while respecting political freedom.