  But the situations, precisely, are situated: they always take place in specific social and political contexts. The myths that the theatre presents, therefore, have two temporal dimensions: 1) Because they are about distinguishing features of human ‘being,’ they have, like Greek and Corneillian tragedy, a transhistorical appeal; they are plays about human freedom in general. This explains the classical bent of many existentialist plays. Thus, it makes perfect sense to stage the conundrums of modern, absurd freedom through the figure of Caligula, as Camus does in one of his most famous plays. 2) The situation is always a specific one, particularly a specific social and political circumstance, with its specific conflict of rights. In the years following the Second World War, the conflict of rights is widely understood as the conflict between liberal rights and the socialist ideal. All the existentialists agreed on this, with the notable exception of Marcel. The ‘communist question’ (of whether to embrace the proposed communist solution to the problems facing the world in 1948—the date of publication of What is Literature?) was one of the most urgent political questions for them. More generally, we can mention the question of the value of individual engagement as opposed to engagement in a collective movement (a question at the centre of Malraux’s novels, notably his Human Condition, which approaches the existentialist aesthetic), and the place of individual freedom in an age of conflict between global forces. These questions were at the forefront of existentialist concerns when they devised their aesthetics, and wrote their plays and novels.