Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology also extends to politics, which he does not only understand from a Marxist point of view. In his articles on Montaigne and Machiavelli, he operates a reduction of the political subject in order to show how it is always already involved in the world, in history and in political affairs, how these phenomena appear to it, and how it can act. In this light, the 'Preface' to Humanism and Terror presents both a description of the demands of political judgment and action, and a statement of Merleau-Ponty's position as a political subject in postwar France.