<i>Emancipatory Thinking: Simone de Beauvoir and Contemporary Political Thought</i>. Elaine Stavro. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018 (ISBN 9780773553545)

The question of what constitutes intellectual engagement was central to Simone de Beauvoir's life and thought.Indeed, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Beauvoir dedicated her writing to ethical and political questions, which, although approached through a philosophical lens, always touched upon the concrete, lived realities of women and men around the globe.The Beauvoir series, edited by Margaret A. Simmons and Marybeth Timmermann and published by the University of Illinois Press from 2004 to 2015, introduces newly discovered texts (some available only in English translation, the French original now lost; some made available for the first time in English) that reveal the extent of Beauvoir's lifelong engagement with feminism, colonialism, racism, worker's rights, and sexuality (this list isn't exhaustive).In these collections, Beauvoir confronts these issues not as abstract, theoretical questions, but as concrete problems that require immediate intervention.Such were her reflections on the moral status of revenge and punishment, responding to postwar purges and the war tribunal in France, or on the complicity of the French in colonial crimes abroad, despite their unawareness, in her 1962 essay in Le Monde on the arrest and torture of the Algerian NFL member Djamila Boupacha.Beauvoir's raising of these problems rendered visible as the horizons of her work the historical and cultural landscapes in which she lived and thought.Indeed, her philosophical concept of "the situation" (Beauvoir 1948, 20) makes such concrete landscapes the birthplace of all thought and action; they define the contour of our lives, condition and shape us, but also provide the content on which we act, to which we assign meaning.Our entanglement in historical and cultural realities prevents us from taking a view from nowhere on the problems that we are considering-a point that Beauvoir formulates in her notion of ambiguity.Yet Beauvoir argued that despite our rootedness in such realities, we have certain commitments that transcend the specificity of the situation, such as commitments to social justice, gender equality, and the termination of exploitation and colonialization.Elaine Stavro's Emancipatory Thinking: Simone de Beauvoir and Contemporary Political Thought is attentive to both these aspects of Beauvoir's thought.Indeed, the central point of her book is that Beauvoir's uniqueness is that these two aspects-the commitment to emancipatory principles, her humanism that seems to transcend time and place, and her sensitivity to context, to realities in which humans act-are intertwined in her thinking.Furthermore, Beauvoir is aware of this double threadwhich she explores under the title of "ambiguity"-and celebrates it, insisting that we must confront it as a defining feature of our lives.This ambiguity, Stavro claims, renders

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