First published in 1948 under title: Dreadful freedom, a critique of existentialism.

Why Existentialism -- Søren Kierkegaard: The Self Against the System -- Sartre and Heidegger: The Free Resolve -- Sartre and Heidegger: The Self and Other Selves -- French Existentialism and Politics: The New Revolutionary -- Jaspers and Marcel: The New Revelation -- Postscript

The more fashionable a philosophy becomes, the more elusive is its definition. So the leaders of existentialism claim that, though many praise and many attack, few understand them. Because they explore the far corners of human life, the horrors and corruptions uncharted by timid captives of gentility, because they expose ruthlessly what they view as the cant of false "human dignity,"they are acorned and gorofied. Marjorie Grene does more than defame or exalt existentialism. She exposes the inadequacies in the thought of its five leading thinkers–Jean-Paul Sartre, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Marcel, and Jaspers–and concludes that they do not present "the new morality we may hope for, but only .. a new expression of our despair." But she also recognizes their original and valid contributions and shows that existentialism is concerned with a basic human problem. For the existentialist, every man is born to set right a time out of joint. And every man's tragedy, like Hamlet's, lies in the odds against him and in the action he takes to right them.