This thesis examines the use of theatrical forms to illustrate social criticism in Simone de Beauvoir’s 1954 novel, Les Mandarins . The novel’s structure and characters reflect the theater, while its themes are political. The soul-searching of Henri, a playwright and journalist who desires both to work for a better world and to retire, recalls Molière’s Misanthrope. Henri’s exploration of the duty of the intellectual is comparable to Alceste’s musings over the responsibility of the “honnête homme.” Duty to one’s fellow humans is one theme among six common to both Les Mandarins and Beauvoir’s political essay “La pensée de droite aujourd’hui,” ie: right-wing pessimism and fatalism, complacency, artistic escapism, me-first mentality, violent tactics, and paranoid anti-communism. In Les Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir draws from medieval farce, Shakespeare, and French theater to dramatize her protagonists’ struggle. For the protagonists, as for the author herself, art enacts a tragic-comic combat for human solidarity against the mindless subordination of global capitalism.