I argue that Merleau-Ponty's account of Being is best understood when we attend to its provenance, situated within the continuous development of his thought over his career. More specifically, we need to call attention to the political horizon of this ontology as it emerged in Merleau-Ponty's thought, which has received insufficient attention in secondary literature. The impulse for Merleau-Ponty's ontology develops from his political disagreements with Jean-Paul Sartre, and emerges through several phases: a new philosophy of history, a philosophy of nature, which leads finally to the incomplete ontology of his final works.