First, he stated very clearly that such a publication should include his nontechnical papers. His reasons for that were two-fold. One reason was his
lifelong commitment to epistemology and to politics, which made him strongly opposed to the view otherwise currently held that mathematics involves only half of a man. As he wrote to G.C. Rota on November 29th, 1982: "An important number of papers published by me are not of a mathematical nature. Some have epistemological features which might explain their presence in an edition of collected papers of a mathematician, but quite a number of them are concerned with theoretical politics (...) they reflect an aspect of myself the omission of which would, I think, give a wrong idea of my lines of thinking". On the other hand, Chevalley thought that the Collected Works of a mathematician ought to be read not only by other mathematicians, but also by historians of science. But the history of mathematics could not be anything pure and detached from the world of general ideas: "I think that history of mathematics should not be what it too often is, namely a collection of statements of the form 'in the year X, mathematician A proved theorem B', but should study the relationship between such and such a mathematical trend and the general epistemological, philosophical or social trend at the time of a certain publication" . For these two reasons, he did not want his technical papers to be published separately from his other work. Though he was never fully satisfied with the various ways in which he himself spoke about the connection between his own mathematical achievements and the "epistemological, philosophical or social trend of ideas" that surrounded him, still he clearly wanted to bear witness to such a connection.