From: Christopher Arthur (cjarthur@WAITROSE.COM)
Date: Mon Mar 15 2004 - 07:31:03 EST
>what is the new dialectics; how does it differ from the "old?" > Here is a n extract from the introduction to my book Chris A The term Œthe New Dialectic¹ it is a convenient way of grouping together thinkers of independent spirit, clearly doing something rather distinctive in the present intellectual conjuncture. many of the most active researchers believe they are working within a new paradigm they call ŒSystematic Dialectic¹ What is involved in the first place is simply a return to sources, making a serious study of what Hegel and Marx really achieved with respect to dialectic. But the New Dialectic has not only recovered much of this indispensable original work, it is characterised by new thinking about the issues, and it has reconstructed the inheritance of Hegel and Marx in various ways. The new interest in Hegel is rather different from that of earlier Hegelian Marxism which was (rightly or wrongly) called Œhistoricist¹. The new interest in Hegel is largely unconcerned with recovering the grand narrative of Hegel's philosophy of history and relating it to historical materialism; rather it is focussed on Hegel¹s Logic and how this fits the method of Marx¹s Capital. The point is usually put by saying the effort is to construct a systematic dialectic in order to articulate the relations of a given social order, namely capitalism, as opposed to an historical dialectic studying the rise and fall of social systems. What, then, is ŒNew¹ about this dialectic? What is implicitly referred to here as the ŒOld Dialectic¹ is the Soviet school of ŒDiamat¹, rooted in a vulgarised version of Engels and Plekhanov, which amounted to an unsystematic compilation of 'examples'. Diamat ran out of steam in the 1950s. In the West this was followed by a recovery of the work of historicist Marxists such as Lukács, Korsch and Gramsci. But then came the high tide of structuralism and post-structuralism, analytical Marxism, discourse theory, etc., which rejected Hegel altogether, and generally had a skeptical a attitude to dialectic. It was Althusser¹s strident anti-Hegelianism that opened the way for paradigms completely alien to Marxism to absorb it; thus there was the rise of so-called analytical Marxism, which relied on axioms that were essentially generalisations of neo-classical economics. But there were always people who refused to follow the fashion. Now we see a number of Hegelian inspired reappropriations of the dialectic. (R. Albritton; C. J. Arthur; J. Banaji; R. Bhaskar; M. Eldred; I. Hunt; M. Lebowitz; J. McCarney; P. Murray; R. Norman (and S. Sayers); B. Ollman; M. Postone; G. Reuten; T. Sekine; A. Shamsavari; F. C. Shortall; T. Smith; H. Williams; M. Williams). There is little in the secondary literature on how to do systematic dialectic even though Hegel¹s and Marx¹s major works are not historical but systematic. I attempt a general characterisation of Systematic Dialectic (emphasising that not all the thinkers I cite would accept everything in the following paragraph). At the philosophical level it is a way of working with concepts that keeps them open and fluid, and above all systematically interconnected. At the methodological level it puts the emphasis on the need for a clear order of presentation, which, however, is not a linear one, for the starting point is not empirically or axiomatically given but in need of interrogation. Epistemologically it insists on the reflexivity of the subject-object relation. Ontologically it addresses itself to totalities and thus to their comprehension through systematically interconnected categories, which are more or less sharply distinguished from historically sequenced orderings.Textually it prefers to look at Hegel and Marx afresh, setting aside sclerotic received traditions of interpretation. Substantively it reexamines or reconstructs Marxian theory in the light of the above protocols. 17 Bristol Road, Brighton, BN2 1AP, England
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