ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to establish the significance of dialectic for social scientific inquiry. To have a dialectical character, the science must somehow, it appears, participate in the activity of rationality it uncovers. For what is dialectical has to constitute an immanent progress, an organic development. Karl Marx consistently claimed that his science was dialectical and that the author of its dialectic was Hege. Consciousness, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel insists, is always consciousness of something. So a dialectic of forms of consciousness will have built into its structure a dualism that guarantees the complexity presupposed by relations of contradiction. In Marx’s appropriation of the phenomenological theme, the subject is the social class, and so the dialectic of consciousness becomes a dialectic of class consciousness. The discussion of the internal links between belief, purpose and action is a useful preliminary to grasping the nature of the dialectical subject.
