ABSTRACT
What is developed in this work is neither Hegelian dialectic nor, to my knowledge, any other pre-existing form of dialectic, but a critical realist dialectic. A major point of reference throughout this book will certainly be Hegelian dialectic, and in the course of it I hope to realize Marx’s unconsummated desire ‘to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence’—though it will take more than two or three printers’ sheets-‘what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered and at the same mystified’,1 as well as to clarify the exact relation between Marx’s own dialectic and Hegel’s one. But I will be discussing a variety of other dialectical (and anti-dialectical) modes, including Aristotelian dialectic, Kantian dialectic and Derridean deconstruction.
