ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces Hegel’s ideas and explains two key concepts essential for Marx: totality and dialectic. Dialectic has held a central place in Western philosophical systems since Plato. In the most general sense, dialectic is a process of social or conceptual discord in which the staging of the conflict of oppositions leads to a fuller or more adequate mode of perception or thought. The word ‘dialectic’ derives from the Greek and means ‘to converse’. Modernism is an artistic movement that lasted from the nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War, but was particularly prominent in the years following the First World War. In art, modernist movements included cubism, futurism, vorticism, and surrealism. Hegel gives examples of dialectic, but he also writes dialectically. When Hegel says ‘the whole is the true’, he means that truth does not always reveal itself at the beginning.
