ABSTRACT
Leftward intellectuals let fall the word dialectic—the key word in the Marxian system—as lightly as though it meant nothing, and entailed nothing, but a belief in change and the possibility of successful revolutions. Few of them realize what the state of mind is which they are helping to propagate by accepting with this numb acquiescence a word so highly charged with meaning. To the Greeks the word “dialectic” first meant conversation, and when in the time of the sophists argumentative conversation developed into a fashionable parlor game, the rules of this game were also called dialectic. At any rate, that similar game of dialectic did introduce the Greeks to the main body of what became philosophy. With Aristotle, who brought those Platonic ideas down into the material world and made them function as a kind of regulating norm for the growth of actual things, the word “dialectic” took a drop from its exalted position.
