Dialectic

The dialectical mode of logic has its strongest roots in the works of G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx. Hegel was a dialectical idealist principally concerned with a dialectic of ideas. [Page 200]Marx combined Hegel's sense of dialectical thinking with the materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach to produce dialectical materialism. This shift from a concern with ideas to what many social scientists would consider a more grounded materialistic approach is what makes the dialectical thinking of Marx, not Hegel, most relevant to social theory.

Dialecticians take a relational view of the social world. Their focus is not on any one aspect of that world in isolation, but rather on the relationships among and between various elements, as well as on the totality of social relations and its relationship to those components. Furthermore, they emphasize reciprocal relations among and between the various elements. There is a heightened attention to the ways in which effects flow back and forth between the various entities involved in a relationship, rather than a focus on one-sided causal explanations. This sense of reciprocal relations also explains why a dialectical approach does not see clear-cut dividing lines between social phenomena. Objects in the social world are not seen as existing independently, but rather as blending into one another in innumerable and frequently imperceptible ways.

Another feature of the dialectic is a concern not only with the present relationships between social phenomena but also with how they relate to both past and future social phenomena. This means that objects in the social world exist in a dialectical relationship to one another across both space and time. For example, in addition to outlining what he saw to be the dialectical relationship between capitalists and the proletariat (in a dialectical fashion, exploitative actions taken by the capitalists serve to make it increasingly likely that the proletariat will eventually come to rebel and overthrow the capitalist economic system), Marx was also concerned with dialectically tracing the history of changes in society from primitive through feudal to capitalist society. While he shied away from utopian blueprints of the future communist society, Marx did see it emerging dialectically out of both the advances (for example, technological) and downfall of capitalist society. Thus, there is a dialectic between capitalism and communism, and the latter could not emerge without the former. (Of course, history seemed to prove Marx wrong as communist societies, or at least those that purported to be communist, emerged in societies such as Russia and China that had never been capitalist, while it did not emerge in the advanced capitalist societies such as Germany and the United States.) However, such considerations of the future do not imply any inevitabilities. Indeed, the very nature of dialectics, and continuing dialectical relationships, precludes the possibility of any inevitabilities.

Dialecticians are interested in the relationships between actors, between structures, and between actors and structures. Although Marx eventually focused a greater amount of attention on social structures, he still manifested a great concern with the relationships between actors and the ways in which they were affected by and were able to affect the large-scale social structures on which he focused.

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