Dance of the Dialectic
Subtitle: STEPS IN MARX'S METHOD
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: July 30, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780252071188
Subjects: Marxism & Communism; Political; Political Ideologies - Communism & Socialism; Philosophy / Movements / General; Philosophy; Politics / Current Events; 1818-1883; Communism; Dialectical materialism; Marx, Karl,; Philosophy, Marxist
First sentence: Have you ever tried to hop on a car while it was still moving?
Description: Marx made extremely creative use of dialectical method to analyze the origins, operation, and direction of capitalism. Unfortunately, his promised book on method was never written, so that readers wishing to understand and evaluate Marx's theories, or to revise or use them, have had to proceed without a clear grasp of the dialectic in which the theories are framed. The result has been more disagreement over "what Marx really meant" than over the writings of any other major thinker. In putting Marx's philosophy of internal relations and his use of the process of abstraction--two little-studied aspects of dialectics--at the center of this account, Ollman provides a version of Marx's method that is at once systematic, scholarly, clear and eminently useful. Ollman not only sheds important new light on what Marx really meant in his varied theoretical pronouncements, but in carefully laying out the steps in Marx's method makes it possible for a reader to put the dialectic to work in his or her own research. He also convincingly argues the case for why social scientists and humanists as well as philosophers should want to do so.--