Introduction: Hegel, Marx and the Dialectic

This last chapter on the interpretive tradition moves in yet another direction, taking up the political implications of the Enlightenment and bringing them forward into the contemporary world.

The home of critical theory was Frankfurt, where the Institute for Social Research was founded in 1923. It developed a non-communist Hegelian Marxism, and the major figures that concern us here are the philosophers Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse and the second generation, contemporary philosopher Jurgen Habermas. With the rise of Hitler the main figures emigrated to the United States, and Marcuse stayed there, Adorno and Horkheimer moving back to Frankfurt in the late 1940s.

Clearly, critical theory presents a very different way of thinking about rationality, and is not as firmly rooted in the Kantian tradition as Weber or even Gadamer. The direct line of descent is from Hegel through Marx, but with rather more emphasis on Hegel than Marx. Critical rationality is a form of dialectical thinking exploited to the full by Hegel, who saw both the history of ideas and the history of the world as a dialectical process. The two were directly related: the history of the world was a product of the history of ideas. In a famous formulation, Marx ‘stood Hegel on his feet’. His ‘materialist conception of history' saw ideas, from philosophical systems to common sense, as the product of social and economic relations rather than the other way around. The simplest but by no means the most accurate way of describing the dialectic, whether of ideas or of reality, is as involving a process of thesis, a proposition or a social system, an antithesis, the opposite to which it gives rise, and the synthesis of two. We start with capitalism, which generates the working class, its own antithesis, and the contradiction produces the socialist revolution. Nobody would accept such a simple formula now, and the attempt of Marx's collaborator, Engels (Engels 1949), to formulate ‘laws of the dialectic' as ‘laws of nature' is now generally rejected.

If we stick with the dialectic in its original form as a way of thinking which is thus implicated in human action and relationships, then we are on firmer ground. It has several important features. First, it is not linear in the way that instrumental thinking is linear. As with hermeneutics, the imagery is circular, and dialectical thinking involves a similar continual movement from the whole to the parts and back again. If we think of a developmental process as a dialectical development, it means it does not go forward in a straight line, but moves more in a spiral, perhaps coming back to the same point but at a different level.

Whereas formal logic and much everyday thinking are based on notions of identity, dialectical thinking is built on opposites - that in any system of concepts, the meaning of one concept can be understood only in relation to those around it, and in particular to its opposite. As a simple example, we can only understand the meaning of ‘up' in relation to the meaning of ‘down' - the two go together. On a broader scale, we can never be satisfied with a simple ‘positive' statement. It must be remembered that dialectical thinking only comes into play when we talk about ideas and about human actions and relations. If we take a statement about the world of nature - all swans are white, for example - we cannot say that the dialectic tells us there should be black swans as well. There are some classic mistakes in the history of dialectical thinking that come from using it this way. Hegel famously predicted that a star would be found where no star exists and more tragically harvests were lost in Soviet Russia in the 1930s through attempts to implement a ‘dialectical' biology in agriculture (see our discussion in Chapter 4).

If we work with ideas and actions, however, we have a different result. We can, for example, suggest that one of the dominant themes of contemporary society and culture is fragmentation - put crudely, things seem to be falling apart. The dialectical thinker would also want to bring into play the opposite process - that of globalization and the increasingly highly organized nature of modern capitalism - and he or she would want to look at the way in which these contradictory processes effect each other.

The idea of the negative or negativity features throughout the history of critical theory. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel (1807, 1977) talks about the ‘labour of the negative', by which he means the careful and systematic criticism of philosophical concepts, and the idea is taken up in Herbert Marcuse's Reason and Revolution (1960), where negative philosophy is juxtaposed directly to Comte's positive philosophy (see Chapter 2). Comte is characterized, largely rightly, as attempting to impose the methods of the natural sciences onto the social sciences in the interests of establishing natural laws of society: if society, like nature, is governed by universal laws, we can do little to change them. However, we know what we can do, and we can stop speculating about what we might do, and this, Comte thought, would be a cure for the social disorder of his time. Negativity, the labour of the negative, on the other hand, is concerned with radical social change, a process of liberation. One of Marcuse's later books was entitled Negations (1968), and finally one of Adorno's most famous books is Negative Dialectics (1973).

Dialectical thinking, then, involves a movement between parts and whole similar to that of hermeneutics, but it involves as well the notion that reason - thought - proceeds by contradiction and that human existence is contradictory in various ways; as a consequence, human relations and human thought are constant processes, not static entities. According to Horkheimer, traditional (positivist) social science is concerned with solving particular social problems. He is referring here to the sort of social engineering envisaged by Comte and later advocated by Popper (1957). He goes on:

We must... add that there is a human activity which has society itself for its object.

The aim of this activity is not simply to eliminate one or other abuse, for it regards such abuses as necessarily connected with the way in which the social structure is organized. Although it itself emerges from the social structure, its purpose is not, either in its conscious intention, or in its subjective significance, the better functioning of any element in the structure. On the contrary it is suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive and valuable, as these are understood in the present order.

(Horkheimer 1972: 206)