Dance of the dialectic : steps in Marx's method / Bertell Ollman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ollman, Bertell.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Marx, Karl, 1818-1883.

Marx, Karl.

Communism.

Dialectical materialism.

Philosophy, Marxist.

Physical Description:

x, 232 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2003]

Summary:

Bertell Ollman has been hailed as "this country's leading authority on dialectics and Marx's method" by Paul Sweezy, the editor of Monthly Review and dean of America's Marx scholars. In this book Ollman offers a thorough analysis of Marx's use of dialectical method. 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.

Contents:

Introduction: Marxism, this tale of two cities

The meaning of dialectics

Social relations as subject matter

The philosophy of internal relations

In defense of the philosophy of internal relations

Putting dialectics to work : the process of abstraction in Marx's method

Studying history backward : a neglected feature of Marx's materialist conception of history

Dialectic as inquiry and exposition

Marxism and political science : prolegomenon to a debate on Marx's method

Why dialectics? Why now? or, How to study the Communist future inside the capitalist present

Critical realism in light of Marx's process of abstraction

Marx's dialectical method is more than a mode of exposition : a critique of systematic dialectics

Why does the emperor need the Yakuza? Prolegomenon to a Marxist theory of the Japanese state.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [217]-222) and index.

ISBN:

0252028325

0252071182

OCLC:

50851976