Customer Reviews

Dialectical Social Theory and Its Critics: From Hegel to Analytical Marxism and Postmodernism (S U N Y Series in Radical Social and Political Theory)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There is in recent times a lot of (in)fighting about the status of "dialectics" in Marxist theory. Tony Smith, a well-regarded political economist, favors the 'Hegelian' approach to Marx and therefore defends both the importance and legitimacy of dialectics in Marxist thought. This particular book, "Dialectical Social Theory and its Critics", is a short (140 odd pages of actual text) defense of this position.

The problem with dialectics is however not, as Smith seems to suppose, its precise meaning or validity, but rather its usefulness as a means of description. Smith's analysis of Hegel's dialectics is well written enough, but the problem remains that most of this 'dialectical thought' is in reality nothing else than scientific thought, dressed up in a particular jargon, that of German idealism. Important aspects of dialectics as Smith describes it are such things as:
- Going from empirical givens to a more abstract theory which sees the essences of these things, and then going back to the real givens to describe them in the appropriate terms;
- The idea that a description of a social object or phenomenon has to unite both its universal and its individual aspects, and that they need to flow from each other;
- The idea that the relation between a dependent variable and an independent variable can be nonlinear (the infamous 'quantity into quality' theory);
- The idea of ordering analysis on the basis of analytic priority, rather than purely historical or chronological priority;
and so forth. All of these things are simply absolute requirements and aspects of the scientific method in the social sciences, and do not require any use of dialectics or the jargon of dialectics to defend. The issue here is therefore not that the substance of dialectics is wrong, as some critics would have it, but rather that the terminology is confusing, philosophizing, and outdated.

The most interesting parts of this book are for this reason not his explanation and defense of dialectics, which conceptual content immediately strikes the reader who is well-versed in radical social thought as trivial, but the parts in which he subsequently attacks and refutes the criticisms of Marx' methodology on the part of Jon Elster, John Roemer, and Jean Baudrillard. These refutations are fairly well done and give a good general sense of why the criticisms of both 'Analytical Marxism' and postmodernism fail to reach their target in Marx. In fact, some of the 'dialectical' refutations Smith makes are so obvious that one wonders if Roemer has even ever read Marx at all.

I don't think anyone skeptical of dialectics will, after reading this book, end up being convinced of the use of the terminology or its provenance in Hegel. But what this book does usefully do is show that Marx' scientific methodology is much superior to that of the positivist methodological individualism of many in the social sciences today, including but not limited to the 'Analytical Marxists'. Whether one wants to call the proper scientific method in social science 'dialectical' or not is, compared to this battle, an irrelevance and perhaps even just a matter of (philosophical) taste.