The preparatory notebooks of 1857-8, known as the Grundrisse provide an important guide to Marx’s purpose in writing Capital in the way that he did, and they also form a bridge between the philosophical perspectives of the pre-1845 writings and the detailed technical analysis of economic categories that he considered to be his most important intellectual work. With regard to his own analyses, pride of place must go to the first volume of Capital, the only volume published in his lifetime, and the culmination of over twenty years of study. ![]() In this respect, the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843) and the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) are particularly important to understanding the formation of Marx’s method. It is frustrating that Marx did not fulfil his stated intention of writing an essay revealing what was rational in Hegel’s method, but he engaged in numerous critiques that give us valuable insights into his own. Marx did not devote much time to discussing his own method, but there are significant statements in the first part of The German Ideology (1845-6), the 1857 introduction to the Grundrisse, the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the preface to the first edition of Capital in 1867, and the postface of 1873 to the second edition. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, David Ricardo, and, most important, Marx’s own analyses, particularly in the field of political economy. Thus we must consider other types of work, including comments that he made about his own method, critiques of other writers such as G. We must therefore look carefully at Marx’s concept of contradiction and his scattered remarks on his own method.Īlthough Marx was a trained philosopher, he did not engage in formal analyses of philosophical categories or concepts, as he considered this approach to be sterile or “purely scholastic”. On the face of it, therefore, the claims of dialectical and formal logic appear to be incommensurable, and dialogue between the two systems appears to be impossible. This is embodied in the principle of non-contradiction, in which the presence of a contradiction in a statement or proposition invalidates its claim to truth. Formal logic denies that contradictions exist in reality, and where they are seen to exist in thought, they have to be expunged in order to arrive at the truth. The most direct way to get to the heart of the first three questions is to examine Marx’s use of the concept of contradiction, which played a role of vital analytical significance in his work, resulting in well-known formulations such as the “contradictions of capitalism and “class contradictions.” Dialectical philosophers claim that contradictions exist in reality and that the most appropriate way to understand the movement of that reality is to study the development of those contradictions. What did Marx mean by dialectic? What did it look like in his work? What was the precise relationship between Marx’s dialectical method and formal logic? And finally, what is the relationship between Marx’s dialectic and Marxist theory? To improve our understanding of his method and its significance in social science, a number of questions need to be addressed. Marx complained that the method he employed in Capital was “little understood,” and although he attempted to clarify the nature of what he called his “dialectic,” the logic of his scientific endeavour has continued to be a contentious subject. ![]() Social theorists tend to be remembered for their conclusions rather than the way in which they conducted their inquiries, but if we neglect to study the latter it is quite likely that we will misunderstand or misconstrue the former. Source: The Cambridge Companion to Marx, ed. ![]() Lawrence Wilde (1991) Logic: Dialectic and contradiction Logic: Dialectic and contradiction by Lawrence Wilde
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