>What is the "dialectical method" anyway? Doug, can you shed light on this?
> Why can't these guys write prose that is easy to understand? I'm judging
>based on a small sample size here, but I feel like someone who's been
>excluded from the club when I read this stuff.
Me too. Not sure if this is exactly what you are asking, but here is Edmund Wilson, the only writer who has been able to pound some semblence of the meaning of "dialectical method" into my methodology-impaired brain:
_To the Finland Station_
[Marx and Engels] called their philosophy "Dialectical Materialism"--a name which has the unfortunate effect of misleading the ordinary person in regard to the implications of Marxism, since in this label neither the word *dialectical* nor the word *materialism* is used in the ordinary sense.
The "Dialectic" of which Marx and Engels talked was not the argumentative method of Socrates, but a principle of change conceived by Hegel. The "dialectic" exploited by Plato was a technique of arriving at the truth by reconciling two opposite statements; the "Dialectic" of Hegel was a law which also involved contradiction and reconciliation but which was imagined by Hegel as operating not only in the processes of logic but also in those of the natural world and in those of human history. The world is always changing, says Hegel; but its changes have the elements of uniformity: that each of them must pass through a cycle of three phases.
The first of these, called by Hegel the *thesis*, is a process of affirmation and unification; the second, the *antithesis*, is a process of splitting off from the *thesis* and negating it; the third is a new unification, which reconciles the *antithesis* with the *thesis* and is known as the *synthesis*. These cycles are not simple recurrences, which leave the world the same as it was before: the synthesis is always an advance over the thesis, for it combines in a "higher" unification the best features of both the thesis and the antithesis. Thus, for Hegel, the unification represented by the early Roman Republic was a *thesis*. The prime unification had been accomplished by great patriots of the type of the Scipios; but as time goes on, the republican patriot is to take on a different character: this type turns into the "colossal individuality" of the age of Caesar and Pompey, and individuality which tends to disrupt the State in proportion as the republican order begins to decay under the influence of Roman prosperity--this is the *antithesis* which breaks off from the *thesis*. But at last Julius Caesar puts down his rivals, the other colossal individualities, and imposes upon Roman civilization a new order which is autocratic, a *synthesis*, which effects a larger unification: the Roman Empire.
Marx and Engels took this principle over, and they projected its action into the future as Hegel had not done. For them, the *thesis* was bourgeois society, which had originally been a unification out of the disintegrating feudal regime; the *antithesis* was the proletariat, who had originally been produced by the development of modern industry, but who had then been split off through specialization and debasement from the main body of modern society and who must eventually be turned against it; and the *synthesis* would be the communistic society which would result from the conflict of the working class with the owning and employing class and the taking-over of the industrial plant by the working class, and which would represent a higher unity because it would harmonize the interests of all mankind.