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Dialectics elude straightforward definition. No doubt it is easier to say what dialectics is not, rather than to say what it is. Against Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx remarked in a letter to Engels that “Hegel never described as dialectics the subsumption of vast numbers of ‘cases’ under a general principle,” and therefore concluded that “the dialectical method is wrongly applied.”1 Vladimir Lenin likewise pointed out that Georgii Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, erred in treating dialectics as “the sum-total of examples,” a mistake from which even Engels was not fully exempt.2
Still less is dialectics reducible to an abstract formula or stereotyped procedure of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. James regarded this series as “a ruinous simplification” in his 1948 Notes on Dialectics,3 while Lenin followed Hegel in considering “the ‘triplicity’ of dialectics… [as] its external, superficial side.”4 In similar fashion, the Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno recalled that “Hegel expressed the most cutting objections to the claptrap triplicity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis as a methodological schema.”5 Early in his career, Lenin upbraided the populist Nikolai Mikhailovsky for his fatuous portrayal of the materialist dialectic as some sort of parlor trick which “proves” capitalism must collapse. “Marx’s dialectical method does not consist in triads at all,” explained Lenin in 1894, “but precisely in the rejection of idealism and subjectivism in sociology.”6
How can this method be retained in sociology, however, while at the same time getting rid of its idealist residues? Obviously, if the dialectic is to be anything more than a subjective addition, an arbitrary “way of thinking” about the world, its logic has to be discovered in the object (i.e., society) itself. The materialist inversion of Hegel’s dialectic can only be justified if its contours appear at the level of social reality. “Dialectical understanding is nothing but the conceptual form of a real dialectical fact,” wrote Georg Lukács in his 1924 monograph Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought.7 Lukács’ contemporary, the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky, maintained that the method should not be applied to just any sphere of knowledge “like an ever-ready master key,” since “dialectics cannot be imposed upon facts, but must be deduced from their character and development.”8 Reflecting on his conversion to Marxism, Trotsky wrote that “the dialectical method revealed itself for the first time, not as an abstract definition, but as a living spring found in the historical process.”9
Trotsky’s metaphor of the spring recurs frequently in his articles and speeches. “Marxism without the dialectic is like a clock without a spring,” he later declared.10 Wound tightly into the shape of a spiral, the materialist dialectic simply mirrors the dynamic tension of capitalism itself. “Cycles explain a great deal,” Trotsky maintained in 1923, “forming through automatic pulsation an indispensable dialectical spring in the mechanism of capitalist society.”11 Earlier in the year he stressed that an adequate sociological account must be both strong and flexible, since “dialectical thought is like a spring, and springs are made of tempered steel.”12
