This volume explores the conceptual, methodological and praxeological aspects of dialectical analysis in world politics. As dialectics has remained an under-theorised analytical tool in international relations, this volume provides a critical resource for those seeking to deploy dialectics in their own research by showcasing its effectiveness for understanding and transforming world politics. Contributions demonstrate a number of innovative ways in which dialectical thinking can be of benefit to the study of world politics by covering three thematic concerns: (i) conceptual or meta-theoretical dimensions of dialectics; (ii) methodological features and general principles of dialectical approaches; and (iii) applications and/or case studies that deploy a dialectical approach to world politics. Canvassing a diverse range of dialectical approaches on key issues in world politics – from global security to postcolonial resistances, from the theoretical problems of reification and complexity, to the study of the global futures and the intercultural historical expressions of dialectics – Dialectics and World Politics offers key insights into the social forces and contradictions that are generative of transformation in world politics and yet routinely downplayed in orthodox approaches to international relations. Each chapter demonstrates how dialectics can be utilized more broadly in the discipline and deployed in a critical fashion as part of an emancipatory project. This book was originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

This book explores and details the actuality (Aktualität) of Hegel's social and political philosophy--its relevance, topicality, and contemporary validity. It asserts--against the assumptions of those in a wide range of traditions--that Hegel's thought not only remains relevant to debates in current social and political theory, but is capable of productively enhancing and enriching those debates. The book is divided into three main sections. Part I considers the actuality of Hegel's social and political thought in the context of a constructed dialogues with later social and political theorists, including Marx, Adorno, Habermas, and Rawls. Part II explores Hegel's internal criticism of Enlightenment rationality as well as the unique manner in which his thought reaffirms both the classical tradition of politics and the Christian conception of freedom in order to deepen and further develop our understanding of modernity and modern secularity. Part III considers Hegel's contribution to current theorizing about globalization.

This volume explores the conceptual, methodological and praxeological aspects of dialectical analysis in world politics. As dialectics has remained an under-theorised analytical tool in international relations, this volume provides a critical resource for those seeking to deploy dialectics in their own research by showcasing its effectiveness for understanding and transforming world politics. Contributions demonstrate a number of innovative ways in which dialectical thinking can be of benefit to the study of world politics by covering three thematic concerns: (i) conceptual or meta-theoretical dimensions of dialectics; (ii) methodological features and general principles of dialectical approaches; and (iii) applications and/or case studies that deploy a dialectical approach to world politics. Canvassing a diverse range of dialectical approaches on key issues in world politics – from global security to postcolonial resistances, from the theoretical problems of reification and complexity, to the study of the global futures and the intercultural historical expressions of dialectics – Dialectics and World Politics offers key insights into the social forces and contradictions that are generative of transformation in world politics and yet routinely downplayed in orthodox approaches to international relations. Each chapter demonstrates how dialectics can be utilized more broadly in the discipline and deployed in a critical fashion as part of an emancipatory project. This book was originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

A reinterpretation of world politics drawing on Chinese cultural and philosophical traditions to argue for a focus on relations amongst actors, rather than on the actors individually.

This book draws on Daoist yin/yang dialectics to move world politics from the current stasis of hegemony, hierarchy, and violence to a more balanced engagement with parity, fluidity, and ethics. The author theorizes that we may develop a richer, more representative approach towards sustainable and democratic governance by offering a non-Western alternative to hegemonic debates in IR. The book presents the story of world politics by integrating folk tales and popular culture with policy analysis. It does not exclude current models of liberal internationalism but rather brackets them for another day, another purpose. The deconstruction of IR as a singular unifying school of thought through the lens of a non-Westphalian analytic shows a unique perspective on the forces that drive and shape world politics. This book suggests new ways to articulate and act so that global politics is more inclusive and less coercive. Only then, the book claims, could IR realize what the dao has always stood for: a world of compassion and care. The Dao of World Politics bridges the humanities and social sciences, and will be of interest to scholars and students of the global/international, as well as policymakers and activists of the local/domestic.

Anticolonial theorists and revolutionaries have long turned to dialectical thought as a central weapon in their fight against oppressive structures and conditions. This relationship was never easy, however, as anticolonial thinkers have resisted the historical determinism, teleology, Eurocentrism, and singular emphasis that some Marxisms place on class identity at the expense of race, nation, and popular identity. In recent decades, the conflict between dialectics and postcolonial theory has only deepened. In Decolonizing Dialectics Geo Maher breaks this impasse by bringing the work of Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel together with contemporary Venezuelan politics to formulate a dialectics suited to the struggle against the legacies of colonialism and slavery. This is a decolonized dialectics premised on constant struggle in which progress must be fought for and where the struggles of the wretched of the earth themselves provide the only guarantee of historical motion.

Much ink has been spilled in attempts to prove that humans are only animals and are, like other species, only aggressive. Marx distinguishes both class and cooperative relations as inorganic: humans create their subjectivity through their mutual social production. They build upon their previous forms of social production and, with capitalism, become not only an opposition of classes, but have the capacity for urban individualism and cooperation. Dialectics of Class Struggleexamines the historical development of classes from ancient times to present. It analyses the development of ancient slavery into feudalism and the latter into capitalism. It focuses on the laws and limits of capitalist development, the contradictions inherent in the capitalist state, revolutions in the twentieth century and the possibilities for human freedom that they revealed. It concludes with an examination of class struggles in the global economy and shows the human deprivations as well as the human possibilities.

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.

The concept of resistance has always been central to the reception of Hegel's philosophy. The prevalent image of Hegel's system, which continues to influence the scholarship to this day, is that of an absolutist, monist metaphysics which overcomes all resistance, sublating or assimilating all differences into a single organic 'Whole'. For that reason, the reception of Hegel has always been marked by the question of how to resist Hegel: how to think that which remains outside of or other to the totalizing system of dialectics. In recent years the work of scholars such as Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda has brought considerable nuance to this debate. A new reading of Hegel has emerged which challenges the idea that there is no place for difference, otherness or resistance in Hegel, both by refusing to reduce Hegel's complex philosophy to a straightforward systematic narrative and by highlighting particular moments within Hegel's philosophy which seem to counteract the traditional understanding of dialectics. This book brings together established and new voices in this field in order to show that the notion of resistance is central to this revaluation of Hegel.

To the question of &lquo;what is art?&rquo;, it is often simply responded that art is whatever is produced by the artist. For John Molyneux, this clearly circular answer is deeply unsatisfying. In a tour de force spanning renaissance Italy and the Dutch Republic to contemporary leading figures, The Dialectics of Art instead approaches its subject matter as a distinct field of creative human labour that emerges alongside and in opposition to the alienation and commodification brought about by capitalism. The pieces and individuals Molyneux examines — from Michelangelo’s Slaves to Rembrandts Jewish Bride to the vast drip paintings of Jackson Pollock – are presented as embodying the social contradictions of their times, giving art an inherently political relevance. In its relationship of creative and dialectical tension to prevailing social relationships and norms, such art points beyond the existing order of things, hinting at a potential future society not based on alienated labour in which creative production becomes the property and practice of all.