The Myth of the Marxist Dialectic
Edmund Wilson
KARL
MARX and Friedrich Engels called their philosophy
"Dialectical Materialism"; and this name has had 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 con–
ceived by Hegel. The "dialectic" exploited by Plato was a technique
of arriving at 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
this
element 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 al–
ways an advance over the thesis, for it combines in a "higher"
uni–
fication the best features of both the thesis and the antithesis. Thus,
for
Hege~
the unification represented by the early Roman Republic
was a thesis. This prime unification had been accomplished by great
patriots of the type of the Scipios; but now the type of the unifying
Roman patriot, persisting, takes on a different character: it turns
into the "colossal individuality" of the age of Caesar and
Pompey, an individuality which tends to disrupt the State in pre>
portion 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.
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