Two Principles of Contradiction

The work accomplished in the first part of this volume was largely a work of destruction: the destruction, namely, of the historicist model of Marx’s ‘dialectics’. We saw there, however, at least in a preliminary way, that the historicist model is as misleading with regard to the character of the ‘dialectical method’ in its archetypal (at any rate, for the purposes of Marxist discussions ‘archetypal’) Hegelian context as it is with regard to the actual norms governing the conduct of Marx’s mature economic analyses. The mere destruction of the historicist model does not, then, per se exclude the possibility that the former might still be relevant to understanding the latter, albeit in some other manner than that suggested by historicism. So the question remains: just what, if anything, is ‘Hegelian’ in the discourse of Capital! As already indicated, if, having once cleared away the obstacles presented by the historicist model, we are now going to be able to resolve this question, we will have first to examine just what in general is distinctive about a Hegelian mode of argumentation as opposed to any other. We will need to know, in effect, just what is distinctively ‘Hegelian’ in Hegel before we can say what is ‘Hegelian’ in Marx.