Reflections on Dialectics in the Social Sciences

Abstract

After the break-up of totalitarian regimes grounded in Marxist ideology, social science tended to avoid the concept of dialectics, or directly excluded it from its scientific agenda. This article tries to elaborate on three questions (concentrating on less familiar or neglected conceptions, e. g. the approaches worked out by Gurvitch, Kojève, Sartre, Stalin, etc.) relating to the development and transformations of dialectic in various sociological conceptions: a) is "dialectical sociology" possible, b) is the concept of "dialectics" redundant (radical and critical sociologies are also "dialectical", c) what are the elementary principles which could or should guide "dialectical studies" of social reality. At the end, the difference between principles of the so-called Lazarsfeldian and radically critical paradigm is demonstrated against the background of empirical research.