Hegel’s Dialectic and the Dialectic of Capital

Abstract

Having sketched some of the reasons for believing capital to be an object with peculiar properties, properties that open the possibility of a rigorously dialectical theory of its inner logic, in this chapter my aim is to explore some of the features of that dialectic, including comparisons with Hegel’s (1969) famous dialectic of the deep structures of pure thought in his Science of Logic. Hegel must, of course, be the central figure in any analysis of modern dialectical theory, but I shall also briefly consider the work of Adorno and Postone as they variously appropriate Hegelian dialectics. I include them in this chapter because they break less sharply with Hegelian dialectics than Weber, Althusser and Derrida, whose perspectives could be considered ‘anti-Hegelian’.