It has been nearly two centuries since Marx famously turned Hegel on his head in order to repurpose dialectics as a revolutionary way of thinking about the internal contradictions of our social relations. Despite critiques from post-structuralists, post-colonialists, and others, there has been a resurgence of dialectical thought among political theorists as of late. This resurgence has coincided with a rise in the mention of words like class warfare, socialism, and communism among the general public on the streets of Seattle in 1999, in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, in the actions of the Greek anarchists and the Spanish indignados, and in the rallying cry of "we are the 99%" of the Occupy Movement, and in academia. This book explores how it is that dialectical thought might respond to the critiques brought forth by those on the left who are critical of Marxism’s universalizing and authoritarian legacy. Brian C. Lovato singles out Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as the key interlocutors in this ongoing conversation between Marxism and post-structuralism. Laclau and Mouffe argue that Marxist theory is inherently authoritarian, cannot escape a class-reductionist theory of revolutionary subjectivity, and is bound by a closed Hegelian ontology. Lovato argues the opposite by turning to two heterodox Marxist thinkers, Raya Dunayevskaya and C. L. R. James, in order to construct a radically democratic, dynamic, and open conceptualization of dialectical thought. In doing so, he advances a vision of Marxist theory that might serve as a resource to scholars and activists committed not only to combatting capitalism, but also to fighting against colonialism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity. The writings of Dunayevskaya and James allow for Marxism to become relevant again in these tumultuous early years of the 21st century.

In 1985, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe issued a serious challenge to the Marxist theoretical tradition with the publication of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Six years later, the collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the end of a nearly century long experiment with Marxism in practice. Both of these events ought to make scholars question the relevance of Marxist critique in the 21st century. This research looks at the work of activist and intellectual Raya Dunayevskaya in order to construct a response to both the current economic and political crises as well as the theoretical crisis that Marxist political thought currently faces. In order to do so, Dunayevskaya's work is compared with two of her contemporaries, C.L.R. James and Cornelius Castoriadis. It is argued that Dunayevskaya represents a unique tradition of libertarian and Hegelian Marxism that is able to respond to the dual crisis mentioned above. This is shown by 1) laying out a Marxist conception of the political that can compete with those offered by current non-Marxist thinkers; 2) claiming that Dunayevskaya and James are able to integrate the concepts of race and gender into their conception of democratic politics in a way that does not fall into the weaknesses of Marxism as theorized by its post-structuralist critics; 3) explaining Dunayevskaya's contribution to the understanding of Marx's appropriation of Hegel; 4) arguing that these facets of Dunayevskaya's thought offer an important contribution to Marxist, anarchist, and radical democratic scholars and activists in the context of current popular struggles.

The greater part of this dissertation provides a textual analysis of Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right in terms of two dialectics of institutional phenomenology of freedom in the modern constitutional nation-state. These two dialectics together structure politics as the intermediary action that holds together the distinct institutions of state and civil society through a process of education in individual self-consciousness that is necessary for the informed action that unifies modern ethics altogether as political spirit. In this sense Hegel's text served as an argument for modern political institutions in post-Napoleonic Germany, but in another sense the text reveals Hegel's awareness of the dangers of modern political institutions as they contain the possibility of democratic revolution, and, as Hegel thought political and religious fanaticism - dangers which he simultaneously tried to deny for the sake of instituting a modern constitution altogether. Following the analysis of Hegel, Marx is interpreted in his "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" to be pointing out the inevitable democratic politics that would result not only from the Hegelian idea of the modern state as a whole, but from the particular institutional politics that are involved with organizing the constitutional nation-state at each intermediary level of political action. In the last chapter Tocqueville's Democracy in America and The Federalist Papers are interpreted as being concerned with the same dialectic analysis and problems as Hegel and Marx, which sets up the conclusion of this dissertation, wherein, it is argued that the problematics of institutionalized democratic political spirit can be seen as animating American political development at key moments of institutional and cultural change (the Progressive era and the Sixties). This argument is advanced by a deeper methodological analysis about the dialectics of political democracy, based on Hegel and Marx, which theoretically organizes different sorts of institutional and political action into 6 different 'logics' - which, it is argued, have acted and interacted in such a way to bring about those changes in American political history.

Dialectics and Contemporary Politics develops a full theory of dialectics in order to reset the terms of dialectical critique and affirm its ability to produce radical insights about contemporary society. Dialectical thought has been the subject of sustained criticism since the 1960s, when competing approaches such as structuralism, genealogy, deconstruction and post-Marxism took political theorizing in new directions.

The concept of democratic freedom refers to more than the kind of freedom embodied by political institutions and procedures. Democratic freedom can only be properly understood if it is grasped as the expression of a culture of freedom that encompasses an entire form of life. Juliane Rebentisch’s systematic and historical approach demonstrates that we can learn a great deal about the democratic culture of freedom from its philosophical critics. From Plato to Carl Schmitt, the critique of democratic culture has always been articulated as a critique of its ãaestheticization“. Rebentisch defends various phenomena of aestheticization Ð from the irony typical of democratic citizens to the theatricality of the political Ð as constitutive elements of democratic culture and the notion of freedom at the heart of its ethical and political self-conception. This work will be of particular interest to students of Political Theory, Philosophy and Aesthetics.

The current political climate of uncompromising neoliberalism means that the need to study the logic of our culture—that is, the logic of the capitalist system—is compelling. Providing a rich philosophical analysis of democracy from a negative, non-identity, dialectical perspective, Vasilis Grollios encourages the reader not to think of democracy as a call for a more effective domination of the people or as a demand for the replacement of the elite that currently holds power. In doing so, he aspires to fill in a gap in the literature by offering an out-of-the-mainstream overview of the key concepts of totality, negativity, fetishization, contradiction, identity thinking, dialectics and corporeal materialism as they have been employed by the major thinkers of the critical theory tradition: Marx, Engels, Horkheimer, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Bloch and Holloway. Their thinking had the following common keywords: contradiction, fetishism as a process and the notion of spell and all its implications. The author makes an innovative attempt to bring these concepts to light in terms of their practical relevance for contemporary democratic theory.

The period from Plato's birth to Aristotle's death (427–322 BC) is one of the most influential and formative in the history of Western philosophy. The developments of logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and science in this period have been investigated, controversies have arisen and many new theories have been produced. But this is the first book to give detailed scholarly attention to the development of dialectic during this decisive period. It includes chapters on topics such as: dialectic as interpersonal debate between a questioner and a respondent; dialectic and the dialogue form; dialectical methodology; the dialectical context of certain forms of arguments; the role of the respondent in guaranteeing good argument; dialectic and presentation of knowledge; the interrelations between written dialogues and spoken dialectic; and definition, induction and refutation from Plato to Aristotle. The book contributes to the history of philosophy and also to the contemporary debate about what philosophy is.