Abstract

I have in this dissertation attempted to dis-associate two aspects of Marx's mature economic analysis which I contend have been falsely associated: on the one hand, the historical character of his analysis and, on the other, the influence in it of Hegelian logic. The product of this union has been what I call the historicist interpretation of Marx's "dialectical method." I try to show that this alleged "method" not only was not Marx's method, but could not have been, since it is not a method of inquiry at all, but merely what I call a "methodological imaginary." Once we discard the historicist interpretation, we can more readily understand both in what sense Marx's analysis does in fact clarify the historical conditions of capitalist production and in what sense that analysis does indeed draw upon aspects of so-called Hegelian logic. I say "so-called," because a large part of the dissertation is devoted to the task of demonstrating that the most distinctive element of "Hegelian logic," namely, the doctrine of "dialectical contradiction," is a source not so much of logical insight as paralogical mystification. Nonetheless, I try to show in conclusion that what appears in Hegel as a correlate of this doctrine, namely, the formula of the so-called "unity of opposites," finds in Marx a meaningful application: not, however, by virtue of any "methodological" choice, but only by virtue of the peculiar nature of economic value