Dialectic and Difference is the first systematic exploration of
Roy Bhaskar 's dialectical philosophy and its implications for
ethics and justice.
That philosophy has three aims: a dialecticisation of original
critical realism, a critical realisation of dialectic, and a
metacritique of western philosophy. In the first, real absence or
negativity links structured being to dialectical becoming in a
dynamic world. The second draws on Marx to locate the critical
impulse in Hegel 's dialectic in a material, open and changing
totality. The third identifies a central problem in western
philosophy from the Greeks on, the failure to think real negativity
as the essence of change ( ontological monovalence ).
Bhaskar 's ethics connect basic human ontology with universal
principles of freedom and solidarity. He marries ( constellates )
these with a grasp of how principles are historically shaped. His
account of freedom moves from the infant 's primal scream to the
eudaimonic society, but thinks the limits to freedom under modern
conditions. The morally real in ethics and justice is displaced and
reconfigured as relations between the ideal and the actual .
Western philosophy systematically denies the real negativity
that drives Bhaskar 's dialectic. Metacritique traces this to
Parmenides and Plato 's account of non-being as difference. It
enables a critique of the poststructural radicalisation of
difference via Nietzsche and the doctrine of Heraclitan flux .
Mobilised as the other of Plato 's Forms, this remains a move on
Platonic terrain. It too denies real negativity in structured being
as the ground of historical change and moral praxis.
This text is essential reading for all serious students of
social theory, philosophy, and legal theory.
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