Bertell Ollman has been hailed as "this country's leading authority on dialectics and Marx's method" by Paul Sweezy, the editor of Monthly Review and dean of America's Marx scholars. In this book Ollman offers a thorough analysis of Marx's use of dialectical method. Marx made extremely creative use of dialectical method to analyze the origins, operation, and direction of capitalism. Unfortunately, his promised book on method was never written, so that readers wishing to understand and evaluate Marx's theories, or to revise or use them, have had to proceed without a clear grasp of the dialectic in which the theories are framed. The result has been more disagreement over "what Marx really meant" than over the writings of any other major thinker. In putting Marx's philosophy of internal relations and his use of the process of abstraction--two little-studied aspects of dialectics--at the center of this account, Ollman provides a version of Marx's method that is at once systematic, scholarly, clear and eminently useful. Ollman not only sheds important new light on what Marx really meant in his varied theoretical pronouncements, but in carefully laying out the steps in Marx's method makes it possible for a reader to put the dialectic to work in his or her own research. He also convincingly argues the case for why social scientists and humanists as well as philosophers should want to do so.

The book presents an integral Marxist conception of the dialectics and methodology of scientific theoretical cognition, of the dialectical interrelation between the abstract and the concrete, of the unity of the historical and the logical, of the correlat

Marxist Theory of Class for a Skeptical World is a critique of Analytical Marxist and Post-structuralist Marxist theories of class, and offers an alternative approach rooted in the ideas of Marx and Engels, as well as Lenin and Trotsky.

While Karl Marx's ideas remain influential in the social sciences, there is considerable disagreement and debate on the methodological principles that inform his work. Marx often aligned himself with both "scientific" and "dialectical" principles, at least once referring to his method as a "scientific dialectic," suggesting he believed dialectical reason could be incorporated into scientific method. By debunking several misconceptions about Marx’s work and examining how he brought scientific methods to bear on his general sociological thinking, his materialist historical perspective, and within his political economy, this book brings new insight to the methodological principles that animate Marx’s writings. What emerges from such a perspective is an approach to sociological inquiry that remains vital and useful for contemporary research on capitalist society and its possible futures.

Revised throughout with an entirely new chapter, "In Defense of Internal Relations," and with replies to critical comments on the 1st edition, which the N.Y. Review of Books called "a remarkable book...brilliant and illuminating."

A theoretical examination of the influence of political and social movements on the art of dance.

This book contends incisively that fascism, far from being the antithesis of liberalism, ought to be seen centrally as an effort to unknot the longue durée tangle of the liberal order, as it finally collided, head on, with mass democracy.