The Dialectical Method: Its Application to Social Theory

Abstract

This dialectical method is built on the Principles of Expression and Differentiation. The first breaks with both logical and causal analysis, emphasizing relationships within a whole. The second stresses that development is often multilinear and discontinuous. Both principles deny the Aristotelian logic which deals with reality as built on abstract theoretical entities. Dialectics can be traced from Socrates through Hegel to pragmatism and contemporary general systems theory. The method is sensitive to linguistic, social, and cultural issues and is much more sociological than its critics have grasped. When applied to functionalism, the dialectical method demonstrates the inadequacy of ends-means logic. It also shows that functionalism has rested on a limited, social control viewpoint based on an identification of equilibrium with negative feedback models. A dialectical approach can subsume functionalism through a balanced perspective which stresses latent potentials as much as latent fuinctions and treats equilibrium as homeorhesis rather than homeostasis. The past two decades have seen sustained debate over the relevance of the dialectical tradition to sociology. Bendix and Berger have pointed to the theoretical and empirical yield of paired concepts with dual tendencies, citing Simmel, Tocqueville, Weber, Park, Mead, and Freud, and Gross has followed with a specific appeal for a neodialectical approach which would consider an indeterminate number of opposite, contradictory, and synthesizing principles. Although Gross' argument has been criticized by Parsons (b), who calls it eclecticism, van den Berghe suggests that functionalism might benefit from the dialectic, and such critics as Friedrichs, Nicolaus, and Schneider tend to agree. All admit, however, to some confusion over the exact nature of the method. Schneider has managed to isolate seven dialectical meaning-clusters of special relevance to sociology, including (1) the distinction between aim and outcome, (2) the issue of displacements, (3) the empirical paradox that particularly effective adaptations are limiting, (4) the idea of development through conflict, (5) the notions of contradiction, opposition, negation, dilemma, and paradox, (6) the contradictory logic of passion, and (7) the concept of the coalescence of opposites. But after a convincing review of the power of this approach, he