Marx made reference to Hegel as 'that mighty thinker' in the preface to his Magnus opus while Lenin was later to comment that it is impossible to understand Das Capital without 'having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's logic'. Dialectics is the method of Marxism but it is the contention of the author that dialectical materialism (Marxism) cannot be appreciated without reference to Hegel, who was the first thinker to consciously apprehend the movement and interconnection of both thought and being - as totality. Subsequently Kant is fiercely critiqued, by Fichte and Schelling among others, and the Hegelian philosophy emerges, to some extent, as the critique of this critique. The author of this article concentrates on the modern epoch in particular, whereby the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume are opposed by Kant. Hegel brought the method of dialectics to fruition through an analysis of the history of philosophy beginning with the ancient Greeks and 'Oriental' thought, before traversing the various stages which would eventually culminate in the philosophy of Hegel himself. This marks a decisive break with the idealism of the dominant tradition of IR theory.This article is an attempt to trace the development of modern dialectics. Contra Linklater & Habermas, political transformation(s) in the present cannot proceed by way of the same liberal philosophy that undergirds the Westphalian state, but must begin with the material production of events. Contra the modernist political philosophies of Andrew Linklater and Jurgen Habermas, a materialist conception of political transformation must be central to our efforts to 'overcome' or 'move beyond' Westphalia. Key to this is refusing the distinction between constitution and performance central to liberal thought, in so doing, conceiving the world as ‘event.’ Although there are several theories to the event within contemporary Continental Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze’s ‘three syntheses of time’ offers the best means of overturning ‘the ontotheology of modernity.’ Deleuze’s syntheses suggest an ontology of creation which places production and creativity at its heart. However, if we are to re-think modernity and its relationship to IR, it is not sufficient to ‘go beyond’ modern philosophy and politics, we must develop new responses to the nominalist revolution. The metaphysics of certainty established here vitiates ideas of natural right, subjective security and community irrevocably tied to the sovereign state that undergird contemporary IR theories. This is a key feature of early modern political thought, and thinkers such as Hobbes and Descartes- in both their metaphysical and political writings- are responding to this problem, establishing certainty in the form of the sovereign state or individual. It identifies ‘modernism’ not with the alienation of late modernity, but with modernity’s very origins: a particular and ideological response to the ‘nominalist revolution.’ The nominalist revolution marked the end of scholastic conceptions of world order and left a new ‘problem’ of understanding how man creates order in the political world. Modernism- the notion that the contemporary world is qualitatively different from the pre-modern- undergirds the juridical, statist lens through which IR prioritises constituted power over constituted power. This thesis explores ‘modernism’ as a form of expression in international political theory. The disagreements and disputes which are going on in our own midst focus on two basic points: the disputes about Hegel touch the foundations of our method, the differences of opinion with regard to Spinoza concern our world-view and involve the concep In the last few years, two 'fronts' have been formed in connection with the treatment of Hegelian dialectics and Spinoza's world-conception: the Hegelian front and the Spinozistic front. But, more importantly, it means that Hegelian dialectic can find a renewed anti-teleological and non-synchronistic identity within the Marxist tradition. This means that the received notion of Hegel as a crude historicist is deeply problematic. In this sense, what emerges is a picture of Hegel as a profoundly nonlinear historical thinker, in which loss, dissolution, breakdown and the excremental prevail. Looking at the emergence recently of a New Hegelianism (Badiou, Bhaskar, Jameson, Žižek), in which Hegel's dialectic is variously reassessed for its political and philosophical resistance to the prevailing 'weak nihilisms' of left and right, I argue with Žižek and Jameson against Badiou and Bhaskar for Hegel as, essentially, a philosopher of the 'productive return' and failure.
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