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How to write a Dialectic/Dialogic Essay

How to write a Dialectic essay

So, your instructor or professor has finally assigned you a dialogic or dialectic essay, and you are wondering how to go about it. Where do you begin? How do you write one that gets you an A+ grade? What goes where? What is the structure? What steps do you take? Worry not anymore because in this comprehensive guide: you will learn how to write a dialectic essay, some topics you could choose, and many tips that will help you ace this essay.

First, you need to acknowledge that a dialogic or dialectic essay is a rare type that many people would not wish to write casually. It requires research, reasoning, and a special kind of keenness. As a result, it proves more difficult when finding important information on how to write a dialectic essay. On the other hand, this type of essay enables you (the writer) to indulge in meaningful discussions on crucial topics in their respective disciplines.

Below we will discuss the procedure of curving out a perfect dialogic essay like a pro.

Let's find out more about this special assignment.

What is dialectic, debate, or Dialogic essay?

A dialectic essay is an argumentative debate or dialogue where the writer composes a thesis statement and provides arguments and counterarguments that tests it before coming to a conclusion that supports the thesis.

When writing, the writer introduces a thesis statement in the introduction paragraph then argues the information out. After using arguments and counterarguments to prove or disagree with the thesis, then the writer gives an objective conclusion to prove the thesis.

The process of arguing out a thesis statement is divided into three principal parts: pointing out the root argument to support your thesis statement, providing a substantial, weighty counterargument, and then weighing your counterargument.

Arguing out the thesis statement requires the writer to research extensively on the topic of the day to bring out a conclusion that validates the thesis statement. The validation statement does not primarily give any position on the point of discussion. It instead points out the most viable view inside the context and attributes of the evidence in the body of your dialogic essay. A conclusion, in most instances, anchors the thesis statement.

One of our top-rated essay writers noted that a dialogic essay or dialectic essay is not the same as a critical precis that takes a single stand. Instead, you present all the arguments, even when you strongly do not agree with some of them.

In some instances, a professor might ask you to share your personal opinion in the conclusion. Still, all you always have to do when writing this assignment is to discuss all sides rationally.

My professor assigned me a dialectic essay. What's the essence?

A dialogic essay is like a conversation among several people. The first one introduces an argument, then the second person objects to it with a counterargument, sparking a debate. A third person then responds to the objection from the second person with arguments that are different from the first person. And the chain continues.

When assigned this assignment, your professor is not out on a mission to frustrate or torture you. Instead, you are given dialogic essays to assess how you've mastered the art of writing essays.

Equally, a dialectic essay tests your ability to elucidate thoughts on a given issue or subject, especially controversial debatable topics. It is a different point of view essay where you present the subject or issue from different perspectives, all of which matter. You are also assessed whether you can rationally, without bias, consider the pros and cons of a problem, and make a conclusion.

This way, writing a dialectic essay helps you discuss specific topics from different perspectives by accounting for positive and negative aspects.

In sum, writing a dialectic essay equips you with the skill to consider the positives and negatives of a thesis and explore an issue deeper.

How to write a Dialogic Essay and Score an A+

Before writing a dialogic essay, you should begin by choosing a topic. You should then brainstorm around the topic and develop ideas, in the process considering all sides of the argument. Since you must provide factual information to support your opinions/arguments, it is necessary to also research. Finally, when presenting the ideas on paper, you have to consider their audience or the people you are addressing : in most cases, the professor/instructor.

An audience is mostly several people who already know the subjects and encourage their opinion on that. The audience may agree or disagree on the point of discussion. The audience's knowledge infers that you should improve the discussions on the subject to a higher and new level.  A dialectic essay is always unbiased and gives an array of options; the unbiased opinions give a dialogic piece a philosophical flavor.

11 simple steps to write a dialectic essay

We already covered the comprehensive essay writing process , which you have to go through when writing a dialogic essay. However, in a nutshell, here is what you should do:

  • Read the assignment instructions to understand what your professor wants
  • Choose an appropriate topic based on the range of topics provided, or choose one for approval by your instructor. You can use a concept map when brainstorming for points and developing ideas for your outline .
  • Do general research on the topic to familiarize yourself with it
  • Develop your thesis statement, which is the central argument of your dialectic essay
  • Conduct in-depth research on the scholarly sources that can help you develop ideas in your paper
  • Organize the research so that each that supports a given viewpoint is recorded appropriately
  • Create an outline for your dialectic essay based on the different perspectives and your thesis statement
  • Systematically write your essay without being a perfectionist
  • Make your title and reference pages
  • Proofread, edit, and polish the first draft into the final dialogic essay
  • Name your essay file appropriately and submit it on time

Dialectic Essay Topics

There are so many dialogic topics that you may write about daily or once in a while. However, if it is a free choice essay, it is vital to choose a passionate subject. It may be an assignment in some cases, but you should strive to provide information to the fullest. There are so many channels where you can seek such information. You can research on the internet, books, novels, magazines, or newspapers. As you do so, focus on debatable or argumentative essay topics.

You may sometimes get caught in arguing situations on topics you probably do not believe or hate. That does not mean that you should do it half-heartedly. On the contrary, your work should reflect your intellectual ability. There are many topics you can write a dialogic essay about: technology, ethics, science, sports, politics, education, or arts.

If you are having a hard time finding topics to write on, then have a look at the list below:

  • Should video games be used in education systems?
  • Should social media profiles be considered in the hiring process?
  • Should students be taught typing in place of writing?
  • Should children be encouraged to join social media platforms?
  • Should there be a legal implication on hate speech witnessed on social media platforms?
  • Should the state be granted access to your social media profiles?
  • Are we too dependent on computers?
  • Do social media influencers affect how people live?
  • Can social media fame be translated to real-life success?
  • Is online dating effective?
  • Are cellphones dangerous?
  • Should people pay to use the internet?
  • Should content on the internet be censored?
  • Can technology be used to manage elections?
  • Are online classes better than in-person classes?
  • Does the belief in God change a person?
  • Does science complement religion?
  • Does the level of educations affect one's moral values?
  • Should abortion be legalized?
  • Should developing countries be blocked on international funds?
  • Should loans on struggling countries be regulated?
  • Are CCTVs a breach of privacy in public places?
  • Is controlling screentime for a teenager fair?
  • Should people use animal-tested cosmetics and drugs?
  • Should torture be accepted?
  • Should the rich people help the poor?
  • Is killing a rapist immoral?
  • Is killing a murderer ethical?
  • Do paparazzi infringe the privacy of celebrities?
  • Does cloning improve one's lifespan?
  • Should there be a limit on the number of children be regulated on a person?
  • Do GMOs have a long time on a person?
  • Does cloning animals improve breeding?
  • Should COVID-19 vaccines are compelled on people?
  • Does COVID-19 affect one's lifespan?
  • Is cheerleading a sport?
  • Is VAR effective?
  • Should the Olympics be held biannually?
  • Does the World Cup unite the world?
  • Should alcohol and tobacco advertisements be shown in stadiums?
  • Does match-fixing affect the fans?
  • Should the prime minister be appointed or elected?
  • Should voting be online?
  • Should prisoners be allowed to vote?
  • Should the voting age be raised to twenty-five years?
  • Should the chief justice be a state appointee?
  • Should Africa have one president like the United States of America?
  • Should the campaign budgets of presidents be taxed?
  • Should the presidential campaign budgets be capped?
  • Should the university be free?
  • Does school break benefit the students?
  • Does school uniform affect student's performance and discipline?
  • Should graffiti be allowed on the walls of the school?
  • Should tribal, racial societies be allowed in school?
  • Should programming be offered as a subject in high school?

General Dialogic essay topics

  • Are teenagers capable of loving intensely?
  • Does abortion have moral grounds?
  • Can making tobacco production illegal stop smoking?
  • Is the death penalty effective?
  • Are gun laws effective in gun control?
  • Is competition a good thing?
  • Are boys too loving in relationships?
  • Are girls mean in their friendship?
  • Is buying a lottery ticket a good idea?
  • Should working moms and dads have special treatment?
  • Are assignments punishments to students?
  • Is fashion important?
  • Should staying on-campus be made mandatory for first-year students?
  • Is breakfast the most important meal of the day?
  • Does quitting sugar help improve health?
  • Is human cloning ethical?
  • Is identity theft punishable?
  • Should we sleep 8 hours a day?
  • Should citizenship by birth be canceled?
  • Should we remove the boundaries around the world?
  • Can wars be ended?
  • Do we need to spend on homeland security?
  • Why does government invest in security and not so much in food sustainability?
  • Does success in school mean successful life?
  • Should advertising to children be prohibited?
  • Can social media destroy real-life communication?
  • Can same-sex marriage affect the mentality of a child?

Related: Argumentative essay topics.

Dialectic/Dialogic essay structure

Writing a dialogic essay is easier than you thought, but how to fine-tune it to perfection is always hard for most writers. This essay follows the traditional structure of five well-fed paragraphs. An ideal dialectic easy is divided into three main parts: introduction, body, and conclusion.

Introduction

First of all, a dialogic essay should have an introduction. In this part of the paper, you begin by using an attention grabber to lure your readers into reading the essay. It should be a fascinating statement that makes the reader glued and hungry to go through your work. Make sure that your statement is controversial to help you note down both sides of the story.

You should also provide a short and precise definition of the essay topic through the background. This essay topic should have at least two interpretations.

However, make sure you do not give away a lot of details in this introduction part. In most cases your thesis statement can be a one-line statement at most. Two sentences are also acceptable.

The body is the most significant part of your dialogic essay. It comprises mainly three paragraphs, which require the writer to organize it point-by-point structure. The structure starts from small argument statements, provides a counterargument, and then provides contradicting information. This marvelous structure keeps your readers glued to your work as you provide detail by detailed arguments.

In the first paragraph, state your argument and support your statement with credible facts and pieces of evidence you collected from your comprehensive research. Technically, this means that without researching widely, you will not feed this category with enough flesh. Feed this paragraph with all the valuable evidence to support your thesis statement in this paragraph.

In the second paragraph, provide statements that contrast your earlier point of view: offer an objection . These statements should contradict your earlier argument and not the main theses to help your essay be debatable. Feed this section with information and pieces of evidence that support your counterargument to avoid confusing your readers.

The third paragraph of a dialectic essay is anchored on facts that criticize your previous paragraph: offer a response . You should watch out not to repeat statements from the first paragraph when responding to the second paragraph. Instead, provide new evidence that diminishes the second paragraph. This paragraph mainly states scientific or widely known shreds of evidence that object to your earlier section.

The last two paragraphs are aimed at demonstrating your understanding of the thesis.

In this last paragraph, the opening statement should reflect the core claim. Still, it should be written using different words and a different sentence structure. You may opt to rewrite your thesis statement or provide an updated view. In the first option, you are to reiterate that you have proven with all your research that your thesis statement is true or exists depending on the topic of study.

For the second alternative, bring out a new thesis statement. This thesis statement should not be completely different from your earlier statement. It is updated depending on the evidence you have put forth in your writing.

Finally, the writer shows their standing on the topic of discussion by giving a justifier anchored on the thesis statement or arguments in an objective structure.

Outline of a Dialogic/Dialectic essay

As indicated before, a dialectic essay is structured in the five-paragraph format . Let us now break it down.

I. Introduction

  • An introductory statement, mostly a hook statement .
  • Background information.
  • The controversial thesis statement .

A. Paragraph one ( presentation of the argument)

  • The minor argument that supports the thesis statement.
  •  Evidence and facts supported the ideas on a thesis statement.
  • Analysis and explanation of your facts and pieces of evidence.
  • A closing remark that points out the correlation between the thesis statement and your arguments in paragraph one

B. Paragraph two ( Presentation of the counterargument/objection )

  • An opening statement that criticizes the minor argument in the first paragraph
  • Evidence and facts sustaining this paragraph's arguments.
  • Explanation of your above facts and shreds of evidence.
  • A concluding remark showing the correlation between the thesis statement and your second paragraphs claims

C. Paragraph three ( Response )

  • An opening statement that gives a critique of your arguments in paragraph two.
  • Facts and evidence that anchor the above claims.
  • Insightful explanation of your facts and pieces of evidence.
  • A closing remark that points out the relationship between your claims in paragraph three and your arguments in paragraph

III. Conclusion

  • Restatement of the thesis statement with new words and sentence structure
  • Brief remarks on the thesis statement, arguments, claims on the thesis statement, and counterargument
  • Closing statements that echo the prevailing shreds of evidence of the thesis statements over the counterarguments above 

Dialectic or Dialogic Essay Tips

When assigned to write a dialectic essay assignment, here are some tips for using to ensure that you capture everything:

  • Begin by reading the essay prompt carefully to understand what the assignment requires
  • Choose an excellent debatable topic that interests you, unless one is already provided, or you can choose among many.
  • Research online to get ideas and familiarize yourself with your topic
  • Craft a thesis for your essay
  • Research further and organize your sources
  • Write a dialectic essay outline where you determine the structure, paragraphing and placement of ideas and counterarguments
  • Think of the advantages and disadvantages of the thesis and construct your arguments and counterarguments
  • Remember to use paragraph organization strategies such as the PEEL format when developing ideas in a paragraph.
  • Use the right tone when writing. For example, in a dialogic or dialectic essay, you are writing a dialogue that addresses a disputable aspect of a current matter of public controversy. It entails three characters, each with their perspectives reflected in each of the three body paragraphs. You should ensure that the opinions are not only strong but also unique. You should use an objective and persuasive tone but never be offensive, condescending, or aggressive, even if you disagree with the arguments.
  • In the body of your essay, make sure that the paragraphs object and respond to the previous one
  • Your counterarguments should only object to arguments from the previous paragraphs and not the thesis
  • Wind up your dialogic essay with a solid conclusion that supports the thesis and initial argument
  • When you give reasons, ensure that they are clear, concise, and factual. Do not present any subjective or dubious claims to avoid misunderstanding between those in support and those opposed to your thesis.

Parting Shot

As we live in a multicultural world with diverse people, discussing and seeing multiple points of view enables us to consider a greater variety of problems and solutions. Doing so also helps us to evaluate cross-cultural and global issues.

A dialogic (otherwise dialectic) essay is based on a debate between two or more opposing or diverging positions of a given issue. Thus, a dialogic essay is a fair and balanced look at the differing or opposing points of view.

A dialogic essay requires you to argue two or more positions or opinions and offer a final perspective that is a compromise or a higher resolution of the previous positions. You don't even have to believe in all the opinions, whether you agree or oppose each. However, you must honestly and fairly understand and rationally discuss all the viewpoints.

Related Read: Important persuasive speech topics .

In the final compromise or the synthesis, however, you may offer your own opinion. Expressing your opinion must show that you have rationally integrated the previously presented arguments and counterarguments and provided strong evidence of convincing the particular perspective.

Structurally, it is a five-paragraph essay with an introduction, first perspective, second perspective (opposed to the first), third perspective (weighing in on the first two), and the conclusion or the synthesis.

If you find this guide useful but need someone to write a customized essay for you, you can trust our custom writing service for the best help online.

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How to Write a Dialectic Essay With Explanations and Examples

11 December 2023

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Dialectic essays enable students to participate in meaningful discourse on controversial topics in their respective disciplines. Basically, this manual discusses the procedure for creating an excellent dialectic essay. Moreover, the guide commences with an exhaustive definition of a dialectic essay and highlights its distinct characteristics. After the detailed introduction into dialectic essay writing, the manual provides sample topics and explains their distinguishable traits. Next, the guide of how to write a dialectic expounds on its structure. In turn, the manual concludes with a sample outline and a sample dialectic essay.

Definition of a Dialectic Essay

A dialectic essay is a type of essay that requires authors to test a thesis statement exhaustively and reach an objective conclusion. Basically, the process of testing a thesis statement has three main stages: identifying the core argument supporting a thesis statement, provision of a viable counterargument, and an evaluation of a counterargument. As a result, authors conduct a comprehensive exploration of the topic of interest to yield a conclusion that they validate. The testing process does not necessarily provide a correct position on the debatable topic. Instead, it identifies the most reasonable view within the context of the evidence and arguments that are present in the body of the essay. In most cases, the conclusion of the discourse supports the essay’s thesis statement.

how to write a dialectic essay

Uniqueness of a Dialectic Essay

The critique of both the main argument and counterarguments is a distinct characteristic of a dialectic essay. In particular, a standard essay simply presents minor arguments in body paragraphs that support the central claim that writers provide in a thesis statement. However, a dialectic essay goes beyond the presentation of minor arguments. Firstly, a dialectic essay discusses counterarguments to minor arguments to establish the main opposing views. Then, such a paper evaluates the validity and relative weight of a counterargument in a discussion.

Sample Topics for a Dialectic Essay

1. sample topics in various disciplines:.

Engineering and technology:

  • The impact of social media on relationship formation.
  • Quality of education in the technological age.

Medicine and health:

  • The cause of the painkiller ‘pandemic.’
  • Modern-day suicide: Do not resuscitate order.

Political science:

  • The effects of stringent immigration law.
  • The dominant political ideology in America.
  • Welcoming transgenderism into society.
  • Children’s experience in dual-career families.

Psychology:

  • Parental pressure and body image in teens.
  • Trading drug addictions and non-drug addictions.

2. Identifying a Dialectic Essay Topic

Students can readily recognize a dialectic essay topic because of its controversial nature. At first sight, learners may categorize a topic as a dialectic essay topic if they realize that there are no less than two reasonable perspectives, which authors can use to create a convincing argument. Upon close examination of the existing body of knowledge on a topic, a student can ascertain that a theme is a dialectic essay topic if he or she finds viable rebuttals to counterarguments, which offer more clarity on contested issues and lead to a logical conclusion.

Structure of a Dialectic Essay

I. Introduction

The introductory paragraph consists of a hook, adequate background information, and a thesis statement. Basically, the role of a hook in the opening paragraph is to capture the attention of a reader and trigger interest to read the entire essay. Then, the background information lays the groundwork for authors to announce the central claim of a dialectic essay. In turn, a strong thesis statement for a dialectic essay should be debatable. Notably, the length of the introduction varies with the essay’s word count because a good introduction does not take up more than 10% of a dialectic essay.

II. Body Paragraphs

Organization. The complexity of a dialectic essay requires students to use a point-by-point organization structure. Basically, this organizational style necessitates the clustering of paragraphs that contain the minor argument, counterargument, and critique of a counterargument under a shared heading to ensure that readers distinguish between independent instances of dialectics. Specifically, this arrangement prevents the audience from losing track of the logical link that exists between three paragraphs that form a dialectic instance. In turn, the arrangement of clusters has an impact on the efficacy of a dialectic essay.

Paragraph structure. All body paragraphs adhere to the ‘sandwich’ rule. Basically, this rule defines a fixed arrangement of components of a paragraph. For example, a topic sentence is the first element of a body paragraph, and it contains the minor argument that writers discuss within a paragraph. After a topic sentence, students introduce a specific piece of evidence, which supports the minor argument. Then, learners provide an interpretation of the evidence and point out the significance of the evidence to the minor argument. Lastly, authors write a concluding sentence that links the minor argument, evidence, interpretation, cluster theme, and thesis statement.

III. Conclusion

The opening sentence of the conclusion should be an iteration of the central claim, but students must use different words and sentence structures. Next, learners must write a concise summary of the argument that supports the thesis statement, counterargument, and argument that criticizes this counterargument. Finally, authors reveal the ‘true’ position on a controversial topic by providing a justification that reflects on the argument, counterargument, and critique in an objective fashion.

Sample Outline Template for a Dialectic Essay

A. Hook. B. Background information. C. A debatable thesis statement.

A. First paragraph

  • The minor argument that supports a thesis statement.
  • Evidence supporting this paragraph’s claim.
  • Interpretation and analysis of the evidence.
  • A concluding statement that shows the relationship between the first paragraph’s claim and thesis statement.

B. Second body paragraph

  • A counterargument to the minor argument of the first paragraph.
  • A concluding statement that shows the relationship between the second paragraph’s counterargument and thesis statement.

C. Third body paragraph

  • An idea that provides a critique of a counterargument.
  • A concluding statement that shows the relationship between the third paragraph’s claim and the counterargument of the second paragraph.

A. Restatement of the thesis statement. B. Summary of the main supporting argument, counterargument, and critique of this counterargument. C. Closing remarks emphasizing the dominance of the central claim over the counterargument.

Sample Dialectic Essay

Topic: Divorce and Its Effects on the Family

I. Introduction Sample of a Dialectic Essay

Marriages in the 21 st century are disintegrating at an early stage. Basically, children are bystanders in divorce, but the breaking of the family affects them to a large extent. In turn, divorce improves the quality of parenting and sustains a healthy home environment.

II. Examples of Body Paragraphs in a Dialectic Essay

A. the main argument.

There is no significant difference in the children’s level of happiness. According to the American Family Organization (2020), the disparity in the happiness index of children from a nuclear family and children of divorced parents is decreasing steadily, with an all-time low of 0.001 in the 2019 national family survey. Moreover, the children of divorced families feel loved and safe despite living in a home with only one parent at a time. Hence, divorce is not a determining factor in creating an ideal home environment.

B. Counterargument

Divorce affects the ability of parents to play their roles in childrearing effectively. For example, Jones (2020) found that the probability of divorced parents to fulfill traditional parenting roles is 0.65. Based on this finding, it is apparent that divorced parents cannot engage in effective parenting at all times when compared to the parents in a traditional nuclear family setup. Accordingly, divorce places additional strain on parenting and the home environment.

C. Critique of a Counterargument

The maintenance of a broken marriage shows no inherent value to parenting. For instance, Potter’s (2020) study provides evidence that resentment build-up in unhappy marriages and the transference of these feelings to children impairs parenting. Moreover, resentment hurts both parents and children. In turn, the opportunity cost associated with the protection of the nuclear family structure is too high.

III. Conclusion Sample of a Dialectic Essay

The nuclear family structure cannot survive the stress caused by unhappy partners. Moreover, there is no need for parents to force a marriage if the marriage is unsalvageable. Thus, divorce is the right choice because it offers the most protection for the children’s interests.

Final Provisions on How to Write a Good Dialectic Essay

  • Students should select a topic that is debatable to create a persuasive dialectic essay.
  • Authors must locate evidence from reliable sources and offer appropriate documentation.
  • Proper organization of a dialectic essay is critical to the clarity of such a paper.

To Learn More, Read Relevant Articles

576 good compare and contrast essay topics, main 5 parts of an essay: easy guidelines for writers.

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How to Write a Dialectic Essay Step-by-Step

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by  Antony W

December 13, 2021

the dialectic essay

This is the complete guide on how to write a dialectic essay, step-by-step. We’ll look at what it is, what makes it unique, the right structure to use, and even give you tips you can use to write a comprehensive essay that scores high grades. In short, if you’re looking for a complete guide on a dialectic essay, you’ve come to the right place.

What is a Dialectic Essay?

A dialectic essay is an argumentative debate in which a writer introduces a thesis statement and then uses both arguments and counterarguments to prove their claim.

You can base the discussion on a topic of your choosing, provided your instructor doesn’t give you one in the brief. Your document should be double-spaced, and the length of the essay should be 600 words maximum.

This type of essay is different from an argumentative essay in that instead of taking a position on an issue, you look at both arguments and present them to your audience, even if you don’t agree with those positions. Of course, your instructor might ask you to share your thoughts in the conclusion section of the essay. However, the core principle is that you have to establish a rational discussion of all sides.

The aim of a dialectic essay is to teach students the essence of participation in meaningful discourse on general and controversial topics in various disciplines. In other words, your instructor wants you to write this type of essay because they want to test your ability to clarify thoughts on a given subject. 

Dialectic Essay Format

The first most important point in writing a dialectic essay is to make sure you understand the format. Your instructor will obviously look at the outline first to see if you’ve structured your essay the right way.

This assignment is no any different from a 5-pargarph essay as far as the outline is concerned. It needs to have an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Check out the image below for structural clarity:

As you can see, the organization is very clear and easy to follow, so writing this essay should be easy.

How to Write a Dialectic Essay Form the Introduction to Conclusion

Now that you have a clear structure of the dialectic essay, it’s time to look at what or how you should write the introduction, body, and conclusion section.

Introduction

In a dialectic essay, your introduction has to be the thesis itself. This is the central message that you wish to discuss and pass across.

Remember, the essay looks at both side of an issue regardless of what you consider to be the most suitable position to hold. As such, you should choose a topic and therefore write a thesis that has more than one interpretation.

We suggest that you introduce some form of controversy in the introduction. Doing so gives you the opportunity to examine and represent the opposing point of views in the essay with ease. Remember also that this section is only one paragraph, so it’s best to make it as precise as possible – and short.

Body Paragraphs

There are three paragraphs in the body section of a dialectic essay. The first focuses on an argument, the second describes an objection, and the third gives a response. Let’s look at these even further to give you more clarity.

1. The Argument

There can only be one argument in a dialectic essay. Also, you have to present it with facts. The introduction of the argument accompanied by factual evidence makes it easy for you to support and prove your thesis to your audience. 

2. The Objection

It’s in this paragraph that you respond to the argument you presented on the first paragraph. To make this a dialectic essay, you do have to object the argument, in which case you give sufficient, objective reasons why your argument cannot be the ultimate truth.

It doesn’t end there.

You need to have enough proof to support the objection against your own argument. Doing so turns your essay into a strong debate, as there are already two opposing views here.

3. The Response

It’s in this section that you give a response to the objection in the second paragraph of the body section. You should not introduce a new argument for the thesis in this section, or anywhere else for that matter, as doing so can confuse your reader.  Remember, your aim is to criticize what you’ve already written in the objection section.

Ultimately, the agenda is to show your instructor or professor that you understand your thesis to a great depth and can present all the interpretations the right way.

Ending a dialectic essay isn’t difficult. You just need to know what to include in the section and what to leave out. Here, you support your thesis, although some guides suggest that you can even represent a new one provided you combine it with the argument and counterargument discussed in the essay.

To be clear, it’s completely wrong to change the thesis of this assignment, and can as easily lead to failing to score the grades that you deserve. Some writers choose to modify the thesis a little, in which case it’s never a complete reversal that’s not supported by proof.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, writing a dialectic essay isn’t difficult. From what we’ve looked at, this should be by far the shortest essay you’ll ever write, and there are often no instructions that suggest that you can make the essay longer.

It’s best to think about the strengths and weaknesses of your thesis before you begin to write. This will help you to organize your ideas in a way that gives your essay a good flow from the introduction all the way to the conclusion.

Another important step to complete is to check your essay for plagiarism. Professors don’t appreciate sitting through hours of reading only to learn that students have submitted unoriginal work. Don’t be the student that submits copied assignment late as this could cost you heavily.

About the author 

Antony W is a professional writer and coach at Help for Assessment. He spends countless hours every day researching and writing great content filled with expert advice on how to write engaging essays, research papers, and assignments.

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How to Write an Exclusive Dialectic Essay: Assignment and Sample

Last updated: July 2019

Oh no, not again!

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image source: Unsplash

Essay types are numerous, and students have to know them all, as well as understand the difference between them. What to do if a professor assigns a dialectic essay to you?

The assignment : write a dialectic essay on the topic of your choice, it should be about 2 double-spaced typed pages (600 words maximum). Follow the structure and clearly label each section of your essay.

Here goes the definition of a dialectic essay for you again:

Dialectic essay is a sort of argumentative dialogue or debate, where a writer should make a thesis and use different arguments and counterarguments to prove this thesis’ verity.

Unlike critical précis , a dialectic essay is not about taking a single stand on the issue. Here you should represent all arguments, even if you don’t agree with some of them. A professor might ask to share your opinion in conclusion, but this essay type is more about a rational discussion of all sides.

It is like a conversation among several people:

  • One introduces and proves an argument.
  • Another one objects it, providing a counterargument and, therefore, starting a debate.
  • Finally, a third one responds to the objection with arguments, different from those in the first paragraph.

Why do they ask you to write a dialectic essay?

Nope, that’s not because your professors hate you.

By assigning dialectic essays, they want to check your ability to clarify thoughts on a particular subject. This essay type is perfect for presenting the subject from different points of view, considering its both positive and negative aspects, and making a conclusion accordingly.

Writing a dialectic essay, you learn to see all values and vices of the thesis, as well as explore the subject in depth.

What is the structure of a dialectic essay?

It reminds a standard 5-paragraph essay, which consists of an introduction, where you present your argumentative thesis , a body of three parts, and a conclusion.

How to organize a dialectic essay?

dialectic-essay-structure

Introduction (a thesis itself)

First of all, the introduction of your dialectic essay should represent a thesis . To introduce a debate in the paper, make sure to choose a topic and thesis that have at least two interpretations.

Make your thesis controversial to have an opportunity of representing opposite views in your essay. And yet, don’t make the introduction too long. This part of your dialectic paper consists of one paragraph.

Paragraph 1 of a dialectic essay presents one argument with facts to support and prove it to the audience. It (argument) supports your thesis.

The second paragraph of a dialectic essay responds to the argument of Paragraph 1, providing the objection to it.

NB! This paragraph objects the argument, not the thesis. Give reasons why it’s not the ultimate truth, and support your objecting with proofs. In this way, you make an essay a kind of a debate between two people with opposite views.

Paragraph 3 of a dialectic essay is your response to the objecting. However, don’t refer to the same arguments you used in Paragraph 1. This part of your essay responds to the objection from Paragraph 2.

There is no need to provide new arguments for the thesis because your task here is to criticize Paragraph 2.

As a rule, the only right argument of your debate is that from Paragraph 1. The rest two serve to demonstrate your professor that you understand the thesis in depth and see its all interpretations.

The aim of a final paragraph is to support the initial thesis of your dialectic essay or represent a new one, which would combine both arguments and counterarguments.

NB! Don’t change the thesis! It may be a kind of modification supported by more proofs but not a complete reversal.

This sample of a dialectic essay will help to understand the sense of such a writing assignment better.

Three Opposing Viewpoints on Abortion by Amy Geiger

essay sample on abortion

From: tc.umn.edu

Dialectic Essay Topics

Dialectic essay tips.

First, you must recognize that dialectic writing is one of the rarest types of papers that do not occur too often. Because of this, learning how to write them well can be a big challenge because there will be little practice. This type of writing generally involves a reasoned dialog between the writer and the arguments for and against.

Here are some essential writing guidelines:

  • First, you should read all the teacher’s requirements, because they can differ. In the future, this will help you to make a minimum number of mistakes.
  • After that, try to choose a topic you already have experience with. Thanks to this, you can develop a writing plan and not make mistakes in facts.
  • Be sure to research the topic to find out all sides and positions of the participants. You need to prove and disprove your arguments at the same time.
  • Write an outline of your essay and specify everything down to the smallest detail. This will help you not to get confused in your argumentation.
  • After writing, read your essay to your friends and acquaintances. This will help you find weaknesses and correct them.

In general, you need to pay the most attention to your sources of information. Ensure that all the cited studies are written correctly and do not contradict each other.

So, now what?

Once your professor assigns a dialectic essay, follow this checklist to make sure you don’t miss anything:

  • Choose a debatable topic (except as noted).
  • Come up with a thesis and represent it in the introduction of your dialectic essay.
  • Think about all the possible pros and cons of the thesis.
  • Organize all ideas to determine both arguments and counterarguments.
  • Write three paragraphs of your essay, with each objecting and responding to a previous one.
  • Make sure that your counterarguments don’t object the thesis but arguments from previous paragraphs of a dialectic essay.
  • Finish your dialectic essay with a conclusion that would support the thesis and initial argument.
  • Proofread and edit your essay .

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Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.

Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.

1. Biographical Sketch

2. dialectic of enlightenment, 3. critical social theory, 4. aesthetic theory, 5. negative dialectics, 6. ethics and metaphysics after auschwitz, other internet resources, related entries.

Born on September 11, 1903 as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, Adorno lived in Frankfurt am Main for the first three decades of his life and the last two (Müller-Doohm 2005, Claussen 2008). He was the only son of a wealthy German wine merchant of assimilated Jewish background and an accomplished musician of Corsican Catholic descent. Adorno studied philosophy with the neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius and music composition with Alban Berg. He completed his Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard's aesthetics in 1931, under the supervision of the Christian socialist Paul Tillich. After just two years as a university instructor ( Privatdozent ), he was expelled by the Nazis, along with other professors of Jewish heritage or on the political left. A few years later he turned his father's surname into a middle initial and adopted “Adorno,” the maternal surname by which he is best known.

Adorno left Germany in the spring of 1934. During the Nazi era he resided in Oxford, New York City, and southern California. There he wrote several books for which he later became famous, including Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer), Philosophy of New Music , The Authoritarian Personality (a collaborative project), and Minima Moralia . From these years come his provocative critiques of mass culture and the culture industry. Returning to Frankfurt in 1949 to take up a position in the philosophy department, Adorno quickly established himself as a leading German intellectual and a central figure in the Institute of Social Research. Founded as a free-standing center for Marxist scholarship in 1923, the Institute had been led by Max Horkheimer since 1930. It provided the hub to what has come to be known as the Frankfurt School. Adorno became the Institute's director in 1958. From the 1950s stem In Search of Wagner , Adorno's ideology-critique of the Nazi's favorite composer; Prisms , a collection of social and cultural studies; Against Epistemology , an antifoundationalist critique of Husserlian phenomenology; and the first volume of Notes to Literature , a collection of essays in literary criticism.

Conflict and consolidation marked the last decade of Adorno's life. A leading figure in the “positivism dispute” in German sociology, Adorno was a key player in debates about restructuring German universities and a lightning rod for both student activists and their right-wing critics. These controversies did not prevent him from publishing numerous volumes of music criticism, two more volumes of Notes to Literature , books on Hegel and on existential philosophy, and collected essays in sociology and in aesthetics. Negative Dialectics , Adorno's magnum opus on epistemology and metaphysics, appeared in 1966. Aesthetic Theory , the other magnum opus on which he had worked throughout the 1960s, appeared posthumously in 1970. He died of a heart attack on August 6, 1969, one month shy of his sixty-sixth birthday.

Long before “postmodernism” became fashionable, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote one of the most searching critiques of modernity to have emerged among progressive European intellectuals. Dialectic of Enlightenment is a product of their wartime exile. It first appeared as a mimeograph titled Philosophical Fragments in 1944. This title became the subtitle when the book was published in 1947. Their book opens with a grim assessment of the modern West: “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant” (DE 1, translation modified). How can this be, the authors ask. How can the progress of modern science and medicine and industry promise to liberate people from ignorance, disease, and brutal, mind-numbing work, yet help create a world where people willingly swallow fascist ideology, knowingly practice deliberate genocide, and energetically develop lethal weapons of mass destruction? Reason, they answer, has become irrational.

Although they cite Francis Bacon as a leading spokesman for an instrumentalized reason that becomes irrational, Horkheimer and Adorno do not think that modern science and scientism are the sole culprits. The tendency of rational progress to become irrational regress arises much earlier. Indeed, they cite both the Hebrew scriptures and Greek philosophers as contributing to regressive tendencies. If Horkheimer and Adorno are right, then a critique of modernity must also be a critique of premodernity, and a turn toward the postmodern cannot simply be a return to the premodern. Otherwise the failures of modernity will continue in a new guise under contemporary conditions. Society as a whole needs to be transformed.

Horkheimer and Adorno believe that society and culture form a historical totality, such that the pursuit of freedom in society is inseparable from the pursuit of enlightenment in culture (DE xvi). There is a flip side to this: a lack or loss of freedom in society—in the political, economic, and legal structures within which we live—signals a concomitant failure in cultural enlightenment—in philosophy, the arts, religion, and the like. The Nazi death camps are not an aberration, nor are mindless studio movies innocent entertainment. Both indicate that something fundamental has gone wrong in the modern West.

According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the source of today's disaster is a pattern of blind domination, domination in a triple sense: the domination of nature by human beings, the domination of nature within human beings, and, in both of these forms of domination, the domination of some human beings by others. What motivates such triple domination is an irrational fear of the unknown: “Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization … . Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized” (DE 11). In an unfree society whose culture pursues so-called progress no matter what the cost, that which is “other,” whether human or nonhuman, gets shoved aside, exploited, or destroyed. The means of destruction may be more sophisticated in the modern West, and the exploitation may be less direct than outright slavery, but blind, fear-driven domination continues, with ever greater global consequences. The all-consuming engine driving this process is an ever-expanding capitalist economy, fed by scientific research and the latest technologies.

Contrary to some interpretations, Horkheimer and Adorno do not reject the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Nor do they provide a negative “metanarrative” of universal historical decline. Rather, through a highly unusual combination of philosophical argument, sociological reflection, and literary and cultural commentary, they construct a “double perspective” on the modern West as a historical formation (Jarvis 1998, 23). They summarize this double perspective in two interlinked theses: “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology” (DE xviii). The first thesis allows them to suggest that, despite being declared mythical and outmoded by the forces of secularization, older rituals, religions, and philosophies may have contributed to the process of enlightenment and may still have something worthwhile to contribute. The second thesis allows them to expose ideological and destructive tendencies within modern forces of secularization, but without denying either that these forces are progressive and enlightening or that the older conceptions they displace were themselves ideological and destructive.

A fundamental mistake in many interpretations of Dialectic of Enlightenment occurs when readers take such theses to be theoretical definitions of unchanging categories rather than critical judgments about historical tendencies. The authors are not saying that myth is “by nature” a force of enlightenment. Nor are they claiming that enlightenment “inevitably” reverts to mythology. In fact, what they find really mythical in both myth and enlightenment is the thought that fundamental change is impossible. Such resistance to change characterizes both ancient myths of fate and modern devotion to the facts.

Accordingly, in constructing a “dialectic of enlightenment” the authors simultaneously aim to carry out a dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment not unlike Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit . Two Hegelian concepts anchor this project, namely, determinate negation and conceptual self-reflection. “Determinate negation” ( bestimmte Negation ) indicates that immanent criticism is the way to wrest truth from ideology. A dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment “discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from [the image's] features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth” (DE 18). Beyond and through such determinate negation, a dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment also recalls the origin and goal of thought itself. Such recollection is the work of the concept as the self-reflection of thought ( der Begriff als Selbstbesinnung des Denkens , DE 32). Conceptual self-reflection reveals that thought arises from the very corporeal needs and desires that get forgotten when thought becomes a mere instrument of human self-preservation. It also reveals that the goal of thought is not to continue the blind domination of nature and humans but to point toward reconciliation. Adorno works out the details of this conception in his subsequent lectures on Kant (KC), ethics (PMP), and metaphysics (MCP) and in his books on Husserl (AE), Hegel (H), and Heidegger (JA). His most comprehensive statement occurs in Negative Dialectics , which is discussed later.

Dialectic of Enlightenment presupposes a critical social theory indebted to Karl Marx. Adorno reads Marx as a Hegelian materialist whose critique of capitalism unavoidably includes a critique of the ideologies that capitalism sustains and requires. The most important of these is what Marx called “the fetishism of commodities.” Marx aimed his critique of commodity fetishism against bourgeois social scientists who simply describe the capitalist economy but, in so doing, simultaneously misdescribe it and prescribe a false social vision. According to Marx, bourgeois economists necessarily ignore the exploitation intrinsic to capitalist production. They fail to understand that capitalist production, for all its surface “freedom” and “fairness,” must extract surplus value from the labor of the working class. Like ordinary producers and consumers under capitalist conditions, bourgeois economists treat the commodity as a fetish. They treat it as if it were a neutral object, with a life of its own, that directly relates to other commodities, in independence from the human interactions that actually sustain all commodities. Marx, by contrast, argues that whatever makes a product a commodity goes back to human needs, desires, and practices. The commodity would not have “use value” if it did not satisfy human wants. It would not have “exchange value” if no one wished to exchange it for something else. And its exchange value could not be calculated if the commodity did not share with other commodities a “value” created by the expenditure of human labor power and measured by the average labor time socially necessary to produce commodities of various sorts.

Adorno's social theory attempts to make Marx's central insights applicable to “late capitalism.” Although in agreement with Marx's analysis of the commodity, Adorno thinks his critique of commodity fetishism does not go far enough. Significant changes have occurred in the structure of capitalism since Marx's day. This requires revisions on a number of topics: the dialectic between forces of production and relations of production; the relationship between state and economy; the sociology of classes and class consciousness; the nature and function of ideology; and the role of expert cultures, such as modern art and social theory, in criticizing capitalism and calling for the transformation of society as a whole.

The primary clues to these revisions come from a theory of reification proposed by the Hungarian socialist Georg Lukács in the 1920s and from interdisciplinary projects and debates conducted by members of the Institute of Social Research in the 1930s and 1940s. Building on Max Weber's theory of rationalization, Lukács argues that the capitalist economy is no longer one sector of society alongside others. Rather, commodity exchange has become the central organizing principle for all sectors of society. This allows commodity fetishism to permeate all social institutions (e.g., law, administration, journalism) as well as all academic disciplines, including philosophy. “Reification” refers to “the structural process whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society.” Lukács was especially concerned with how reification makes human beings “seem like mere things obeying the inexorable laws of the marketplace” (Zuidervaart 1991, 76).

Initially Adorno shared this concern, even though he never had Lukács's confidence that the revolutionary working class could overcome reification. Later Adorno called the reification of consciousness an “epiphenomenon.” What a critical social theory really needs to address is why hunger, poverty, and other forms of human suffering persist despite the technological and scientific potential to mitigate them or to eliminate them altogether. The root cause, Adorno says, lies in how capitalist relations of production have come to dominate society as a whole, leading to extreme, albeit often invisible, concentrations of wealth and power (ND 189–92). Society has come to be organized around the production of exchange values for the sake of producing exchange values, which, of course, always already requires a silent appropriation of surplus value. Adorno refers to this nexus of production and power as the “principle of exchange” ( Tauschprinzip ). A society where this nexus prevails is an “exchange society” ( Tauschgesellschaft ).

Adorno's diagnosis of the exchange society has three levels: politico-economic, social-psychological, and cultural. Politically and economically he responds to a theory of state capitalism proposed by Friedrich Pollock during the war years. An economist by training who was supposed to contribute a chapter to Dialectic of Enlightenment but never did (Wiggershaus 1994, 313–19), Pollock argued that the state had acquired dominant economic power in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and New Deal America. He called this new constellation of politics and economics “state capitalism.” While acknowledging with Pollock that political and economic power have become more tightly meshed, Adorno does not think this fact changes the fundamentally economic character of capitalist exploitation. Rather, such exploitation has become even more abstract than it was in Marx's day, and therefore all the more effective and pervasive.

The social-psychological level in Adorno's diagnosis serves to demonstrate the effectiveness and pervasiveness of late capitalist exploitation. His American studies of anti-Semitism and the “authoritarian personality” argue that these pathologically extend “the logic of late capitalism itself, with its associated dialectic of enlightenment.” People who embrace anti-Semitism and fascism tend to project their fear of abstract domination onto the supposed mediators of capitalism, while rejecting as elitist “all claims to a qualitative difference transcending exchange” (Jarvis 1998, 63).

Adorno's cultural studies show that a similar logic prevails in television, film, and the recording industries. In fact, Adorno first discovered late capitalism's structural change through his work with sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld on the Princeton University Radio Research Project. He articulated this discovery in a widely anthologized essay “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938) and in “The Culture Industry,” a chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment . There Adorno argues that the culture industry involves a change in the commodity character of art, such that art's commodity character is deliberately acknowledged and art “abjures its autonomy” (DE 127). With its emphasis on marketability, the culture industry dispenses entirely with the “purposelessness” that was central to art's autonomy. Once marketability becomes a total demand, the internal economic structure of cultural commodities shifts. Instead of promising freedom from societally dictated uses, and thereby having a genuine use value that people can enjoy, products mediated by the culture industry have their use value replaced by exchange value: “Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation [ gesellschaftliche Schätzung ] which they mistake for the merit [ Rang ] of works of art— becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy” (DE 128). Hence the culture industry dissolves the “genuine commodity character” that artworks once possessed when exchange value still presupposed use value (DE 129–30). Lacking a background in Marxist theory, and desiring to secure legitimacy for “mass art” or “popular culture,” too many of Adorno's anglophone critics simply ignore the main point to his critique of the culture industry. His main point is that culture-industrial hypercommercialization evidences a fateful shift in the structure of all commodities and therefore in the structure of capitalism itself.

Philosophical and sociological studies of the arts and literature make up more than half of Adorno's collected works ( Gesammelte Schriften ). All of his most important social-theoretical claims show up in these studies. Yet his “aesthetic writings” are not simply “applications” or “test cases” for theses developed in “nonaesthetic” texts. Adorno rejects any such separation of subject matter from methodology and all neat divisions of philosophy into specialized subdisciplines. This is one reason why academic specialists find his texts so challenging, not only musicologists and literary critics but also epistemologists and aestheticians. All of his writings contribute to a comprehensive and interdisciplinary social philosophy (Zuidervaart 2007).

First published the year after Adorno died, Aesthetic Theory marks the unfinished culmination of his remarkably rich body of aesthetic reflections. It casts retrospective light on the entire corpus. It also comes closest to the model of “paratactical presentation” (Hullot-Kentor in AT xi-xxi) that Adorno, inspired especially by Walter Benjamin, found most appropriate for his own “atonal philosophy.” Relentlessly tracing concentric circles, Aesthetic Theory carries out a dialectical double reconstruction. It reconstructs the modern art movement from the perspective of philosophical aesthetics. It simultaneously reconstructs philosophical aesthetics, especially that of Kant and Hegel, from the perspective of modern art. From both sides Adorno tries to elicit the sociohistorical significance of the art and philosophy discussed.

Adorno's claims about art in general stem from his reconstruction of the modern art movement. So a summary of his philosophy of art sometimes needs to signal this by putting “modern” in parentheses. The book begins and ends with reflections on the social character of (modern) art. Two themes stand out in these reflections. One is an updated Hegelian question whether art can survive in a late capitalist world. The other is an updated Marxian question whether art can contribute to the transformation of this world. When addressing both questions, Adorno retains from Kant the notion that art proper (“fine art” or “beautiful art”— schöne Kunst —in Kant's vocabulary) is characterized by formal autonomy. But Adorno combines this Kantian emphasis on form with Hegel's emphasis on intellectual import ( geistiger Gehalt ) and Marx's emphasis on art's embeddedness in society as a whole. The result is a complex account of the simultaneous necessity and illusoriness of the artwork's autonomy. The artwork's necessary and illusory autonomy, in turn, is the key to (modern) art's social character, namely, to be “the social antithesis of society” (AT 8).

Adorno regards authentic works of (modern) art as social monads. The unavoidable tensions within them express unavoidable conflicts within the larger sociohistorical process from which they arise and to which they belong. These tensions enter the artwork through the artist's struggle with sociohistorically laden materials, and they call forth conflicting interpretations, many of which misread either the work-internal tensions or their connection to conflicts in society as a whole. Adorno sees all of these tensions and conflicts as “contradictions” to be worked through and eventually to be resolved. Their complete resolution, however, would require a transformation in society as a whole, which, given his social theory, does not seem imminent.

As commentary and criticism, Adorno's aesthetic writings are unparalleled in the subtlety and sophistication with which they trace work-internal tensions and relate them to unavoidable sociohistorical conflicts. One gets frequent glimpses of this in Aesthetic Theory . For the most part, however, the book proceeds at the level of “third reflections”—reflections on categories employed in actual commentary and criticism, with a view to their suitability for what artworks express and to their societal implications. Typically he elaborates these categories as polarities or dialectical pairs.

One such polarity, and a central one in Adorno's theory of artworks as social monads, occurs between the categories of import ( Gehalt ) and function ( Funktion ). Adorno's account of these categories distinguishes his sociology of art from both hermeneutical and empirical approaches. A hermeneutical approach would emphasize the artwork's inherent meaning or its cultural significance and downplay the artwork's political or economic functions. An empirical approach would investigate causal connections between the artwork and various social factors without asking hermeneutical questions about its meaning or significance. Adorno, by contrast, argues that, both as categories and as phenomena, import and function need to be understood in terms of each other. On the one hand, an artwork's import and its functions in society can be diametrically opposed. On the other hand, one cannot give a proper account of an artwork's social functions if one does not raise import-related questions about their significance. So too, an artwork's import embodies the work's social functions and has potential relevance for various social contexts. In general, however, and in line with his critiques of positivism and instrumentalized reason, Adorno gives priority to import, understood as societally mediated and socially significant meaning. The social functions emphasized in his own commentaries and criticisms are primarily intellectual functions rather than straightforwardly political or economic functions. This is consistent with a hyperbolic version of the claim that (modern) art is society's social antithesis: “Insofar as a social function can be predicated for artworks, it is their functionlessness” (AT 227).

The priority of import also informs Adorno's stance on art and politics, which derives from debates with Lukács, Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s (Lunn 1982; Zuidervaart 1991, 28–43). Because of the shift in capitalism's structure, and because of Adorno's own complex emphasis on (modern) art's autonomy, he doubts both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of tendentious, agitative, or deliberately consciousness-raising art. Yet he does see politically engaged art as a partial corrective to the bankrupt aestheticism of much mainstream art. Under the conditions of late capitalism, the best art, and politically the most effective, so thoroughly works out its own internal contradictions that the hidden contradictions in society can no longer be ignored. The plays of Samuel Beckett, to whom Adorno had intended to dedicate Aesthetic Theory , are emblematic in that regard. Adorno finds them more true than many other artworks.

Arguably, the idea of “truth content” ( Wahrheitsgehalt ) is the pivotal center around which all the concentric circles of Adorno's aesthetics turn (Zuidervaart 1991; Wellmer 1991, 1–35 ; Jarvis 1998, 90–123). To gain access to this center, one must temporarily suspend standard theories about the nature of truth (whether as correspondence, coherence, or pragmatic success) and allow for artistic truth to be dialectical, disclosive, and nonpropositional. According to Adorno, each artwork has its own import ( Gehalt ) by virtue of an internal dialectic between content ( Inhalt ) and form ( Form ). This import invites critical judgments about its truth or falsity. To do justice to the artwork and its import, such critical judgments need to grasp both the artwork's complex internal dynamics and the dynamics of the sociohistorical totality to which the artwork belongs. The artwork has an internal truth content to the extent that the artwork's import can be found internally and externally either true or false. Such truth content is not a metaphysical idea or essence hovering outside the artwork. But neither is it a merely human construct. It is historical but not arbitrary; nonpropositional, yet calling for propositional claims to be made about it; utopian in its reach, yet firmly tied to specific societal conditions. Truth content is the way in which an artwork simultaneously challenges the way things are and suggests how things could be better, but leaves things practically unchanged: “Art has truth as the semblance of the illusionless” (AT 132).

Adorno's idea of artistic truth content presupposes the epistemological and metaphysical claims he works out most thoroughly in Negative Dialectics . These claims, in turn, consolidate and extend the historiographic and social-theoretical arguments already canvassed. As Simon Jarvis demonstrates, Negative Dialectics tries to formulate a “philosophical materialism” that is historical and critical but not dogmatic. Alternatively, one can describe the book as a “metacritique” of idealist philosophy, especially of the philosophy of Kant and Hegel (Jarvis 1998, 148–74; O'Connor 2004). Adorno says the book aims to complete what he considered his lifelong task as a philosopher: “to use the strength of the [epistemic] subject to break through the deception [ Trug ] of constitutive subjectivity” (ND xx).

This occurs in four stages. First, a long Introduction (ND 1–57) works out a concept of “philosophical experience” that both challenges Kant's distinction between “phenomena” and “noumena” and rejects Hegel's construction of “absolute spirit.” Then Part One (ND 59–131) distinguishes Adorno's project from the “fundamental ontology” in Heidegger's Being and Time . Part Two (ND 133–207) works out Adorno's alternative with respect to the categories he reconfigures from German idealism. Part Three (ND 209–408), composing nearly half the book, elaborates philosophical “models.” These present negative dialectics in action upon key concepts of moral philosophy (“freedom”), philosophy of history (“world spirit” and “natural history”), and metaphysics. Adorno says the final model, devoted to metaphysical questions, “tries by critical self reflection to give the Copernican revolution an axial turn” (ND xx). Alluding to Kant's self-proclaimed “second Copernican revolution,” this description echoes Adorno's comment about breaking through the deception of constitutive subjectivity.

Like Hegel, Adorno criticizes Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena by arguing that the transcendental conditions of experience can be neither so pure nor so separate from each other as Kant seems to claim. As concepts, for example, the a priori categories of the faculty of understanding ( Verstand ) would be unintelligible if they were not already about something that is nonconceptual. Conversely, the supposedly pure forms of space and time cannot simply be nonconceptual intuitions. Not even a transcendental philosopher would have access to them apart from concepts about them. So too, what makes possible any genuine experience cannot simply be the “application” of a priori concepts to a priori intuitions via the “schematism” of the imagination ( Einbildungskraft ). Genuine experience is made possible by that which exceeds the grasp of thought and sensibility. Adorno does not call this excess the “thing in itself,” however, for that would assume the Kantian framework he criticizes. Rather, he calls it “the nonidentical” ( das Nichtidentische ).

The concept of the nonidentical, in turn, marks the difference between Adorno's materialism and Hegel's idealism. Although he shares Hegel's emphasis on a speculative identity between thought and being, between subject and object, and between reason and reality, Adorno denies that this identity has been achieved in a positive fashion. For the most part this identity has occurred negatively instead. That is to say, human thought, in achieving identity and unity, has imposed these upon objects, suppressing or ignoring their differences and diversity. Such imposition is driven by a societal formation whose exchange principle demands the equivalence (exchange value) of what is inherently nonequivalent (use value). Whereas Hegel's speculative identity amounts to an identity between identity and nonidentity, Adorno's amounts to a nonidentity between identity and nonidentity. That is why Adorno calls for a “negative dialectic” and why he rejects the affirmative character of Hegel's dialectic (ND 143–61).

Adorno does not reject the necessity of conceptual identification, however, nor does his philosophy claim to have direct access to the nonidentical. Under current societal conditions, thought can only have access to the nonidentical via conceptual criticisms of false identifications. Such criticisms must be “determinate negations,” pointing up specific contradictions between what thought claims and what it actually delivers. Through determinate negation, those aspects of the object which thought misidentifies receive an indirect, conceptual articulation.

The motivation for Adorno's negative dialectic is not simply conceptual, however, nor are its intellectual resources. His epistemology is “materialist” in both regards. It is motivated, he says, by undeniable human suffering—a fact of unreason, if you will, to counter Kant's “fact of reason.” Suffering is the corporeal imprint of society and the object upon human consciousness: “The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject … ” (ND 17–18). The resources available to philosophy in this regard include the “expressive” or “mimetic” dimensions of language, which conflict with “ordinary” (i.e., societally sanctioned) syntax and semantics. In philosophy, this requires an emphasis on “presentation” ( Darstellung ) in which logical stringency and expressive flexibility interact (ND 18–19, 52–53). Another resource lies in unscripted relationships among established concepts. By taking such concepts out of their established patterns and rearranging them in “constellations” around a specific subject matter, philosophy can unlock some of the historical dynamic hidden within objects whose identity exceeds the classifications imposed upon them (ND 52–53, 162–66).

What unifies all of these desiderata, and what most clearly distinguishes Adorno's materialist epistemology from “idealism,” whether Kantian or Hegelian, is his insisting on the “priority of the object” ( Vorrang des Objekts , ND 183–97). Adorno regards as “idealist” any philosophy that affirms an identity between subject and object and thereby assigns constitutive priority to the epistemic subject. In insisting on the priority of the object, Adorno repeatedly makes three claims: first, that the epistemic subject is itself objectively constituted by the society to which it belongs and without which the subject could not exist; second, that no object can be fully known according to the rules and procedures of identitarian thinking; third, that the goal of thought itself, even when thought forgets its goal under societally induced pressures to impose identity on objects, is to honor them in their nonidentity, in their difference from what a restricted rationality declares them to be. Against empiricism, however, he argues that no object is simply “given” either, both because it can be an object only in relation to a subject and because objects are historical and have the potential to change.

Under current conditions the only way for philosophy to give priority to the object is dialectically, Adorno argues. He describes dialectics as the attempt to recognize the nonidentity between thought and the object while carrying out the project of conceptual identification. Dialectics is “the consistent consciousness of nonidentity,” and contradiction, its central category, is “the nonidentical under the aspect of identity.” Thought itself forces this emphasis on contradiction upon us, he says. To think is to identify, and thought can achieve truth only by identifying. So the semblance ( Schein ) of total identity lives within thought itself, mingled with thought's truth ( Wahrheit ). The only way to break through the semblance of total identity is immanently, using the concept. Accordingly, everything that is qualitatively different and that resists conceptualization will show up as a contradiction. “The contradiction is the nonidentical under the aspect of [conceptual] identity; the primacy of the principle of contradiction in dialectics tests the heterogeneous according to unitary thought [ Einheitsdenken ]. By colliding with its own boundary [ Grenze ], unitary thought surpasses itself. Dialectics is the consistent consciousness of nonidentity” (ND 5).

But thinking in contradictions is also forced upon philosophy by society itself. Society is riven with fundamental antagonisms, which, in accordance with the exchange principle, get covered up by identitarian thought. The only way to expose these antagonisms, and thereby to point toward their possible resolution, is to think against thought—in other words, to think in contradictions. In this way “contradiction” cannot be ascribed neatly to either thought or reality. Instead it is a “category of reflection” ( Reflexionskategorie ) , enabling a thoughtful confrontation between concept ( Begriff ) and subject matter or object ( Sache ): “To proceed dialectically means to think in contradictions, for the sake of the contradiction already experienced in the object [ Sache ], and against that contradiction. A contradiction in reality, [dialectics] is a contradiction against reality” (ND 144–45).

The point of thinking in contradictions is not simply negative, however. It has a fragile, transformative horizon, namely, a society that would no longer be riven with fundamental antagonisms, thinking that would be rid of the compulsion to dominate through conceptual identification, and the flourishing of particular objects in their particularity. Because Adorno is convinced that contemporary society has the resources to alleviate the suffering it nevertheless perpetuates, his negative dialectics has a utopian reach: “In view of the concrete possibility of utopia, dialectics is the ontology of the false condition. A right condition would be freed from dialectics, no more system than contradiction” (ND 11). Such a “right condition” would be one of reconciliation between humans and nature, including the nature within human beings, and among human beings themselves. This idea of reconciliation sustains Adorno's reflections on ethics and metaphysics.

Like Adorno's epistemology, his moral philosophy derives from a materialistic metacritique of German idealism. The model on “Freedom” in Negative Dialectics (ND 211–99) conducts a metacritique of Kant's critique of practical reason. So too, the model on “World Spirit and Natural History” (ND 300–60) provides a metacritique of Hegel's philosophy of history. Both models simultaneously carry out a subterranean debate with the Marxist tradition, and this debate guides Adorno's appropriation of both Kantian and Hegelian “practical philosophy.”

The first section in the Introduction to Negative Dialectics indicates the direction Adorno's appropriation will take (ND 3–4). There he asks whether and how philosophy is still possible. Adorno asks this against the backdrop of Karl Marx's Theses on Feuerbach , which famously proclaimed that philosophy's task is not simply to interpret the world but to change it. In distinguishing his historical materialism from the sensory materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx portrays human beings as fundamentally productive and political organisms whose interrelations are not merely interpersonal but societal and historical. Marx's emphasis on production, politics, society, and history takes his epistemology in a “pragmatic” direction. “Truth” does not indicate the abstract correspondence between thought and reality, between proposition and fact, he says. Instead, “truth” refers to the economic, political, societal, and historical fruitfulness of thought in practice.

Although Adorno shares many of Marx's anthropological intuitions, he thinks that a twentieth-century equation of truth with practical fruitfulness had disastrous effects on both sides of the iron curtain. The Introduction to Negative Dialectics begins by making two claims. First, although apparently obsolete, philosophy remains necessary because capitalism has not been overthrown. Second, Marx's interpretation of capitalist society was inadequate and his critique is outmoded. Hence, praxis no longer serves as an adequate basis for challenging (philosophical) theory. In fact, praxis serves mostly as a pretext for shutting down the theoretical critique that transformative praxis would require. Having missed the moment of its realization (via the proletarian revolution, according to early Marx), philosophy today must criticize itself: its societal naivete, its intellectual antiquation, its inability to grasp the power at work in industrial late capitalism. While still pretending to grasp the whole, philosophy fails to recognize how thoroughly it depends upon society as a whole, all the way into philosophy's “immanent truth” (ND 4). Philosophy must shed such naivete. It must ask, as Kant asked about metaphysics after Hume's critique of rationalism, How is philosophy still possible? More specifically, How, after the collapse of Hegelian thought, is philosophy still possible? How can the dialectical effort to conceptualize the nonconceptual—which Marx also pursued—how can this philosophy be continued?

This self-implicating critique of the relation between theory and practice is one crucial source to Adorno's reflections on ethics and metaphysics. Another is the catastrophic impact of twentieth-century history on the prospects for imagining and achieving a more humane world. Adorno's is an ethics and metaphysics “after Auschwitz” (Bernstein 2001, 371–414; Zuidervaart 2007, 48–76). Ethically, he says, Hitler's barbarism imposes a “new categorical imperative” on human beings in their condition of unfreedom: so to arrange their thought and action that “Auschwitz would not repeat itself, [that] nothing similar would happen” (ND 365). Metaphysically, philosophers must find historically appropriate ways to speak about meaning and truth and suffering that neither deny nor affirm the existence of a world transcendent to the one we know. Whereas denying it would suppress the suffering that calls out for fundamental change, straightforwardly affirming the existence of utopia would cut off the critique of contemporary society and the struggle to change it. The basis for Adorno's double strategy is not a hidden ontology, as some have suggested, but rather a “speculative” or “metaphysical” experience. Adorno appeals to the experience that thought which “does not decapitate itself” flows into the idea of a world where “not only extant suffering would be abolished but also suffering that is irrevocably past would be revoked” (403). Neither logical positivist antimetaphysics nor Heideggerian hypermetaphysics can do justice to this experience.

Adorno indicates his own alternative to both traditional metaphysics and more recent antimetaphysics in passages that juxtapose resolute self-criticism and impassioned hope. His historiographic, social theoretical, aesthetic, and negative dialectical concerns meet in passages such as this:

Thought that does not capitulate before wretched existence comes to nought before its criteria, truth becomes untruth, philosophy becomes folly. And yet philosophy cannot give up, lest idiocy triumph in actualized unreason [ Widervernunft ] … Folly is truth in the shape that human beings must accept whenever, amid the untrue, they do not give up truth. Even at the highest peaks art is semblance; but art receives the semblance … from nonsemblance [ vom Scheinlosen ] … . No light falls on people and things in which transcendence would not appear [ widerschiene ]. Indelible in resistance to the fungible world of exchange is the resistance of the eye that does not want the world's colors to vanish. In semblance nonsemblance is promised (ND 404–5).

Addressing such passages is crucial in the ongoing assessment of Adorno's philosophy.

Section 1 lists many of Adorno's books in English, including several he co-authored, in the order of their abbreviations. Section 2 lists some anthologies of Adorno's writings in English. Books listed in section 1 without abbreviations were originally published in English; all others were originally published in German. A date in parentheses following a title indicates either the first German edition or, in the case of posthumous publications, the date of the original lectures. Often the translations cited above have been silently modified. The abbreviation “GS” or “NS” after an entry below tells where this book can be found in Adorno's collected writings. “GS” indicates writings published during Adorno's lifetime and collected in the 20 volumes of Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften , edited by Rolf Tiedemann et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–1986). “NS” indicates posthumous works that are appearing as editions of the Theodor W. Adorno Archive in the collection Nachgelassene Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993–).

For more extensive Adorno bibliographies, see Huhn 2004, Müller-Doohm 2005, and Zuidervaart 2014, an annotated bibliography.

Primary Literature

2. adorno anthologies.

  • The Adorno Reader , ed. B. O'Connor, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
  • Can One Live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader , ed. R. Tiedemann, trans. R. Livingstone et al., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
  • The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture , ed. J. M. Bernstein, London: Routledge, 1991.
  • Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno , ed. R. D. Leppert, trans. S. H. Gillespie et al., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

3. Secondary Literature

  • Benhabib, S., 1986, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory , New York: Colombia University Press.
  • Benzer, M., 2011, The Sociology of Theodor Adorno , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Bernstein, J. M., 1992, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno , University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
  • –––, 2001, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • ––– (ed.), 2010, Art and Aesthetics after Adorno , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Boucher, G., 2013, Adorno Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts , London: I. B. Tauris.
  • Bowie, A., 2013, Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy , Cambridge, Mass.: Polity.
  • Brittain, C. C., 2010, Adorno and Theology , London: T. & T. Clark.
  • Brunkhorst, H., 1999, Adorno and Critical Theory , Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
  • Buck-Morss, S., 1977, The Origin of Negative Dialectics; Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute , New York: Free Press.
  • Bürger, P., 1984, Theory of the Avant Garde , trans. M. Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Burke, D. A., et al. (eds.), 2007, Adorno and the Need in Thinking: New Critical Essays , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  • Claussen, D., 2008, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius , trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
  • Cook, D., 2004, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society , New York: Routledge.
  • –––, 2011, Adorno on Nature , Durham, UK: Acumen.
  • ––– (ed.), 2008, Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts , Durham, UK: Acumen.
  • de Vries, H., 2005, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas , trans. G. Hale, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Foster, R., 2007, Adorno: The Recovery of Experience , Albany: State University of New York Press.
  • Frankfurter Adorno Blätter , 1992–2003, ed. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Munich: Edition Text + Kritik. (Published annually, more or less.)
  • Freyenhagen, F., 2013, Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Gibson, N. C., and A. Rubin, (eds.), 2002, Adorno: A Critical Reader , Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Geuss, R., 2005, Outside Ethics , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Habermas, J., 1987, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. F. Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  • Hammer, E., 2005, Adorno and the Political , New York: Routledge.
  • –––, 2015, Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Hansen, M. B., 2012, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno , Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Heberle, R. J. (ed.), 2006, Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
  • Hellings, J., 2014, Adorno and Art: Aesthetic Theory contra Critical Theory , Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Hohendahl, P. U., 1995, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno , Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
  • –––, 2013, The Fleeting Promise of Art: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Revisited , Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press.
  • Honneth, Axel, 1991, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory , trans. K. Baynes, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  • –––, 2009, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory , trans. J. Ingram et al., New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Huhn, T., and L. Zuidervaart (eds.), 1997, The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory , Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  • Huhn, T. (ed.), 2004, The Cambridge Companion to Adorno , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Hullot-Kentor, R., 2006, Things beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno , New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Jäger, L., 2004, Adorno: A Political Biography , trans. S. Spencer, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
  • Jameson, F. 1990, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic , London; New York: Verso.
  • Jarvis, S., 1998, Adorno: A Critical Introduction , New York: Routledge.
  • ––– (ed.), 2006, Theodor Adorno , 4 vols., London: Routledge.
  • Jay, M., 1984, Adorno , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
  • –––, 1996, The Dialectical Imagination , 2d ed., Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Jenemann, D., 2007, Adorno in America , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Krakauer, E. L., 1998, The Disposition of the Subject: Reading Adorno's Dialectic of Technology , Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
  • Lee, L. Y., 2005, Dialectics of the Body: Corporeality in the Philosophy of T. W. Adorno , New York: Routledge.
  • Lunn, E., 1982, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno , Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Macdonald, I. and K. Ziarek (eds.), 2008, Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions , Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  • Martinson, M., 2000, Perseverance without Doctrine: Adorno, Self-Critique, and the Ends of Academic Theology , Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
  • McArthur, J., 2013, Rethinking Knowledge within Higher Education: Adorno and Social Justice , New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
  • Menke, C., 1998, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida , trans. N. Solomon, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  • Morgan, A., 2007, Adorno’s Concept of Life , New York: Continuum.
  • Morris, M., 2001. Rethinking the Communicative Turn: Adorno, Habermas, and the Problem of Communicative Freedom , Albany: State University of New York Press.
  • Müller-Doohm, S., 2005, Adorno: A Biography , trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge: Polity Press.
  • Nicholsen, S. W., 1997, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno's Aesthetics , Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  • O'Connor, B., 2004, Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality , Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  • –––, 2013, Adorno , London: Routledge.
  • Paddison, M., 1993, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music , New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Pensky, M., (ed.), 1997, The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern , Albany: State University of New York Press.
  • Rensmann, L., and S. Gandesha (eds.), 2012, Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations , Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
  • Rose, G., 1978, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno , London: Macmillan Press.
  • Ross, N. (ed.), 2015, The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory: New Readings of Benjamin and Adorno , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
  • Schweppenhäuser, G., 2009, Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction , Durham: Duke University Press.
  • Sherman, D., 2007, Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity , Albany: State University of New York Press.
  • Sherratt, Y., 2002, Adorno's Positive Dialectic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Shuster, M., 2014, Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity , Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  • Vogel, S., 1996, Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory , Albany: State University of New York Press.
  • Vries, H. de, 2005, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas , trans. G. Hale., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Wellmer, A., 1991, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism , trans. D. Midgley, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  • –––, 1998, Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity; Essays and Lectures , trans. D. Midgley, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  • Whitebook, J., 1995, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory , Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  • Wiggershaus, R., 1994, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance , trans. M. Robertson, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  • Witkin, R. W., 2003, Adorno on Popular Culture , New York: Routledge.
  • Zuidervaart, L., 1991, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion , Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  • Zuidervaart, L., et al., 1998, “Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund,” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics , Vol. 1, pp. 16–32, ed. M. Kelly, New York: Oxford University Press; second edition, 2014.
  • Zuidervaart, L., 2007, Social Philosophy after Adorno , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Zuidervaart, L., 2014, “Theodor Adorno,” Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy , ed. D. Pritchard, Oxford: Oxford University Press, abridged version available online
How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.
  • Archives Center/University Library J.C. Senckenberg at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. This university archive contains the literary bequests of Horkheimer, Pollock, and other of Adorno’s colleagues in the Frankfurt School.
  • Association for Adorno Studies
  • Theodor W. Adorno Archive/Institute of Social Research , at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt.
  • Theodor W. Adorno Archive in the Walter Benjamin Archive , at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

Benjamin, Walter | contradiction | critical theory | domination | Enlightenment | Habermas, Jürgen | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: dialectics | Heidegger, Martin | Horkheimer, Max | Husserl, Edmund | identity | Kant, Immanuel | Lukács, Georg [György] | Marx, Karl | Popper, Karl | postmodernism | -->rationality --> | truth | Weber, Max

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how to write a dialectic essay

Dialectic essays are a type of writing that covers a variety of topics from both sides of an argument. In this article, we will teach you how to write a dialectic essay effectively so that your academic work stands out.

What is a dialectic essay?

Dialectic essays are written in a specific style that uses three different modes of argument: premise, antithesis, and synthesis.

In a dialectic essay, the writer begins by introducing a premise, or assertion, which is then challenged by an opposing position. The two positions are then further refined and reduced to a single point of contention. Finally, the writer attempts to resolve the conflict by proposing a synthesis that reconciles the two opposing views.

Dialectic essays can be challenging to write , but they are an essential component of critical thinking skills. If you want to improve your writing skills, consider studying dialectic essays as part of your curriculum.

The Different Types of Dialectic Essays

Dialectic essays are written in a discourse format, which means that each sentence builds on the last. The essay will typically start with a thesis statement, followed by two opposing arguments, then a conclusion.

Thesis Statement: Dialectic essays should focus on the differences between two positions, not on the similarities between them.

Two Opposing Arguments: One position should be argued against using specific examples, while the other should be outlined more generically.

Conclusion: The conclusion should reiterate the thesis statement and highlight the differences between the two positions.

The Purpose of a Dialectic Essay

A dialectic essay is an educational essay that uses a debate format. Dialectics is the use of two opposed arguments to explore a topic. A dialectical approach helps students see different sides of an issue and come to a more reasoned conclusion.

The purpose of a dialectic essay is to help students develop critical thinking skills. The structure of a dialectic essay allows students to examine an issue from different perspectives, which helps them develop their own opinions. Dialectics also engages students in a thoughtful discussion, which can help them learn about different points of view.

When writing a dialectic essay , it is important to keep the following in mind:

1. The goal of the dialectic essay is to engage students in a thoughtful discussion.

2. The structure of the essay should allow students to examine an issue from different perspectives.

3. Dialectics engages students in a thoughtful discussion, which can help them learn about different points of view.

How to Write a Dialectic Essay

Dialectic Essays are a great way to show your skill as a writer. They require you to use different points of view and to argue your point of view effectively. This can be a challenging task, but with the right approach, it can be completed successfully.

When writing a dialectic essay , it is important to begin by outlining your argument. This will help you organize your thoughts and make sure that your points are clear. Next, you will need to develop your points of view. This can be done by discussing different examples that support your argument. Finally, you will need to argue your case effectively. This can be done by providing evidence and backing up your points with logic.

By following these steps, you can write a successful dialectic essay .

Dialectic essays are a popular type of essay for students in high school and college . They require the student to use critical thinking skills to analyze different perspectives on a topic, and then present their own view as well. This guide will teach you how to write a dialectic essay , including tips on choosing a topic, developing your argument, and crafting your conclusion. Thanks for reading!

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Dialectic Essay Examples: Great Strategies for Effective Writing

As you may probably know, there are various types of academic essays. If you have not heard of dialectic essays before, you may look for dialectic essay examples on the net. As a student, you may be often asked to provide academic essays of different types. Therefore, it is essential to understand the difference between different essay types. As such, when you are assigned a dialectic essay, you need to take into consideration the structure and mode of organization. Read on and find out what a dialectic essay is.

A dialectic essay is a type of an argumentative debate or dialogue where it is important for a writer to formulate a thesis statement comprising of different “for” and “against” arguments (counterarguments are a must) that are aimed to support the thesis.

Why Do You Need to Write Dialectic Essays?

If you are given a task to submit a dialectic essay, you need to demonstrate your abilities and skills in clarifying and explaining your thoughts on a specific topic/ issue. With the help of dialectic essay writing, you can discuss a specific topic from different perspectives, where you take into account all its positive and negative aspects. If you look at some of dialectic essay examples, you will see that the conclusion is composed based on the analysis of the pros and cons of the topic discussion.

Dialectic Essay Structure

The organization is the same as of a classical five-paragraph essay. It is a must to have an introductory paragraph, body paragraphs, and conclusion. When developing the main body, which normally consists of three body paragraphs, you need to develop the argument in great detail. To put it simply, you need to elaborate on the argument presented in the thesis statement. Read on to find detailed information about the structure of dialectic essay examples.

  • Introductory paragraph In the introduction, you have to present a thesis statement. In any case, you need to include both an argument and a counterargument when formulating the thesis. As such, you need to take into account two possible interpretations of the issue. Since you have to focus on both of the arguments, it is advisable to choose a controversial topic to make the essay more interesting.
  • Presentation of the argument In the first body paragraph, present the argument and support it with solid reasons or expert opinion. Make sure the supporting evidence is strong enough so that the audience could agree with you.
  • Presentation of the counterargument In the next paragraph, focus on the objection. Make sure the objection does not deny the thesis you have formulated (does not refute it or makes false) but only the argument mentioned in the previous paragraph. Provide reasons why the counterargument should also be considered and claimed true.
  • Response In the third body paragraph, make sure to respond to the counterargument. It should be presented in a form of a debate. As such, respond to the objection. You do not need to present some new argument – merely respond to the counterargument presented in the second body paragraph.
  • Conclusion In the conclusive paragraph, make sure to provide clear and strong support for the originally written thesis or provide a new one, which is frequently a combination of the argument and counterargument. As a rule, you should not provide a new argument that completely differs from what you have discussed in the paper.

Dialectic Essay Sample PDF

Writing and structuring a top-quality dialectic essay.

Girl

Introductory Paragraph

  • This unit should provide a thesis statement. When choosing a topic, you need to remember that it should be based on your thesis statement which is to be interpreted at least in two different ways.
  • The writer should examine a disputable question which requires providing arguments and facts to give the paper specific features.
  • Remember that the introductory section of your paper should be neither very long nor very short. It should include only one paragraph presenting your thesis statement.
  • An argument supporting your thesis should be presented in the first paragraph of your paper body. Then, it is required to discuss your thesis in a way that will make readers take your position.
  • Do not forget that it is necessary to provide incontrovertible facts to prove your thesis statement.
  • The data presented in this paragraph should oppose the information mentioned in the previous one.
  • By stating an opposing opinion, you need to be very cautious not to present your thesis as a fake one.
  • Number the points according to which your work contains invalid content. Try to make your paper disputable as if it presents controversial viewpoints expressed by two people.
  • The third paragraph should give a proper answer to the posed question. Nevertheless, you should not impart the same facts as in the first paragraph of your work.
  • In this section, you need to provide the arguments that would oppose the contradictory ones given in the second paragraph of your paper. Here, you are to critically analyze the second paragraph
  • It is essential to keep in mind that a thesis statement has to be presented in the introduction. All the rest paragraphs should focus on different aspects of the topic.

Concluding Unit

  • In this paragraph, you need to support your thesis. However, you may also present a new viewpoint. This section combines both supporting and opposing arguments.
  • Do not alter your thesis statement completely. Show that you are ready to discuss new ideas.

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the dialectic essay

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Throughout Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire draws heavily on the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—especially the concept of dialectics . A “dialectical” way of thinking starts with a “thesis” (an initial idea or proposition) and an “antithesis” (an idea that opposes or contradicts the thesis), and the interaction of these two ideas creates a “synthesis,” or a new idea that reconciles the conflict between the two original ideas. Freire argues that dialectics are the fundamental logic of reality, and he uses dialectic thought in his discussions of oppression , education, and social change. According to Freire, when oppressed people come to see the world as “dialectical,” they become more aware of how reality works and can therefore affect reality to become more free.

Freire argues that dialectics are the natural logic of the world. In his theories of the world and of human consciousness, Freire brings up several examples of binary, conflicting ideas that must be resolved. For one, his model of history is dialectical: he points out that “ themes ” (the worldly expression of ideas and values during a historical moment) and “ limit-situations ” (historical conditions that limit human freedom ) always exist in tandem with oppositional or contradictory themes and situations. The theme of “domination,” for example, is dialectically opposed to the theme of “ liberation .” As some people try to become free and others try to preserve their oppressive power, the contradiction is resolved through the social changes that happen over time.

Freire also uses dialectical methods in his theories of education and social change. Since Freire believes that history proceeds according to dialectical logic, he argues that understanding dialectical thought can help oppressed people take action to free themselves. The “ banking model” of education (where a teacher tells students to memorize and recall facts) is in no way dialectical. The teacher has knowledge, and he or she imposes that knowledge on the students. Freire’s “problem-posing model,” however, is dialectical in that teachers and students share important, and sometimes conflicting, ideas that are brought to a synthesis through group effort.

Freire uses the example of labor negotiation to explain how dialectical thought, as practiced in education, can be applied to political struggles. In this scenario, a group of oppressed workers wants to demand higher pay, while their leader wants to push for more radical changes. Freire argues that the solution to this problem lies in “synthesis”: the leader should work with the people to get higher wages, while challenging the people to ask why they should only ask for high wages. Although the leader and the people have opposing perspectives, the leader should reconcile those perspectives to create a new strategy.

It’s important to note that Freire’s dialectical approach has its flaws. Although dialectics are commonly used in Marxist philosophy, other critical approaches (particularly more recent ones) reject the notion that dialectical logic can explain history and reality. Freire divides society into a strict binary of oppressors and oppressed people, while a more nuanced view of oppression might consider intersectionality—the notion that social categories intermix in such a way that a person can be simultaneously oppressor and oppressed.

A more nuanced view of oppression might also consider the motivations of people who attempt to preserve the status quo. For example, Freire would condemn a political leader who wants to create significant social change, but only makes superficial changes that do not challenge the oppressive system. While Freire sees these small changes as a sign of “false generosity” (since he believes that a leader who truly cares about the oppressed should work to create a wholly new society), this view takes for granted that oppressors see themselves and the oppressed as being totally separate. Even when he talks about revolutionary leaders, Freire points out a contradiction that makes their role in the struggle more complicated. Revolutionary leaders must see themselves as part of the oppressed so that both groups can fight for freedom together; however, they also have to be distinct from the oppressed, so that they can organize and coordinate the groups. Although liberation resolves the contradictions in oppressors and oppressed people, it also relies on certain contradictions like this.

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Dialectics Quotes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one. The man or woman who emerges is a new person, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is superseded by the humanization of all people. Or to put it another way, the solution of this contradiction is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor, no longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom.

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[Themes] imply others which are opposing or even antithetical; they also indicate tasks to be carried out and fulfilled. Thus, historical themes are never isolated, independent, disconnected, or static; they are always interacting dialectically with their opposites.

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We Are the Dialectic: An Essay for Positive Politics

Profile image of Joe Grim Feinberg

2009, Socialism and Democracy

An essay on politics and dialectics. The uploaded file is a draft; final version available in open access here: https://sdonline.org/issue/49/we-are-dialectic-essay-positive-politics. Typeset version here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08854300802635957 (or contact the author). Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “We Are the Dialectic: An Essay for Positive Politics.” Socialism and Democracy, vol. 23, no. 1 (March 2009), pp. 124–28.

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the dialectic essay

Special Issue, 'Dialectics and World Politics', Globalizations

The question ‘What is dialectics?’ is notoriously difficult to answer. Theoretical obfuscation and ideological baggage have fostered widespread misunderstandings of the concept. This article is intended to go some way in providing an answer, though one offered as a heuristic in which further developments can be made, rather than as doctrinaire statement of first principles. This introductory account of dialectics proceeds in four steps. It begins with a basic definitional and conceptual outline of dialectics before offering a brief philosophical history of dialectics in Eastern and Western philosophical traditions; its reemergence from scholasticism through Kant and Hegel; its vivification in Marx’s thought (and subsequent decline under ‘Diamat’); and its development in Western Marxism and on into contemporary political philosophy. The third part then explores the more modest engagements with dialectics that have taken place within IR theory before closing with a discussion of some of the ongoing tensions and key themes in dialectical thought. These center on the question of understanding dialectics as a process of reflection and an objective logic traceable in human praxis, highlighting the ongoing critical and revolutionary essence of dialectics.

Research Methods in Analytical Political Theory

Alan Hamlin

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Imre Szeman

Dialogue and Universalism

Harry Cleaver

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This essay explores the philosophical reasons why successful attempts to overturn domination and dogmatism only seem to result in the emergence of new forms of domination and dogmatism, and thus in political disappointment. It is argued that the epistemic key to this problem is to be found in Pyrrhonian scepticism. To begin, the way dialectic developed so as to be understood, in Hegel, as a response to this problem, is examined. How this was then forgotten in Marx is explored through Lucio Colletti’s flawed critique of Hegelian Marxism. The essay concludes that political thought, if it truly aspires to overturn domination and dogmatism, should address itself directly to the sceptical problem by adopting a Left Pyrrhonian dialectical strategy.

Kerem Adakan

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the dialectic essay

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Between the Times – and Sometimes Beyond: An Essay in Dialectical Theology and its Critique of Religion and “Religion”

This paper gives a systematic account of Dialectical Theology (DT) and its surprisingly ramified usage of the concept of religion on the backdrop of recent debates about the “return of religion.” First, the positional context between Schleiermacher and Barth is sketched. Second, the highly divergent positions of Bultmann, Barth, Brunner as well as Gogarten and Tillich are presented – always in regard to their sometimes programmatic, sometimes rather hidden references to “religion” between its facticity and normativity. Third and by way of conclusion, it is suggested to restrict “religion” as a concept to non-theological disciplines, i.e., to treat “religion” as a strictly empirical and sociological term, whereas theology is concerned with faith that belongs to a very different game than religion, as DT helps to clarify.

Has the dawn ever seen your eyes? Have the days made you so unwise? Realize, you are. Had you talked to the winds of time, Then you’d know how the waters rhyme, Taste of wine, How can you know where you’ve been? In time you’ll see the sign And realize your sin. Will you know how the seed is sown? All your time has been overgrown, Never known. Have you walked on the stones of years? When you speak, is it you that hears? Are your ears full? You can’t hear anything at all. [1]

1 The liberal “heresy”: a prelude

Giving an account of the current state of religion in the West is, often enough, based on one specific metaphor: “return.” That metaphorical framework is intentionally or implicitly ambivalent, and it is precisely this ambivalence between sketching a specific development and leaving space for its interpretation that might explain the success of this metaphor for diagnosing religion and its conceptualizations nowadays. But obviously, that term itself just invites further questions: what exactly is it that “returns”? God, piety, spirituality, or religion? [2] With what kind of return are we dealing with here? Is it a sort of going back to a former state? Or is the “returning” a transformation that does not leave the original state untouched? And what does the reaction to that return look like? Is the return good news or rather something we should fear or even fight?

All three questions hang together in ramified ways. If, for instance, God is the object (or even subject and agent) of that return it would appear to be a highly metaphysical and precarious claim that he changed or even transformed Himself within and by that return. [3] And this creates a difficulty that leads to the deeper problem of whether the idea of God’s return makes sense in the first place, independent of our reactions to it in “fear and trembling.” Rather, it seems religion as a social system or spiritual formation is a proper candidate of a return that is open to a transformation or even progress. [4]

It is, however, this alternative between God and religion that captures the essential option in modern theology: Is God and God’s reality the theological theme, or is it religion as the emblematic structure of a specific self-understanding and spiritual practice with which theological studies are or should be concerned? The return of God or religion is, sociologically speaking, the emergence of a topic and interest among particular forms of life. Thus, the return means that religious topics gain a formerly lost grip on social groups or layers. Theologically speaking, however, the return of God or religion denotes a decisive choice in dogmatics. Here, the return signifies a shift within theology from religion to God or, as in recent times, the other way around where religion gradually replaced God as the central and essential theme of theology as theo -logy. [5]

One could even categorize theology as a discipline alongside that very alternative: either religion or God . [6] The return of the one was, accordingly, the theological decline of the other. Hence, either religious belief is considered to be in continuation with its cultural surroundings or God is the ultimate counterpart of what is called culture and religion as one important part of it; either religion is embedded in the varieties of cultural forms and structures or God’s reality is the interruption and crisis of human endeavors; either the gesture of affirmation and augmentation of culture’s latent potentials governs the intellectual scene, or the counterpolitics of limitation, critique, and delineation is at the heart of every theological comment that deserves its name.

Traditionally, Friedrich Schleiermacher is taken to represent the most effective turning point from God as the theological topos to religion as the post-enlightenment substitute. It would be inadequate to claim that the church father of the nineteenth century is not speaking of God anymore, but only of “God” as a non-cognitive expression and a conceptual entailment of one’s religious consciousness. If even classical elements of the doctrine of God cannot be reduced to or derived from a religious “feeling,” it is no longer justifiable as a proper chapter of theology. [7]

Now, it is true that Schleiermacher conceptualizes theology as a quasi-transcendental analysis of human piety ( Frömmigkeit ). [8] More precisely, theology unfolds the (conceptual or logical) conditions for the actually existing duality between ultimate freedom and the feeling of absolute dependence, between grace and sin. Nevertheless, there is a different line of thought in Schleiermacher, not only in his Glaubenslehre but also in his early 1799 Speeches , when he attempts to give an account of religion’s autonomy. His famous distinction between metaphysics, morals, and religion serves precisely that very purpose. As soon as this is taken into consideration, one might have less difficulty appreciating Schleiermacher’s “anthropocentric” starting point while admitting that it implies, at the same time, the serious endeavor to avoid every mixture between religion as a genuine human expression and the variety of its counterparts. The fact that Schleiermacher concentrates on metaphysics as well as morals is, partly, due to the topics of the debate among his contemporaries, ca. 1800. “Metaphysics” represents, to a large extent, the classical tradition of theologia naturalis in its attempt to infer God from the world. “Morals,” however, stands for the attempt to reduce religious utterances to their moral relatives as in the Kantian and Fichtean traditions. [9]

Schleiermacher clarifies these distinctions by connecting metaphysics, morals, and religion to specific activities or faculties . Even though all three of them are woven with the same fabric, as Schleiermacher holds, that fabric is dealt with in different modes: metaphysics has to do with classifying the universe and inferring the necessary from the contingency of the world ( thinking ); morals is concerned with elaborating a system of duties or a class of certain goods ( acting ); religion, however, is the “sense and taste for the infinite” (“ Sinn und Geschmack für’s Unendliche ”). [10] Although Schleiermacher theologizes “from below” he defends the claim that religion has its “own province” in contrast to other modes of relating to oneself. Religion possesses, as he also states, its specific “point of view,” that allows for doing everything “with religion” (or “religiously”) and not because of or “out of religion.” [11] Accordingly, religion constitutes its own, i.e., a specific and irreducible mode of relating to the “universe,” a way of dealing and interacting with everything in seeing the “infinite” and “absolute” in the finite and relative. [12]

Schleiermacher’s claim, then, is twofold: theology has to analyze religion (and by doing that, God and “God”) to fulfill its task; and religion is an autonomous “province” of the human mind. The first claim is a methodological one, the second a theological proposal; [13] both are normative . While it is true that the Schleiermacherian way of doing theology entails at least the danger to lose God as theology’s object by reducing the theological work to religion, [14] it is equally true that Schleiermacher tries to build a cordon around religion for separating it against a devastating mixture with other modes of relating to the “universe.” Now, it is crucial to appreciate the combination of both normative claims, because Schleiermacher’s critics (such as Barth, see Section 3.2) tend to concentrate only on the first one, while neglecting the second.

It is a common phenomenon that a label given to an intellectual school, direction, or orientation is, often enough, not a self-description but rather derived from its adversary. This is also true for Schleiermacher and the aftermath of his influence on the theology of an entire century. What has been criticized as “liberal theology” is, hence, a retrospective characterization provided by those who said eagerly “farewell” to what has been considered to be Schleiermacher’s legacy: replacing God with religion and substituting theo -logy with a religious analysis of culture and human consciousness. [15] As we have seen, this is only one side of the truth. This judgment is only based on the observation that liberal theologians tend to start with religion, not with God; but the other side of Schleiermacher’s approach is often suppressed, namely, the attempt to establish religion as an irreducible “province.”

It is, I think, fair to say that Karl Barth, the antipode to this kind of liberal theology, is irresponsible for this one-sided critique. Barth is, at least sometimes, open about his admiration for Schleiermacher who is the “head” of modern theology. [16] Nevertheless, for him Schleiermacher turns the doctrine of God into religious humanities; the classical position that God, faith, and the Word had claimed within the framework of reformation theology is now, Barth holds, taken by religion, culture, and feeling. [17] Barth will stick to this assessment in his later Church Dogmatics by saying that modernistic theologies base the dogmatic insight on non-theological grounds and, therefore, fulfill what Ludwig Feuerbach has (in)famously claimed for theology in general: that the “secret” of theology lies in or even is anthropology. [18]

Schleiermacher or Barth – religion or God as theology’s starting point; that is, what the simple (or, simplistic) alternative looks like. The more prominent the one party had been, the stronger the critique of it had become. It is this critical interplay that creates theological identities and gives rise to labels that help to orient oneself by deliberately (and heuristically) neglecting nuances, details, differences, and ambivalences to be found in what has now been easily and comfortably categorized. [19]

What has been called Dialectical Theology (DT) is, partly, a result of this theological battle. Theologians such as the early Barth, and also Rudolf Bultmann, Emil Brunner, and Friedrich Gogarten, to some extent even Paul Tillich, reacted, with strong criticism, to their teachers who were, for them, all influenced – or even “poisoned” – by Schleiermacher and liberal theology. It was the devastating impression of the first World War that led to the most important breaking point in twentieth century theology. After decades of optimism, humanistically underwritten progress, and human self-confidence, an entire realm had fallen apart. The idea that faith and its institutionalized company, the church, could infiltrate culture and successively realize the “kingdom of God” on earth came, finally, to an end – that, at least, had been the debatable impression in the early 1920s. The extensive destruction, esp. in Europe, undermined the explicit coalition between faith and culture, between God and human endeavors. The group of dialectical theologians changed decisively the way of relating both poles to each other: not the “permanent wedding” between God and culture was now on the theological agenda, but the opposite statement that God means the ultimate crisis of culture. Not God and culture , but God against culture was now the slogan. [20]

2 “Religion” and its counterparts. A very short terminological sketch

As things stand, it could seem that Schleiermacher serves as the “bad cop” seen from a dialectic-theological perspective, and that the concept of religion is the terminological tool for dismissing the dogmatic counterpart. [21] The result would be a clear cut between theological programs starting with religion and from God, respectively. An unhappy either/or-situation would emerge that is basically structured as a strict dualism between religion as the sum of the human condition and God as its fundamental crisis.

The logic of dualistic distinctions has further implications. [22] First, if the duality between God and religion is taken to be complementary (either/or – and no third element), then the question arises whether both elements are on the same level, i.e., whether there is an equilibrium between both poles. In other words, is the distinction a neutral one or is it normatively charged? Second, one has to establish that twofold distinction from a certain perspective, that is necessarily included by the duality, i.e., either it is provided from one side of the duality or the other. In other words, distinguishing between God/religion could be made by a theology as doctrine of God or by its counterpart, theology as a religious analysis of culture. Third, this latter element is relative to what Niklas Luhmann has described as re-entry (following George Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form ). [23] The duality A/B is drawn from the A- or B-perspective; and, the duality of A/B reemerges on both sides as a mode of self-critical reflection, i.e., one could distinguish between A and B on the A-side as well as on the B-pole. In other words, A criticizes itself by asking whether it is truly A or B, while B is making the analogous move. [24] Applying the combination of these three aspects to DT amounts to stating that (i) the distinction in question is, in fact, normative, and necessarily so, (ii) the distinction is an act of self-location since DT itself belongs to one side of the duality, and (iii) the critic against the other side should lead to critical reflexivity by “re-entering” the initial distinction on the level of the distinguished elements.

The result of this strict duality is simple but also simplistic: (i*) DT disregards the other side, because it represents a theological confusion, at least seen from DT’s perspective; hence, the duality is, obviously, normative and, more precisely, pejorative. (ii*) In defending God as theology’s nucleus, DT tends to be critical of religion (as a given reality) and “religion” (as a concept). (iii*) By applying the distinction between the two types of theology to DT itself, DT shows its self-awareness for the danger of missing God as its essential theme, i.e., to latently confuse God and religion, or to implicitly confuse God with an idol. [25]

Substantial : This meaning of religion is based on specific contents that a practice (or a set of convictions) has to entail for it to be legitimately called religion; for instance, religion must imply the claim that there is a transcendent reality or that religion is necessarily connected to the institution of prayer (allegedly, encompassing the commitment to that transcendent – and personal – reality). [26]

Functional : This meaning of religion is derived from the purpose of that very practice; for instance, religion must orient its members or unify them under a certain idea, ideal, or experience. [27]

Hermeneutical : This meaning of religion underlines a certain dynamic that is realized in religious practices, groups, and institutions, namely, that religions locate the space where its members interpret their world, themselves, and God in a certain way and by certain (conceptual, narrative, and pictorial) means; for instance, religion gives the interpretive tools to deal with the senseless, unexplainable, or even evil in a symbolically structured way. [28]

Heuristic : This meaning of religion is a tribute to the problems connected to (a), (b), and (c). From the difficulties in finding general contents, purposes, or dynamics common to what one wants to denote as religion, one can infer the heuristic status of religion as something that is not “out there,” but that is based on our grasp on certain phenomena that we want to call “religious.”

Sociological : This meaning of religion is, arguably, the common one in treating religion as a social system in relation to others; including the shift from religion as a dominating system via integrating it with other systems such as politics, arts, and economics too, finally, abandoning religion as a proper system combined with a new leading system, like economics nowadays. Central here are questions regarding the institutional membership or spiritual allegiance to churches or religious orientations, as well as the declining or increasing influence of religion in the public sphere and the transformation of religion itself. [29]

Theological : This meaning of religion is necessarily normative since “religion” is here considered to represent the human endeavor of relating to God under the condition of fallenness and sin. “Religion,” then, serves as a critical term in contrast to its dogmatic counterpart: God. Hence, a religion without religion or “Christianity without religion” (Bonhoeffer, “religionsloses Christentum”) [30] is, theologically, good news.

Now, it is obvious that the dualistic scenario of normative distinctions belongs to this last meaning (f), when it comes to DT and their assessment of religion and usage of “religion.” It might nevertheless be helpful to differentiate these six meanings of religion (that partly overlap, complement each other, or are combined with one another). As we will see, dialectical theologians, sometimes, jump from (f) to, mainly, (a) or (e) and, often enough, they are not very explicit about that terminological leap. [31] Let us take a closer look.

3 Dialectical theology and its critique of religion. Four concise studies

As we have seen, the rise of DT in the early 1920s was essentially connected to the historical horror after the first World War and the theological disappointment among younger scholars about the helplessness or even blindness of their teachers faced with the catastrophe of so far unknown violence. For authors such as Bultmann, Barth, Tillich, Gogarten, and Brunner (all born between 1884 and 1889), an entire epoch of theological orientation had come to an end – at least, in their view. The attempt to regard God and faith in continuation with religion and culture appeared to them to be the crucial confusion of modern Protestantism in the wake of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and his school, as well as Ernst Troeltsch. [32]

It is far easier to hint at what they dismissed than working out what they constructively stood for. The critical side explains why “religion” was turned into the emblematic formula for the human condition whose breakdown and crisis are God’s judgment on human hubris. The constructive side is the attempt to speak of God dialectically , i.e., combining God’s “No” to the world as a realm of sin and godlessness with God’s “Yes” to the world as God’s good – and reconciled – creation. Now, dismissing religion in a normative sense (as in f) still leaves space for dealing with religion in an empirical and social sense (as in a, or e). Clearly, both approaches to religion are not independent of each other: the more the factually given religion is criticized, the more a normative critique of religion seems to be comprehensible and justified; and the other way around: the more conclusive the critique of religion as a concept appears, the bigger the reservation against all “positive” religions will be.

From the very beginning, trying to understand how to deal with religion and “religion” in their ambivalences between normativity and facticity was a latent source of tensions internal to DT. There was one group holding that without actual (religious) existence, God-talk loses its grip and significance; that was Bultmann’s standpoint – “theology as hermeneutics.” [33] There was, however, another group holding that God-talk has to be freed from all given specifications to gain the proper meaning of speaking of and to God; that was Barth’s standpoint – a “theology of preaching.” [34] Whereas Bultmann considers talking “out of” (not: about) God as the result of genuine theological work, Barth lets theology start with the fact that God has already spoken. Hence, DT was a combination of divergent and, eventually, rival orientations in dogmatics. In its foundations was already the seed sown to its downfall but also the resources for transforming it into new theological programs. [35]

3.1 Bultmann and the dialectics of existence

For Rudolf Bultmann, the relation between religion and culture becomes a theological question at a very early stage. In 1920, he published a lecture titled “Religion und Kultur” that entails already the specific tension in Bultmann’s work between a critique of the human condition by theological means and an appreciation for culture as the unavoidable social framework in which human beings are leading their lives in faith or unbelief. Religion as a cultural phenomenon will necessarily remain ambivalent, and yet, there is no other realm in which even the vera religio could be realized. Bultmann’s entire hermeneutical work will be accompanied by this telling tension.

Bultmann starts off his lecture by drawing on the increasing autonomy of the “spiritual life” against the backdrop of the formerly dominating religion. [36] With a certain kind of appreciation he describes the emancipation of all social systems – he focuses on science, arts, and morality – from religion and underlines that the effect of religion on these other systems had been highly dubious. Religion had, obviously, often enough a retarding effect on developments that turned out to be fruitful. Instead, religion should be radically neutral toward these other systems. [37]

The conclusion Bultmann is ready to draw – or, is at least in danger to allow – is privatizing as subjectivizing religion . Relying on Schleiermacher he relegates religion, i.e., the religious consciousness of absolute dependence, to the individual sector: there is no general validity of insights within religion as a symbolic framework of “feelings,” but only its individual relevance. [38] Nevertheless, humans live in a specific tension between “nature” and “culture;” and, Bultmann adds, one can only have religion in living in both worlds. Hence, culture as a “second nature” and “first order” nature is presented as the conditions for leading one’s religious existence. There is, however, also the converse relation between culture and religion when, as Bultmann states, the “power of experiencing something” is strengthened by religion. He even adds that by this support, culture is “justified by religion,” because it is religion that humanizes humans. [39]

Bultmann immediately recognizes that he is about to run into the theological danger of divinizing culture and, paradoxically, writing as if he is a liberal theologian that he criticized so eagerly in other contexts (this does not deny that Bultmann would himself regard as a liberal theologian). [40] This is precisely what Barth will be criticized in Bultmann’s approach, but that criticism misses the equally strong countervoice in Bultmann’s work that underlines the contingent condition of every culture and the strict impossibility of absolutizing any cultural state and stage as allegedly God-given. There are even passages in Bultmann where he changes the layer of meaning in using “religion” as a normative term to contrast it with “faith” that is the only adequate human response to God’s call and order. [41]

The second trait gets more prominence in papers and lectures since the middle of the 1920s. In one of Bultmann’s best-known texts, “Liberal Theology and the Most Recent Theological Movement” (1924), the tone of his assessment concerning Schleiermacher and his legacy has changed considerably. Now the criticism against the liberal tradition is that it has lost God as the topic of theology; God, however, is the radical negation of human beings, their complete verdict, and sentence. [42] Although this sounds far more like a DT voice, Bultmann does not hesitate to add that God is the object of theology, while theology speaks of God in speaking of human beings as they stand before God ( coram Deo ). [43]

We find a similar ambivalence in Bultmann’s – I think – most important book that is based on a lecture given several times between 1926 and 1936, the Theological Encyclopedia . Here, the “fact of religion” is for human beings only the “ question of God.” More than “religion” – which is identical to that question – is not possible among human beings. [44] And yet, God is not an object outside of our existence, since God is precisely the reality that determines our existence in faith. Then – in that very “moment” – God is no longer the object of faith, but its subject and agent. To exist as a believer entails, accordingly, this paradox of substituting and inverting subjects. [45] Faith is, for Bultmann, the response to the preaching (“Kerygma”) in which God addresses man. And this trusting faith is only credible in explicit contrast to the world. [46]

This leads to consequences concerning the status and structure of theological propositions. The classical DT-view claims that every statement is only true (or at least not inadequate) when it is said in conjunction with its denial; hence, we would have to deal with a dialectics of propositions. Bultmann seems to distance himself from this approach by holding that the real dialectics is not a propositional one, but lies between question and answer, between the human act of asking and the revelatory act of God’s reply. The paradox then is that the question is actually the answer as a real possibility for every existence and that it becomes an instantiated reality if and only if God shows Godself within the boundaries of human existence. [47]

In sum : Bultmann uses “religion” neither normatively nor in a straightforward theological manner (as f); his account, however, does not imply an empirical or sociological meaning either (as e). According to Bultmann, human beings as belonging to culture are living in its tension between community and individuality. Since “religion” is, for Bultmann, an individual practice (or: the communal element does not play, for him, a significant role), he draws on “existence” to describe the religious orientation. Existence, however, is a structural term; hence, “religion” denotes a structure too, namely, the more specific one of relating one’s existence to something that transcends this very existence (similar to the functional meaning b). [48] This structure is itself ontically neutral and allows for a reference that is, theologically speaking, either idolatrous or authentic. It is the second insofar as the existence is truly determined and governed by God’s reality – which is the vera religio . Bultmann’s notion of religion is, thus, a modal or hermeneutical one (c).

Bultmann belongs to DT, not because God’s reality is taken to be dialectical, and not because the theological statements about that divine reality have to be dialectical, but rather because religion itself is a dialectical structure between judgment and promise. On a first level, religion remains ambivalent, since it is a neutral structure of existence open to genuine faith or fallenness. On a second level – the one of re-entering the initial duality – religion turns out to be dialectical, since here faith relates critically to itself in asking whether it is genuine faith or idolatry, whether the whole reality, as Bultmann says, is determined by God, [49] or if even this thought is an “impossible possibility” (as Barth also put it). Bultmann’s dialectic is, in its core, a paradox , namely, the one between the human question as religion and the trust that it is answered by God within  – the true – religion.

3.2 Barth on religion as unbelief

It is interesting to see how Karl Barth oscillates between a deep reservation and a deep appreciation, even love, for Schleiermacher. It seems, for him, one has to go through the liberal project and to theologically live with it to fully recognize that it is an impossibility. From Barth’s perspective, Bultmann’s verdict according to which the liberal tradition has lost God as its object is the sad truth; but he adds, though much later, that Bultmann himself belongs to that very tradition, he is “a true pupil of Schleiermacher.” [50]

The correspondence between Bultmann and Barth, running from 1911 until 1966, is a document of increasing alienation and reflects in an almost tragic way how hidden differences come successively to the fore, not without being confounded with misunderstandings and personal irritations. Very early during that correspondence, Barth expresses his fear that “a huge explosion” among the dialectical theologians is directly ahead of them and will erupt soon. [51] As a background of these conflicts, Barth alludes again to divergent readings of Schleiermacher while expressing his theological aversion against him:

The devil should take him, I do not like him and am still searching unsuccessfully for a mode to speak of him with a sanctimonious justice that is called for by the university nowadays. [52]

Bultmann, however, Barth adds, sticks to the liberal program regarding faith as a human possibility; the dialectical endeavor is turning out to be just another way of continuing with liberal premises. Bultmann is witnessing this, and Barth’s “attempt to understand him” is doomed to fail. Bultmann represents a “pre-Copernican gesture” [53] to start theologically – again – not with God, but with human existence instead.

From the beginning on and despite all later upheavals in his theology Barth underlines that the theologically significant dynamic is not located within existence, but comes “vertically from above,” from God Himself. Not religious experience and moods or feelings are the theological subject matter, but “God’s breakthrough in the human realm.” [54] The naive and transfiguring optimism shared by liberal theology (esp. in Richard Rothe’s work) was, for Barth, exactly the critical target of theology in the wake of the Reformation and, later, of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche – a reservation against the human condition and therefore against “religion.” [55]

Barth’s famous “commentary” on Paul’s letter to the Romans is a highly metaphorical, even poetic elaboration on this divine veto and protest against religion. Following Kierkegaard, Barth highlights the “essential, qualitative, and eternal difference” between God above and the human being here on earth; and explicitly treats religion as a constant attempt to discard that very difference. [56] Although the “commentary” includes passages that seem to entail a more positive or, at least, non-normative view on religion, [57] Barth concentrates on polemizing against religion as an essentially human (mis)deed; “religion” means, for Barth, experience, attitude, feeling. [58] It is, as such, “the most dubious gesture” of the human; religion is just another circumscription of turning God’s revelation into a human possibility, while faith is not about religion, but related to God. [59] In contrast, on Calvary the “religious possibility” had been “sacrificed;” Calvary is, Barth states, the ultimate “limit of religion;” accordingly, religion and mercy relate to each other exactly as death and life do. [60]

Thus, Barth sticks to the strict duality that we observed above. He uses different conceptual pairs to present that clear cut: “time” and “eternity,” “faith” and “sin,” “God’s reality” and “human religion.” [61] In his writings leading to the Church Dogmatics , Barth tries to find the right assessment of that duality and to deal with it adequately; it is interesting to see that he appreciates the “dialectical” way between affirmation and its denial on the one hand and that he shows his reservation against that approach on the other, because of its inability to reach God’s reality. Speaking of God is only God’s possibility. [62] Hence, Barth’s following “goodbye” from DT and its journal, “Zwischen den Zeiten” (“Between the Times”) was only consistent. [63] For him, DT turned out to be just another chapter of the liberal enterprise – with the dangerous disadvantage of not being aware of it. The entire program was for him a disappointing, but “productive misunderstanding.” [64]

It is, then, no surprise that Barth’s first volumes of his Church Dogmatics thematize this “goodbye” in giving a retrospective justification for leaving that movement. Barth is, in these passages, highly self-critical in admitting to have not fully taken seriously what has become now his theological agenda: giving up finding a theological starting point by acknowledging that God has already begun with us. The direction is not bottom-up, but top-down, a theological “one-way street,” which means that all theological anthropology in disguise has to be abandoned – including the quasi-liberal DT. [65] Barth clarifies:

In faith, we have to understand the cognizability of God’s word, as it is given in faith. It is, so to say, born in the event of faith, comes in sight and wants to be searched for and to be found there. (…) Hence, one cannot begin with the analysis of humankind. [66]

Coming from this angle, Barth draws drastic consequences for the concept of religion. Paragraph 17 of CD I/2 has as its title “God’s revelation as the nullification of religion;” as is well-known, the second section of that paragraph is headed “Religion as Unbelief.” Barth holds that there is a strict rivalry between revelation and religion, an exclusive either/or. Against what he calls “modern Protestantism,” religion is to be understood from God’s revelation, not the other way around. This revelation, however, annihilates or suspends human religion. [67] It is only the human being in the light of revelation that is theologically to be taken seriously, because faith and unbelief stand against each other in an irreconcilable contrast. [68] Barth finally states:

Religion is unbelief ; religion is a business, one has to say: the business of the godless man. [69]

In sum : For Barth, religion is the signature of human crises. Therefore, “religion” is, right from the outset, considered as a normative concept of theological evaluation and criticism. Accordingly, religion as a phenomenon appears to be the totality of human self-assertion against God. The idea of a vera religio is, for Barth, a contradiction in terms, because there cannot be any truth in religion. [70]

We find a strict dual conception in Barth along these lines: “faith” and “unbelief,” “faith” and “religion,” “God’s revelation” and “religion” as its denial. Since Barth does not rely on an existential or factual concept of belief or religion and since he draws that distinction strictly, a re-entry of the initial duality seems to be excluded, because it would be, again, a human endeavor of hybrid self-reflexivity. Here, however, we are faced with a strict either/or: either God’s revelatory word determines our existence, or one is living “religiously.” A re-entry as a reflexive act belongs only to the second pole, whereas the first does not possess any ambivalence. [71] Therefore, the DT-Barth is the most obvious proponent of a decisively normative concept of religion (f) in repudiating even the possibility to affirm a potentially positive form of religion. Although, as we will see shortly, Brunner also defends a negatively normative version, he presents a slightly softer form of (f), hence: (f*).

Although Barth, I think, shows the biggest loyalty to the critical approach of DT, namely, its theological reservation toward the human condition and the intellectual optimism accompanying the liberal tradition, dialectics as a dogmatic structure loses its weight during Barth’s development in the late 1920s and 1930s. It is true that Barth’s commentary on Romans relies on dialectical assertions between the “Yes” and “No” as elements of God’s judgment being the crisis of the world. As we have seen, however, Barth will quickly distance himself from this way of working theologically. Nevertheless, there is one moment in his later work that inherits the dialectical thinking: the programmatic decision to construct theology as christology and, by doing this, setting the paradox of the vere Deus  –  vere homo at theology’s center. Barth’s christology is itself an essential tool to suspend religion. Only theology, and hence christology, could overcome religion. [72]

3.3 Brunner on psychologism and revelation

In his polemics against human hubris and self-affirmation is Emil Brunner in no way inferior to Barth’s devastating post-War critique of culture and theology starting with anthropological abilities and faculties. What the commentary on Romans is for Barth, is the 1924 book Mysticism and the Word for Brunner. While Barth presents his critical case as a Pauline reading, Brunner’s fury is directed to Schleiermacher as the “theological Paganini” and “the greatest concept virtuoso of the century.” [73] However, that was not meant to be a compliment, but the entrance door to a comprehensive refutation of the man who created the “lentil dish of religious studies compatible with culture.” [74] In a less polemical form Brunner’s critique reads as follows:

We can recognize both now: the reason why Schleiermacher time and again continued to claim the (relative) autonomy of religion, and why others could never believe him and his claim. Schleiermacher never speaks of the faith to which the Gospel refers, but rather of the merely pious sentiments that – as long as they last and assert no proposition concerning objective truths – do not conflict with philosophy. [75]

There are four crucial aspects of this critique: first, Brunner explicitly refutes theological forms of psychologism in the wake of Schleiermacher. By “psychologism” he addresses the strong concentration on religious “feelings” (as substitute of “vision” or “intuition” ( Anschauung ) in the second edition of the Speeches ). By that term he also means the function that is fulfilled by the concept of “(pure) consciousness” in the Glaubenslehre . [76] Both accounts suffer from the same crucial confusion: they start with man, not with God. Second, Brunner refutes the mystical element encapsulated by “feeling” as well as, later, by “absolute dependence.” What Brunner finds so problematic here is the human attempt to experience God in an immediate and direct mode making God’s consciousness and human self-consciousness identical. This “dream” has to end, since revelation means mediation (by Christ through the Word) as a miracle, the absurd, the incomprehensible pace mysticism’s wrong-headed immediacy. [77] Third, Brunner eagerly criticizes Schleiermacher’s major move in the Speeches to defend a “province” for the sake of religion’s autonomy and independence from metaphysics and morality (see above, the introduction). This provincialism created by Schleiermacher (and Kant) does not defend religion in its own right, but restricts it in a “dishonorable” way (however, Brunner won’t take the exit presented by Tillich’s “theology of culture” either; cf. the next section). [78] Fourth, Brunner thinks Schleiermacher’s religion simply lacks content ; in other words, what is traditionally taken to be the substantial nucleus of religion is transformed by Schleiermacher (and his followers) into secondary figurations of feelings and consciousness. [79] That, however, turns the theological hierarchy between attitudes and doctrines, between modes of existence and doctrinal content upside down.

All four aspects create a strictly dualistic structure as well as a terminological dualism that is so emblematic not only for DT in general but also for Brunner’s work during the 1920s in particular: faith and historicism are “completely incommensurable;” [80] faith is the decisive “crisis of morality” and is the “spark” jumping out “under the hammer of God’s word;” [81] the content of faith is the opposite of everything that is rational, open to proof; it is a paradox and wonder – something (not ir rational, but) anti -rational being the ground for reason and rationality. [82]

What does all this imply for Brunner’s take on religion and “religion”? Answering that question brings telling ambivalences to the fore but also – despite all polemical similarities to Barth – crucial differences. On the one hand, we have – in accordance with the aforementioned dualisms – a highly polemical attitude toward religion as part of human culture. Here, we find the typical DT-radicalism of programmatic denial and negation. To begin with, “religion” is, Brunner holds, a pagan term, not to be found in the Bible and, rarely, in reformation theologies. Revelation stands to the cultural and religious sphere in “sharpest contrast” and constitutes a “strict divide between God and man, God and world;” there is no “continuation between human spiritual life and God’s revelation,” since “God is God and the world is world.” [83] Revelation is the “irruption of the wholly other” into this world, “not lyrics but drama, not stability but unheard upheaval, fraction, discontinuity with everything that is in man himself.” [84] And in regard to “religion” Brunner states:

Religion does not only offer criticism of this or that form of culture, but rather calls humanity itself into question, because it questions the human being. [85]

This is the fairly typical DT take based on a strict demarcation line between religion and culture (including all their derivatives). On the other hand, however, Brunner uses “religion” also in a more positive, even constructive way. Here, he presents two different versions: one – it is possible to speak, Brunner says, “in the right way” of religion insofar as religion signifies or entails the content of faith . Hence, what Brunner criticizes in Schleiermacher’s notion of religion as feeling without content is revised and rectified now. [86] It is, however, quite another question what this content exactly implies; two – there is, for Brunner, the possibility of an authentic religion under the condition that religion remains “unspoiled” ( urwüchsig ). And this is the case, when…

religion could unfold its own life, when it does not acknowledge the authority of culture consciousness ( Kulturbewußtsein ) in rather ignoring it or even by openly fighting it. [87]

Obviously, Brunner sticks to the old dialectical dualism here, but without excluding a potentially positive role for religion . Thus, Brunner –  – in significant contrast to Barth – allows for the possibility of a vera religio deserving its name. And yet, the truth of religion, the truly vivid and vital religion, is only achievable from a point “beyond humanity.” [88] Religion – “in the sense of faith” – must not be absorbed by culture, [89] otherwise it will be reduced to a merely cultural matter, as has happened in the Schleiermacherian provincialism of pious feelings and isolated privacy.

The later dispute with Barth concerning the sense and (im)possibility of natural theology might be the best studied chapter of Brunner’s work. As early as in 1925, Brunner stated that truth needs a context and is never “dot-like.” [90] As well-known, circumventing this “dot-likeness” led Brunner to searching for a human “point of contact.” [91] And it is, in fact, interesting to see Brunner’s surprise about Barth’s later development and Barth’s tentative openness, in later volumes of his CD , to the similarities between God and human despite human sin; to the connections and relations between both poles beyond the divide of pagan and Christian humanity, as Brunner puts it; and to the continuity of human nature that is not undermined or even destroyed by sinfulness and existential failure. One has to speak of a “new Barth,” Brunner concludes that seems to say “No” to his initial while famous first “No” to Brunner’s theologia naturalis . [92]

In sum : This judgment might overestimate Barth’s cautious reorientation in the 1940s. As surprising as the “newness” in Barth might have been for Brunner, it is equally astonishing to detect Brunner’s ambivalence concerning religion and his almost inconsistent dealing with that term: insofar as religion is part of human culture or humanity it falls under theological attack, similar to Barth’s normative refutation of religion (version f); insofar as religion stands, in turn, for faith’s content – God’s revelation mediated by Christ – the concept is, again, normatively while positively loaded in mirroring a substantial account of the term (version a). [93]

3.4 Tillich and Gogarten on religion as culture’s crisis

Paul Tillich – arguably in his early days as a critical member of DT too – claims that religion and the concept of religion should be overcome by the philosophy of religion. [94] While pointing to the main problem of DT, as he sees it, namely, the undialectical foundation or the uncritical nucleus of the “Theology of Crisis,” [95] he underlines the paradox as a necessary element of every theological assertion. [96]

By neglecting that paradox, the philosophy of religion contributes to finitizing the infinite, either in dissolving or subordinating it. Tillich holds that the philosophy of religion has to elaborate on the absolute that is in everything relative. It has to start with God as the absolute and in being loyal to that task it has two options: integrating religion into culture or regarding the absolute to be the rupture of the finite. [97] In the first case, the danger consists in losing the absolute; in the second case, the danger consists in losing the relative. Now, a heteronomous theology, as the liberal one is, starts with religion, but without God and succumbs to the first temptation. A theonomous theology, however, follows the absolute as being a potential of everything relative.

What Tillich means by this (paradoxical) potential comes to the fore in what he develops as “theology of culture.” Tillich regards this type of theology as “concrete-normative science of religion,” a science, that has no specific object. [98] This is meant to be a direct criticism of Schleiermacher’s distinguishing “provinces” since religion does not match a specific realm, section, or area (thus, this way of putting the criticism is different from Brunner’s; see previous section). There is no “religious” feeling either; rather, religion is a state of the mind that is realized in all “provinces.” It does not denote a new reality beyond the one we are living in, but the absolute is “through” all things – the “hyper-being,” as he puts it. [99] Accordingly, religion is for Tillich the experience of the absolute and “ultimate reality” – based on the experience of “absolute invalidity.” [100] A theology of culture pays heed to this dialectics in giving an analysis of all parts of culture in the light of its absolute potential under – and despite – the human condition.

Friedrich Gogarten – beyond all differences when compared to Tillich in terms of style, philosophical background, and theological orientation – shares crucial features of method and thinking, an alliance that expresses their membership in DT. First, Gogarten is highly critical of the liberal tradition too, in a rigor that is on the same polemical level as Barth’s and Brunner’s. Liberal protestantism has “tormented” believers and it belongs, fortunately, to a different time that has now fallen apart and is past. It is the “hour of downfall,” and one “does not feel comfortable among dead bodies.” [101] Second, both in fact claim that a religious way of seeing things makes only sense, as Gogarten puts it when everything human disappears to give God His space. [102] The absolute new is the absolute transformation of everything ( metabasis ) with the consequence that the human being vanishes completely as agent; God is now the only acting person, since God does not need “human’s dozing states” to be present and effective on earth. [103] As soon as one recognizes God’s reality, there is no place for the human being in the world. [104] Third, Gogarten shares with Tillich (as well as Barth) a disillusioned view on the situation as it is – “between the times.” The war had only been a “parable” of the crisis to come, a “complete crisis” of culture. [105] The question remains, however, whether this crisis denies culture or is itself part of it. Fourth, Gogarten as well as Tillich hold (against Barth) that there is a theologically significant meaning of religion. Liberally speaking, religion is culture’s soul; the alternative proposed by DT is that religion is itself the crisis of culture. Thus, every cultural crisis only mirrors the theologically relevant crisis, namely, the one that is religion itself. [106] Fifth, Tillich and Gogarten draw a similar conclusion concerning the form of theological statements: they have to be dialectical, i.e., that no assertion could stand without its suspension by a negating assertion: there is no “No” without a “Yes,” as Gogarten states about negative theology. [107]

In sum : It is revealing to see how Tillich and Gogarten use the concept of religion as a terminological tool within the DT-framework, while sharing with Barth (and Brunner) the deep reservation concerning the human condition and culture. Religion signifies here the crisis of culture; or the other way around: the ultimate cultural crisis is defined as religion. That is almost a heuristic concept of religion (d). Certainly, they defend a normative meaning of the term: not, however, as Barth did in a pejorative sense, but as the decisive fraction of an era and time that has become suspect, dubious, and, eventually, impossible for them. However, in sharp contrast to Barth, religion stands here at the heart of DT, either as “theology of crisis” or as “theology of culture,” but in both cases as saving the absolute against various modes of relativizing it.

Now, every tool for circumventing the crisis or finitizing the absolute is itself critical or finite and relative. It is this constellation that creates the dialectics between both poles of negation and affirmation as well as the necessity of binding every theological assertion to its counterpart. [108] Hence, the strict duality between religion and culture – a duality for the sake of both – turns a re-entry superfluous because religion as a normative concept denotes a pure phenomenon from whose perspective a re-applied distinction between itself and its counterpart lacks sense. It is what it is in pure contrast to the other side. Hence, theologically speaking, religion, for Gogarten and Tillich, does not belong to culture. There is a strict duality between religion in a normative sense and culture in a sociological meaning (cf. versions e and f). If there is a religion, then it is the true one; there is only, and can only be, the vera religio . The rest is silence (and culture).

4 Finally. Theology after religion/without “religion”?

As we have seen, there are two basic moves to be found in DT in relation to the theme of “religion”: first, the various members of that school refer to the concept of religion in highly divergent ways – up to the point of incompatibility in using this term. Hence, there is no way of mediating or combining these meanings of “religion,” apart from the rival meanings that the term has outside theology. Second, and beyond all conceptual differences, “religion” is integrated with a normative and dualistic structure between faith and unbelief (or their equivalents). After summing up both aspects, I would like to ask in which relation these aspects stand to each other – with consequences for the theological usability of “religion” from a DT-perspective.

Let us start with the first aspect: despite several common features of DT, “religion” is treated in divergent and, partly, incompatible ways. Bultmann’s work entails a hermeneutical or modal concept of religion (version c). “Religion” serves as a specification of “existence” and, hence, denotes an individual structure of relating to a transcendent entity, person, sense, or reality. The theologically crucial duality between faith and unbelief is located within religion, while faith and unbelief allow for a re-entry of that distinction as a self-reflective act. Accordingly, Bultmann formalizes and neutralizes religion that is, thus, open to be a genuine expression of faith or one of its opposites, seen from a theological perspective. The neutral formality of “religion” reflects the fact that human existence is the only possible sphere where man could encounter God.

Barth feels uncomfortable with the underlying premise that there is, at least, a structurally possible continuation between faith and unbelief. He uses “religion” normatively and, more specifically, pejoratively as the entirety of human fallenness and self-assertion against God (version f). Therefore, “religion” itself belongs to the theologically characteristic duality, whereas Barth has different terminological counterparts; the most prominent pair is “religion” and “revelation” and the latter is taken to be the overcoming of religion. God exceeds every human and mundane condition to which religion necessarily belongs. [109]

At first sight, Brunner is fully on Barth’s side in refuting a theologically constructive meaning of the concept of religion. Here, “religion” denotes, again, the fallenness of human nature. However, Brunner already presupposes in these passages a Schleiermacherian framework that reduced religion to a particular realm among other activities in life, to a mere feeling without content. Contrary to Barth’s rigorous dismissal of the possibility of an authentic or true religion, Brunner allows for that option; then, religion is regarded as standing in absolute contrast to the cultural sphere by being integrated into faith as its very content – leaving Schleiermacherian premises behind. One might hold that both versions apply “religion” normatively – in the first case pejoratively (version f), in the latter one constructively (version f*).

Gogarten and Tillich share Barth’s (and Brunner’s) normative understanding of religion and they subscribe also to the claim that the human condition stands in protest against God’s revelation and, hence, must be broken and opened up. Contrary to Barth, the dynamics of breaking and opening is religion itself. Their normative understanding is, then, an affirmative one with the consequence that “religion” belongs here again to the theological duality, while having changed sides: now, religion stands in sharp contrast to culture as its crisis without being an integral part of it anymore. The one who lives religiously has left culture; and those who are still surrounded by culture are only living ahead of their “religious” crisis (version d//e + f).

At first sight, it might seem that the “return of religion” mentioned at the outset would have elicited very different reactions among the DT members. Bultmann would deny that such a return is a possibility that makes any sense because “religion” as a neutral and purely formal concept is among the possible qualifications of “existence.” As long as humans exist they might live religiously in one way or the other. From a Barthian perspective, a return of religion would be a catastrophe but also one that would not surprise Barth. For him, religion is not more than the empirically evident and theologically qualified fallenness of man. Now, every believer had been an unbeliever before; and that’s why even a return cannot make things worse because seen from a normative point of view the situation between God and man could not be worse. Hence, a return of religion as deepening the initial alienation between God and man lacks sense too. Brunner could agree on that matter while adding that religion as faith’s substance is a possibility which, however, crucially diverges from the meaning of the contemporary “return of the gods.” And a very similar claim has to be made with regard to Gogarten and Tillich, but now from another angle. As we have seen, here religion is contrasted with culture and indicates its eschatological crisis. A return of religion sounds like very good news then. That metaphor, however, presupposes God’s religious revival as if God’s presence suffered from “divine tiredness.” Since the cultural crisis is a permanent one (Gogarten), and since God’s presence is “theonomously” everywhere and persistent (Tillich), speaking of God’s return remains dubious here too.

A second look is required nevertheless: the reason for this lack of semantic sense lies in the simple fact that the “return-thesis” is an empirical and, more precisely, a sociological one capturing recent religious phenomena and indicating critically that the old common sense regarding an all-encompassing secularization is, in that generalized form, falsified. [110] Obviously, this notion of religion (as in version e) is not the one used by DT. Their “ignorance” toward it is justified by the fact that theology per se has, for them, nothing to do with social developments and cultural tendencies. Neither Bultmann’s formalized “religion,” nor Barth’s and Brunner’s bashing of religion, nor Gogarten’s and Tillich’s promotion of religion to the crisis of culture refer to actual transformations within societies, states, or countries. [111]

What is decisive for all authors we have dealt with in this tour d’horizon is the theologically normative duality between God and man. Not metaphors of continuation, mediation, and semblance are governing the theological scene here, but of fraction, breakthrough, and ending. This is the unifying element between Bultmann, Barth, Brunner, Gogarten, and Tillich – a dogmatic rigor that understands itself as mirroring the ultimate crisis of the human condition in which faith and unbelief, God’s revelation and religion, and religion and culture are in almost irresolvable conflict. [112] No human could know on which side one stands; since that is God’s judgment and His judgment alone. Or:

How can you know where you’ve been?
In time you’ll see the sign
And realize your sin.
Will you know how the seed is sown?
All your time has been overgrown,
Never known.

In the end, it is not the first aspect – the concept of religion – that is the crucial element in DT, but the second one – the bivalent architecture between faith and unbelief, in which “religion” appears. Now, what I would like to propose is to use the latter aspect as an allusion to the way for how to deal with the first aspect, the incompatible meanings of “religion” within the DT-framework. The incompatibility just outlined leaves us with two options: either we accept the diversity of religion’s meanings at the price of running into misunderstandings and the constant need of clarification or theology as theo -logy leaves “religion” to religious studies and sociology in concentrating on other, genuinely dogmatic notions that encapsulate and inherit what has been just unequivocally expressed by “religion.” Although all authors of DT stick to “religion,” the internal contradictions in their terminology may invite us to say “farewell” to “religion” as a proper and genuinely theological concept. Religion might be culture’s crisis, as Brunner and Gogarten put it. The hopeless semantic inconsistency of “religion,” however, is at the same time the crisis of the concept of “religion” itself. Its terminological success since the Enlightenment period amounts, finally, to a conceptual inflation undermining the shape, precision, and even usability of the concept – a dynamic well-known from other prominent concepts, such as “metaphysics.”

Therefore, besides the theological duality between faith and unbelief, there is the methodological duality between theology as dogmatics and religious studies as an empirically oriented science. Both approaches refer to the same state of affairs, and yet, both signify two highly different perspectives on the “identical” subject matter. The difference between these methodological perspectives implies divergent vocabularies with which the material in question is approached, structured, and described. “Faith” and “unbelief” is a conceptual duality that is theologically normative, whereas “religion” should be – against the actual practice within DT, but along its basic underlying intention – reserved for the other side of the methodological duality.

The consequences entailed by this terminological proposal are widespread: first, we have to deal with the crossover of two dualities; the one between faith and unbelief belongs to the theological side of the methodological duality, whose second pole is religious studies to which the concept of religion belongs exclusively. Second, “religion” does not serve as a genuinely theological term with positive content anymore, whereas “faith” and “unbelief” are concepts having their proper context not in religious studies (or the sociology of religion) anymore. Third, a dogmatic reorientation from God to religion (or the other way around) is a confusion since it is in severe danger of just jumping from one scientific game to another methodological access that is both based on the dualism sketched in this paper.

Dialectical Theology reminds us that there might be a return of religion, but not as religion’s “ultimate concern.” The only return theology could possibly be interested in is returning to God as its essential and only theme – after religion and without “religion.”

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‘I would like to be on good terms with all animals,’ remarked the woman, to her daughter. They were sitting on the gritty beach at Sopot, looking out at the cold sea. The eldest boy had gone to the arcade. The twins were in the water.

‘But you are not!’ cried the daughter. ‘You are not at all!’

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It was true. What the woman had said was true, in intention, but what the girl had said was true, too, in reality. The woman, though she generally refrained from beef, pork and lamb, ate – with great relish – many other kinds of animals and fish, and put out flypaper in the summer in the stuffy kitchen of their small city apartment and had once (though her daughter did not know this) kicked the family dog. The woman had been pregnant with her fourth child, at the time, and temperamental. The dog seemed to her, at that moment, to be one responsibility too many.

‘I did not say that I am. I said that I should like to be.’

The daughter let out a cruel laugh.

‘Words are cheap,’ she said.

Indeed, at that moment the woman held a half-eaten chicken wing in her hand, elevated oddly to keep it from being covered in sand, and it was the visible shape of the bones in the chicken wing, and the tortured look of the thin, barbecued skin stretched across those bones, which had brought the subject to mind.

‘I dislike this place,’ said the daughter, definitively. She was glaring at the lifeguard, who had once again had to wade into the murk to tell the only bathers – the girl’s own brothers – not to go past the red buoy. They weren’t swimming – they could not swim. There were no waters in the city in which to take lessons, and the seven days they spent in Sopot each year was not long enough to learn. No, they were leaping into the waves, and being knocked over by them, as unsteady on their feet as newborn calves, their chests grey with that strange silt which fringed the beach, like a great smudge God had drawn round the place with a dirty thumb.

‘It makes no sense,’ continued the daughter, ‘to build a resort town around such a filthy and unwelcoming sea.’

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Her mother held her tongue. She had come to Sopot with her own mother and her mother had come with her mother before that. For at least two hundred years people had come here to escape the cities and let their children run wild in the public squares. The silt was of course not filth, it was natural, though no one had ever told the woman exactly what form of natural substance it was. She only knew to be sure to wash out all their costumes nightly in the hotel sink.

Once, the woman’s daughter had enjoyed the Sopot sea and everything else. The candyfloss and the shiny, battery-operated imitation cars – Ferraris and Mercedes – that you could drive willy-nilly through the streets. She had, like all children who come to Sopot, enjoyed counting her steps as she walked out over the ocean, along the famous wooden boardwalk. In the woman’s view, the best thing about a resort town such as this was that you did whatever everybody else did, without thinking, moving like a pack. For a fatherless family, as theirs now was, this collective aspect was the perfect camouflage. There were no individual people here. In town, the woman was on the contrary an individual, a particularly unfortunate sort of individual, saddled with four fatherless children. Here she was only another mother buying candyfloss for her family. Her children were like all children, their faces obscured by huge clouds of pink spun sugar. Except this year, as far as her daughter was concerned, the camouflage was of no use. For she was on the very cusp of being a woman herself, and if she got into one of those ludicrous toy cars her knees would touch her chin. She had decided instead to be disgusted with everything in Sopot and her mother and the world.

‘It’s an aspiration,’ said her mother, quietly. ‘I would like to look into the eye of an animal, of any animal, and be able to feel no guilt whatsoever.’

‘Well, then it has nothing to do with the animal itself,’ said the girl pertly, unwrapping her towel finally and revealing her precious, adolescent body to the sun and the gawkers she now believed were lurking everywhere, behind every corner. ‘It’s just about you, as usual. Black again! Mama, costumes come in different colours, you know. You turn everything into a funeral.’

The little paper boat that had held the barbecue chicken must have blown away. It seemed that no matter how warm Sopot became there would always be that north-easterly wind, the waves would be whipped up into ‘white horses’ and the lifeguard’s sign would go up and there would never be a safe time to swim. It was hard to make life go the way you wanted. Now she waved to her boys as they waved at her. But they had only waved to get their mother’s attention, so that now she would see them as they curled their tongues under their bottom lips and tucked their hands into their armpits and fell about laughing when another great wave knocked them over. Their father, who could very easily be – as far as anyone in Sopot was concerned – around the next corner, buying more refreshments for his family, had in reality emigrated, to America, and now fixed car doors onto cars in some gigantic factory, instead of being the co-manager of a small garage, as he had once had the good fortune to be, before he left.

She did not badmouth him or curse his stupidity to her children. In this sense, she could not be blamed for either her daughter’s sourness or her sons’ immaturity and recklessness. But privately she hoped and imagined that his days were brutal and dark and that he lived in that special kind of poverty she had heard American cities can provide. As her daughter applied what looked like cooking oil to the taut skin of her tummy, the woman discreetly placed her chicken wing in the sand before quickly, furtively, kicking more sand over it, as if it were a turd she wished buried. And the little chicks, hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps millions, pass down an assembly line, every day of the week, and chicken sexers turn them over, and sweep all the males into huge grinding vats where they are minced alive.

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The Logic of Marxism, and its Critics—An Essay in Exploration

THIS essay is an attempt to clear the ground for a better and fuller appreciation of that which gives Marxism its living unity—namely, the Dialectical Materialist Method . Its special feature is that it seeks to show what this method is by means of an examination of what it did in the hands of Marx and Engels. It considers the Dialectical Materialist Method in action in the theoretical practice of these its first elaborators, and following them (so far as falls within its purpose) that of their disciples, Lenin and Stalin.

No pretence is made that this essay is in any way final or authoritative. Very much to the contrary: it is in every respect an essay , a venture—an attempt at a provisional exploration of a field which no British Marxist has hitherto attempted on anything but a most perfunctory scale. It is therefore liable to all the faults and mischances necessarily attending such provisional essays. None the less it is — an attempt! If its demerits—whatever they may be—provoke ethers better qualified to cover the ground in a more worthy manner it will have more than served its purpose.

  *  *  *  *  *  

This essay has been rendered necessary by two things. The first is the appalling state of Marxist studies in English, as evidenced by the quality of all but a very few of the works purporting to treat of Marx and Marxism which have appeared in Britain in recent years; the second is the fact of the existence of a cleavage in the Marxist camp represented by the conflict—carried at times to the pitch of actual combat in arms—between the Communists on the one side and the Social-Democrats and their allies upon the other.

No Marxist can view this conflict without concern: no Marxist who takes his Marxism seriously can treat it as a mere personal squabble, arising from “faults on both sides,” which could be composed by the exercise of tact and patience. What is at stake in this conflict is the basic significance of Marxism itself, and upon such an issue no Marxist can do other than choose his side and help to fight the issue, theoretical and practical, to a finish. Full frankness is far more likely to produce union and agreement than any “diplomacy.”

As long ago as April, 1920, Stalin spoke of this cleavage in Marxism in these words:

“There are two groups of Marxists. Both are working under the flag of Marxism and consider themselves genuine Marxists. Nevertheless they are far from being identical. More than that. A complete gulf divides them, for their respective methods of work are diametrically opposed to each other.

“The first group usually confines itself to the superficial recognition of Marxism—to solemnly proclaiming it. Unable or not willing to study the essence of Marxism, unable or not willing to apply it in practical life, it transforms the living revolutionary propositions of Marxism into dead, meaningless formulas. It bases its activities, not on experience, not on the results of practical work, but on quotations from Marx. It takes its guiding lines and directives not from an analysis of living reality, but from analogies and historical parallels. Discrepancy between word and deed—such is the principal disease from which this group suffers. . . . The name of this group is, in Russia, Menshevism; in Europe, Opportunism.

“The second group, on the other hand, transfers the centre of gravity of the question from the superficial recognition of Marxism to its realisation, to its application in practical life. Indicating the path and means of realising Marxism for various situations, changing the path and means when the situation changes—this is what this group concentrates on mainly. It takes its directives and its guiding lines not from historical analogies and parallels, but from the study of surrounding conditions. In its activities it relies not on quotations and aphorisms, but on practical experiences, testing every step it takes by experience, learning from its mistakes and teaching others to build a new life. This . . . explains why in the activities of this group there are no discrepancies between word and deed, and why the teachings of Marx fully preserve their living, revolutionary force.... The name of this group is Bolshevism—Communism.”—STALIN: Lenin , pp. 5-6.

Disregarding as irrelevant the objection that might be urged that Stalin, being a partisan in the dispute, is no more than any man “a judge in his own cause,” we affirm that the issue is ultimately as Stalin here states it.

“Marxism” is either a mere abstract opinion, having only an incidental connection with the practical realities of life and struggle—in which case there is no need for a “Marxist” to feel responsible for squaring his theory with his practice—or, alternatively, the Marxist world-conception is primarily a theory of action , one derived so intimately from the facts of life and struggle that he who declares himself a Marxist thereby takes upon himself the responsibility for liming Marxism as well as preaching it.

But before Marxism can be lived it must be understood before it can be wielded as a weapon it must be grasped . And in order that a grasp of the essential logic of Marxism may become widespread in Britain it is before all things necessary to clear away the whole fabric of misconceptions and misrepresentations which stand as a blanket-veil between the ordinary British worker and Marxist understanding.

Although there have been “Marxists” of sorts in Britain since before the death of Marx, the working-class movement in Britain has never been consciously or purposefully Marxist. At best it has been adulterated by such “Marxism” as has been available, and this, the native-British “Marxism,” has in turn, “like the dyer’s hand,” been “subdued to that it works in.”

Nothing evidences this better than the quality of the literature produced by native British Marxists. Apart from a score of works, all of recent date, in which an attempt is made to elucidate current problems by the aid of Marxist theory, this native British Marxist literature consists almost wholly of works purporting to “explain” Marxist theory in the abstract , in terms suited to the (presumably infantile ) understanding of the plain man.

No objection is here raised to simplification as such. On the contrary, no work could be more useful than that of presenting Marxism in such a way as can easily be assimilated by the ordinary man. What calls for protest is the fact that those who in Britain set out to “simplify” Marx commonly begin by reducing him to a simpleton , and those who offer to “explain” him are as a rule primarily concerned only to explain him away .

We take the ground here that Marx and Engels (and this applies also to Lenin and Stalin) are their own best expounders that to attempt to “simplify” that which they have already made as simple as it is humanly possible to make it, cannot fail to result in a distortion of their plain sense and a misrepresentation of their clearly-presented meaning. Not “simplification” but amplification and, above all, application is what Marxism needs in Britain.

As usually presented to the English-speaking world by its popular expositors, literary and oratorical, “Marxism” is a loosely aggregated bundle of separate and distinct “theories” which have no connection with each other beyond the fortuitous fact that they all originated with the one man, Karl Marx. Resolved thus into a jumble of “theories”—of Value, of Capital, of Crises, of History, of Class-War, of Revolution, and so on—each theory being presented as quite separate and self-contained—Marxism becomes an Old Curiosity Shop in which political amateurs and literary dilettanti can rummage for decorative oddments, just as they rummage in the Caledonian Market for old china, pewter plates, and bawdy prints.

In this way it has become quite a tradition in Britain for men to pose as “Marxists” on the strength of wearing a “Marxist” feather in the hair, or fig leaf on their intellectual nakedness. Nobody laughs in Britain to hear of “Marxists” who are also Christians, Theosophists, Spiritualists, or even Thomists-men who contrive to divide their allegiance between Karl Marx and the Blessed Saint Thomas Aquinas, even as others, with equal solemnity, seek to effect a synthesis between the philosophies of Marxism and of the Herr Doktor Sigmund Freud.

This eclectic-opportunist trick of disrupting the living unity of Marxism into a rubbish-heap of incompatible fragments has in Britain received high academic approval. Here, for instance, are the words of the learned Professor of Political Science in the University of London:

“The essence of Marx’s work lies not in any special economic doctrine so much as in the spirit by which this total accomplishment was performed. . . .

“Marxism as a social philosophy can be most usefully resolved into four distinct parts . It is first and foremost a philosophy of history . . . it is a theory of social development intended to guide the party of which he was a leader. Marx in the third place outlined a tactic. . . . He was, finally, an economic theorist .

“For Marx himself, of course, none of these aspects is properly separable from any other. They form a logical whole, the unity of which he would have passionately defended. It is, however, possible to reject the validity of his economic system, while accepting the large outlines of his social theory.”—Professor H. J. LASKI: Communism , pp. 22-26.

That this may fairly be taken as representative of what passes for “Marxism” in Britain is evidenced by the fact that Professor Laski has, without in any way modifying the opinion above cited, taken of late to calling himself a “Marxist.” As such he has been welcomed with acclaim into the “Marxist” camp, even to the extent of being chosen as the chief speaker at the function organised by the ( Marxist ) National Council of Labour Colleges to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Karl Marx.

Professor Laski exhibits, in the quotation given above, a characteristic common to the whole British school of “explainers” of Marx. He takes it calmly for granted that he understands Marxism far better than Marx understood it himself! Marx, he argues, would have “defended passionately” the logical unity of his theoretical system. But herein, according to Professor Laski, Karl Marx was self-deluded. Marxism, he affirms, can be “separated” into parts capable of being considered in complete isolation. So, we might retort, is Professor Laski capable of being “separated” from his head, his lights, or his liver! But in that case he would cease to be Professor Laski. And in like manner a Marxism disrupted is not Marxism, but a mangled corpse.

Professor Laski, however, sins in thoroughly respectable company. Here is a choice specimen of what has passed in Britain for a critical evaluation of Marxist doctrine:

“There are two remarkable inconsistencies between the general sociological position taken up by Marx and Engels and their persistent assertion of the economic basis of history. . . . In the first place they agreed that . . . ‘the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development.’ If that be true, is it conceivable that every department of life ‘natural, historical, intellectual’ (by the way, a very slipshod division)—is chained to economics and cannot attain an independent development and existence of its own? In the second place, Marx’s insistence that each epoch has its own characteristic law of development is inconsistent with the assertion that economic considerations are the prime movers in historic evolution.”—J. RAMSAY MACDONALD: Socialism and Society , p. 42.

This passage, so sublime in its owlish stupidity, so ludicrous in its spurious profundity, is truly characteristic of Ramsay MacDonald; but, as is apparent from its family likeness to the quotation from Professor Laski, it is none the less characteristic of the whole “British” school of Marxian interpretation.

That MacDonald, of all men living or dead, should accuse anybody (let alone Engels!) of “slipshod” thought or speech is MacDonaldite in excelsis . It should not, however, prevent us from noting that in failing to perceive any reason for the allocation of the phenomena of universal development into just those departments—of Nature, of History, and of the Thought-process in itself—MacDonald follows the fashion of his school in treating as of no account the fundamental dialectical method whereby the conclusions of Marx and Engels were reached.

Similarly MacDonald, faced with an affirmation that the entire universe is in constant movement, finds a “contradiction” between that affirmation and the assertion that history has an “economic basis.” Why? Because this latter assertion, to MacDonald (and his school), means that “every department of life” (who said “slipshod”?) “is chained to economics.”

Since to Marx the term “economics” denotes a movement —“the sum and total of human productive activity—with its objective outcome”—and was therefore “a department of life” (in the MacDonaldite sense)—to talk of mankind’s non-economic activities being “chained” to their economic ones is as illuminating as to speak of a man being “chained” to his own feet or bowels. To resent the fact that the life activities of men in their social inter-relations are, however various, all interdependent, is, in effect, to demand a physiology in which digestion goes on without intestines and is quite “independent” of food or feeding.

Likewise MacDonald sees in the assertion that historic epochs have differing laws of development a contradiction to the assertion that in historical evolution economic determinants are primary. Why? To Marx epochs are distinguishable each from each precisely by means of differences, progressively developed, in the economic constitution of society. For MacDonald, on the other hand, as for the true-blue British school of economists, “economic laws” are part of the fixed and immutable order of Nature, and can no more change than the lions in Trafalgar Square can lay eggs.

In short, MacDonald herein places himself critically on a par with that soldier in the British force sent in 1919 to overthrow the Soviet regime who was given a pot of caviare as part of his loot. “This here jam ,” said he, “tastes fishy !” MacDonald complains of Marx’s doctrine that it is neither metaphysical, eclectic, nor idealist, but Dialectical and Materialist .

A significant change has overtaken the attitude of the British intelligentsia towards Marx and Marxism—a change not unconnected with the continuance of the world depression and the failure of every effort to overthrow the ( Marxist ) Communist regime in the U.S.S.R. Marx is now by general consent admitted to the ranks of the very greatest intellects of all time, while Dialectical Materialism—the method and world-conception of Marx and Marxism—is beginning to be discussed, for the truly “British” reason that it is “the official (!) philosophy” of the U.S.S.R.

It would therefore seem to be timely to direct attention to the essential unity of Marxism and to its validity as a guide to action. As against all the critics, belittlers, revisers and explainers of Marx, we affirm, and seek herein to prove, that in the fifty years and more which have elapsed since Marx died events have so completely vindicated his standpoint, his method, and his main conclusions that his doctrine is, in general, truer to-day than when it was first formulated .

This is, we affirm, not only true objectively in the sense that developments have in fact made actual the situations and inter-relations which Marx and Engels had the genius to foresee and to predict, but true also subjectively, in the sense that the working-class in Britain, and with it its allies in the ranks of the intelligentsia and the progressive middle and upper classes, are better prepared, theoretically, to begin to comprehend Marxist theory than they were in Marx’s own lifetime—than they ever have been at any time previous to this time present.

That consideration has determined the form of this essay as well as its substance. As to the latter, it will be perceived that, far from making any attempt to carry Marxist theory beyond the point at which Marx left it, the main, virtually the sole, purpose of this essay, is to demonstrate the point at which Marxist theory began .

The respects in which, for instance, Lenin, and following Lenin, Stalin, have extended and amplified Marxist theory are dealt with herein only so far as is necessary to establish their essential connection with the basic presuppositions and method of Marx and Engels themselves.

For that reason the earlier chapters of this essay are devoted to an attempt to elucidate, with the aid of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach —herein taken as the seminal form of Marxian Theory,—the whole philosophical and political-theoretical background from which Marxism took its rise. That this entails what will seem, at first glance, to be a highly disconnected survey of the incidentals of the Marxist world-conception, is a circumstance which was unavoidable. It has the methodological advantage of presenting Marxism in its embryonic phases as a preliminary to, and as an elucidation of, the theory in its fully matured form.

The continuity of the earlier chapters, and more or less of the whole work, is, furthermore, interrupted by frequent digressions in which the objections and mis-presentations of the would-be “simplifiers” of Marx are disposed of. This was necessary to the purpose of the essay—since it is precisely the efforts of these “simplifiers” which constitute to-day the chief obstacle to the general understanding and acceptance of Marx’s theory and practice. To those who find these “interruptions” of the argument an annoyance sympathy is extended, but no apology. To such readers I offer a hint borrowed from Heine:

“If you who read become tired of the ‘stupid’ stuff herein, just think of what a dreary time I must have had in writing it! I would recommend you, on the whole, once in a while to skip half a dozen leaves, for in that way you will arrive much sooner at the end.”—HEINE: The Baths of Lucca , Chap. IX.

For readers with stouter stomachs, and a better comprehension of the purpose in view, we note that after the survey of the Theses on Feuerbach the essay deals in succession with the relations between the Marxist conceptions of Nature and of History; and between those of History and of Revolution in general and the Proletarian Revolution in particular. Here again the purpose is not to advance any new or original speculations, but, on the contrary, to explore the route by which Marx and Engels reached the conceptions for which they are famous. Superficially these chapters might seem to be guilty of the rashness of challenging comparison with (particularly) Engels’ classic expositions, Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring . A more careful reading will show that they are designed expressly to enable a reader to begin the reading of those masterpieces (and with them every work of Marx and of Lenin—particularly the latter’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism ) with a fuller and a better comprehension of their purpose than has hitherto commonly been brought to their study in Britain.

In the culminating chapter four selected “man-handlers” of the Marxist Dialectic are critically examined at full length. This is done in order to complete the exposition by demonstrating, in sequence with the preceding chapters, the general connection between the Marxist conception of understanding (its subjective Dialectics) and its conceptions of Nature, History, and Revolution (its objective Dialectics). The four victims chosen for this special treatment have been so selected because they are typical of the main trends of divergence from the true line of Marxist advance observable in the Marxist movement in Britain to-day.

No apology is offered for the manner of this criticism:

“It’s war we’re in; not politics! It’s systems wrastling now, not parties . And vict’ry in the end’ll fix Where longest will and truest heart is!” —LOWELL.

The author has been far too occupied with the problem of attaining accuracy to find time to study politeness.

The translations from Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin which have page references are taken from the editions published by Messrs. Martin Lawrence (who were good enough to place at the author’s disposal advance copies of their more recent issues), except, of course, in the cases of Marx’s Capital (Vol. I, Sonnenschein edition; Vols. II and III, Kerr’s edition) Engels’ Socialism Utopian and Scientific and his Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (Allen and Unwin). The extracts from the Marx-Engels Correspondence have been taken from the Martin Lawrence edition translated by Dona Torr. For other translations from Marx, Engels and Heine the present author accepts all blame. I have also to thank Messrs. Martin Lawrence for many acts of help and encouragement; and those comrades who have looked over the MSS. and the proofs and made helpful suggestions deserve a public acknowledgement likewise. Neither of these comrades is to be blamed for any faults found herein; on the contrary, the reader has them to thank for the fact that there are not many more.

The corrections in this second edition have been confined almost wholly to proof-reader’s corrections. In two places, not affecting the argument, the statement of a matter o£ fact has been rectified. Otherwise the work remains unaltered.

Next: I. The Making of Marxism

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How to Write a Dialectical Essay?

the dialectic essay

How to Write a Dialectical Essay: Important Info

  • How to Write a Dialectical Essay with a Powerful Conclusion

The Structure of Your Essay

  • Dialectic Essay Sample

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If you are asked to write a dialectic essay, the process will require you to find a controversial topic for exploration. Because of this, it can help to begin by looking through articles in journals, newspapers, and on the Internet. This will enable you to collect sufficient information on the topic you intend to discuss. Remember to cite all materials properly and pay careful attention to the academic style or format you have been instructed to or chosen to use. 

It is possible you will find quite a bit of helpful information on the Internet about writing this type of essay. One of the most important factors is to choose reliable and credible websites. Additionally or alternatively, you are welcome to use the instructions provided below.

“How to write a dialectical essay?” is one of the frequently questions that many students try to find an answer to. The emphasis of such a type essay is in the presentation of the opposite points of view or attitudes concerning a certain issue and a bit different understanding of the problem under study. It implies objecting a specific technique and brainstorming with the key purpose to discover diverse ideas related to the chosen topic. The main essence of a dialectical essay is very controversial and essential. Throughout the process of writing, a person denies a specific fact or evidence, and presents controversial arguments. The key purpose of the author is to determine a novel objective of the well-known issue. The nature of the dialectical essay is very philosophical.

It should be noted that this written task requires fascinating preparation, knowledge, as well as experience. Like any other essay type, it has its peculiar characteristics. To satisfy all the content needs, it is imperative to keep to the tips given below. Primarily, the writer will face the need to do some research in order to determine new perspectives of the issue under study. To deliver am amazing dialectical essay, it is of great significance to be competent in the chosen topic, as well as knowledgeable about it.

The following assignment requires that students approach the problem utilizing various objectives. The essay is aimed at exploring a set of solutions instead of making emphasis on a specific one. Consider that whenever your teacher asks you to complete such an essay, it means that he / she is eager to estimate your thinking flexibility and creativity, as well as the skills aimed at clarifying the ideas or considerations regarding a specific subject or topic. A writer of a dialectical essay should discover both negative and positive aspects of the issue / problem and provide all the pros or cons concerning the chosen issue.

Useful Hints on How to Write a Dialectical Essay with a Powerful Conclusion

The structural elements assisting in writing a dialectical essay can be easily seen if you refer to dialectic essay examples available online, but we would like to focus on the most important of them in the article below.

There are essential constituents of the structure giving a clear explanation on how to write a dialectical essay. Take into account that the dialectic essay should comprise five paragraphs. Every of them has its peculiar features. The introduction one should include a thesis statement. The thesis statement may have two interpretations. Essentially, it should be formulated in such a way the writer may approach it from two different perspectives. Further, in the essay, it should provide the readers with the controversial ideas. The format of the introduction should be clear, short, informative, and eye-catching.

In an ordinary essay, the body is composed of two-three paragraphs, which can either support or deny the key thesis argument or point of view. On the contrast, the characteristics are different in a dialectic essay. After the introduction, there should be an argument paragraph. The task is to give one argument that supports the key thesis. It is possible to provide the readers with certain reasons, why it is worth supporting this key thesis.

The objection paragraph is supposed to be the next one. The task of the author here is to object the statements indicated in the precious paragraph. There is on the significant nuance that the author should be well aware. It should be stressed that the objective section does not have to comprise the sentences which content denies the thesis statement or doubts of its rightness.

The third paragraph of the body is referred to as a response. In the following part, the writer should respond to the statements indicated in the objection section of the essay. You ought to specify it clearly. Consider that you should not provide any novel arguments. You should present a critical approach in your essay.

The last element of a dialectical essay is the conclusion. The task of the author is to formulate the results of the debates presented in the work. The writer should take a decision which viewpoint is valid and reliable and should be paid attention to. Sometimes the composition of several points should be credible and reliable. Moreover, the writer should present some piece of evidence that supports her / his position, in some cases even through the prism of the opposing arguments. In case, when the writer changes his / her viewpoint, he /she should explain to the readers each point or consideration. The writer should provide some reasons, as well as defend her / his point of view throughout the essay.

Once the essay is ready, you should read it very carefully and make the final adjustments. It is of great significance that the conclusion ought to support the thesis statement, as well as the arguments presented in the essay. The opposing arguments ought not to deny the key statement of the essay. However, they should object the other pieces of argumentation provided in the dialectical essay.

Always keep in mind that a dialectical essay is a type of writing that approaches the set or chosen question from two different angles, which are opposite. The conclusion means the alternative viewpoint is based on the data looked into. The task of the author is to search for the disputes, contrasts, as well as oppositions. Then it is imperative to search for the key idea that will combine all those points and make it the most significant issue of your writing. While working on your dialectical essay, you should utilize your dialectical thinking. The structural characteristics of the dialectical essay allow combining the controversial viewpoints and make it look logically organized and full of sense.

There are a few techniques that can be applied during the writing process. You can utilize a con and pro collection grid. The following technique can help you arrange all of your points of view accordingly and avoid creating a mess in your work. Moreover, you can always apply the brainstorming technique in case you lack some ideas.

The format of the essay is also an important criterion affecting the quality of writing. It concerns citing, as well as plagiarism and editing issues. In the majority of cases, the dialectical essay should comprise about 600-800 words.

In case there is a necessity to clearly realize how to write a dialectical essay, you should not get worried or panic. Make sure that you know all its peculiar features, are well aware of the requirements, as well as have critical thinking. Without doubt, you will be able to prepare a dialectical essay of premium quality!

  • Introductory Paragraph

The introduction paragraph should be used to introduce the topic of your essay. Usually, this includes:

  • An overview of the topic you will be discussing in your essay
  • A presentation of the various opinions on the topic you will be discussing.
  • The main point that demonstrates why it is important to explore the particular topic you will be discussing. 
  • Background Information

Provide your readers with any background information you think will be useful.

  • Presentation of Your Viewpoint (First Part)

Identify the main point or idea of your paper and focus on this. You should use this section to provide as much powerful and reliable evidence as possible. This means presenting an opinion you will go on to support. Say why you believe your opinion is objective and valid. Provide information on any experts who agree with your chosen viewpoint.

  • Presentation of Your Viewpoint (Second Part)

You should use this section to examine the main point or idea of the work you are exploring. Give a further opinion on the topic you are examining and make reference to others who support this. Offer a few well-reasoned arguments in support of this point of view.   

  • Analysis of Any Opinion(s) You Present

Mention any opposing viewpoints and say why you think these are not valid. Analyze any arguments that support or oppose your viewpoint.

  • Give Your Own Opinion

Give your own opinion on the topic. Towards the end, present any conclusion(s) you arrive at. Why have you taken a particular stance? Set out solid arguments to support your choice.

Do not overlook the importance of including any historical facts or information that is relevant to your topic’s development.

Pay attention to spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Try to make your essay or paper as gripping as possible. Establish whether your readers already know anything about the matter you are examining.  

It is essential to double-check the points listed below when writing a dialectic essay:

  • Is the information you provided correct?
  • Is your chosen topic sufficiently important or significant?
  • Are people likely to act in the exact same manner in different circumstances or situations?

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Writing a dialect essay can be a real struggle. It differs from argumentative writing in that a dialect essay introduces a thesis and uses arguments and counterarguments to prove its verity. What do you do when your professor assigns you a dialect essay? Eddusaver outlines a dialect essay’s steps and structure in case you face a writing challenge.

Unlike other essays, dialect essay focuses on many arguments even if you do not agree with all. In a detailed explanation, where your professor asks you to prepare an opinion conclusion, it’s more of a rational discussion of all sides in a dialect essay.

Students can engage in substantive discussion on contentious issues in their academic fields by writing dialectic essays. In essence, this guide explains how to write a top-notch dialectic essay. The guide begins by thoroughly defining a dialectic essay and emphasizing its unique features. Following a thorough explanation of how to write a dialectic essay, the manual offers sample themes and outlines what makes them unique. The guide also includes a sample dialectic essay and a sample outline.

What is a dialect essay?

In dialect essay is an essay that allows the writer an opportunity to test the thesis and come up with an exhaustively objective conclusion. It involves three major steps: identifying the primary argument supporting a thesis statement, offering a strong counterargument, and evaluating the counterargument.

Dialect essay writers carry out a thorough investigation of the subject of interest to arrive at a conclusion that they can support. The testing procedure does not always provide the best opinion on the contentious issue. Instead, it indicates the perspective that makes the most sense in light of the facts and arguments presented in the essay’s main body.

If you are writing a dialect essay, you must conduct extensive research on your topic and satisfy your tutor with arguments that validate your thesis statement. The evidence of the essay is presented as a viable view inside the body section and anchored in the conclusion part of the paper. When you hire Eddusaver experts to write your dialect essay or follow our top-notch writing manual, your dialect essay takes a new stand. Let us write your essay and achieve your goals hassle-free.

How do I write my dialect essay?

Many questions flock to your mind when writing a dialect essay for the first time. However, when you seek writing help from our services, you learn how to write a dialect essay, topics you can choose from, and tips to make your essay top-notch.

A dialect essay is a rare type of academic writing that students write casually. It needs research, comprehension, and a sense of keenness to compose a compelling paper. Dialect essay proves a challenging task when finding important information to use, making it one of the most challenging academic writing. Additionally, dialect essays require a thoughtful discussion on crucial topics in your discipline.

As a result, writers thoroughly investigate the subject of interest before arriving at a conclusion they want to support. The search procedure only sometimes yields the best opinion on the contentious issue. Instead, it indicates the most sense in light of the word choice and arguments presented in the essay’s main body.

How are dialect essays unique?

A distinctive feature of a dialectic essay is critiquing the primary argument and counterarguments. A normal essay gives small arguments in the body paragraphs to back up the main point that writers present in a thesis statement. A dialectic essay, however, goes beyond outlining minor points of contention. A dialectic essay first discusses counterarguments to minor arguments to establish the primary opposing points of view. The validity and relative importance of a counterargument in a discussion are evaluated in a dialect essay.

It focuses on a proposed argument or idea and then objects to the point of view using logical ideas. Additionally, dialect essays explore a variety of solutions rather than discussing just one answer.

Dialect essay structure

Just like any other essay, a dialect essay observes a five-paragraph essay. The first requires the writer to put forward a strong argumentative thesis statement followed by a counterargument that concerns the issue under study. The argumentation tests the main points and draws a relevant conclusion. If you cannot write a custom dialect essay, Eddusaver is all you need. Reach out with your essay request, and we will help you make a compelling paper.

A dialect essay writing structure is similar to other essay formats except that dialect essays focus on arriving at a logical conclusion and providing logical solutions concerning a specific topic. A dialectic essay is a dialogue on a particular subject that is included in a formal essay. As a writer, you should concentrate on two distinct points of view and approach the subject from many different perspectives. Additionally, it’s necessary to emphasize how each perspective corresponds with the topic of study. If making a custom dial essay sounds complicated, please use our dialect essay writing structure and help below.

  • a) Introduction.

The introduction is the first part of a dialect essay writing process. It presents the main idea in a thesis statement. The writer has to choose a topic and then come up with atleast two interpretations based on the thesis statement. The introductory paragraph of a dialect essay is generally made up of a hook, sufficient background information, and a thesis statement. The hook statement in the first paragraph draws the reader in and arouses their curiosity about the rest of the essay. The background knowledge prepares writers to declare the dialectic essay’s main thesis. Additionally, your argument for a dialectic essay should be debatable and planned so that it is neither too long nor too short.

  • b) Organization of body paragraphs.

The uniqueness of a dialect essay is in the body paragraphs. The writer must use a step-by-step organization structure. Its structure necessitates an organization that clusters paragraphs with minor arguments, counterarguments, and critiques, allowing readers to distinguish between independent instances and dialects. The organization will also ensure your audience keeps track of the logical link between your body paragraphs.

As you make your dialect essay body paragraph, it is important to peg your paragraphs to the rule that defines a fixed arrangement of components of the paragraphs. The first element provides an interpretation of the evidence and points out the significance of the minor arguments. Finally,  write a concluding sentence that connects your minor argument and thesis statement. Remember to support the thesis statement in the argument paragraph.

  • c) Conclusion.

The conclusion is the last part of your dialect essay structure. In it, the writer has to formulate the results of their debates throughout the composition. The author has to approach this step seriously and responsibly as he has to decide which point of view deserves attention. Additionally, the writer has to present proof of which the essay addresses and support his position.

By offering an explanation that thoughtfully considers the argument, counterargument, and critique objectively, the authors ultimately expose the “true” perspective on a controversial issue. However, the writer has to provide reasons and defend their position throughout the paper. If the author changes his point of view, he has to explain convincingly to the target audience.

Dialect essay writing is disruptable and controversial, so every student should deliver adequate ideas related to the topic to win. The reader should explore your mind and understand your point through your essay; hence, you must ensure it is flawless for the reader to grasp the main idea. Lastly, the writer gives their stance on the topic by a brief justifier anchored on the thesis statement in the objective structure.

Dialect essay outline.

A dialect essay observes a five-paragraph essay format. The format is further broken down into the following components.

  • Introduction.

                        * A hook statement is commonly called the introductory paragraph.

                        * A brief background information.

                        * A controversial thesis statement.

  • a) presentation of the argument.

            * Presentation of the minor argument that supports the thesis statement.

            * Facts supporting ideas on the thesis statement.

            * Explanation of the facts and pieces of evidence.

             * Parting shot claim that points out the correlation between the thesis and your                          argument.

  • b) presentation of objection claim.

            * Statement that criticizes the minor argument.

            * Evidence to sustain the paragraph’s arguments.

            * Explaining the facts to shred the evidence.

            * Closing remark showing a correlation between thesis and paragraph claim.

  • c) Response claim.

            * A critikue paragraph

            * Facts and evidence that anchor the claims.

            * Insightful explanation of facts presented as evidence.

            * Remark that points out the relationship between your claim and the argument.

  • Conclusion.

            * Here, restate your thesis statement in other words.

            * Give remarks on the thesis statement and counterargument.

            *  Give a closing statement that echoes the prevailing shreds of evidence.

Proven Dialect essay writing tips to give your success.

Regarding dialect essay writing, the writer’s main focus is to make a paper structure that allows you to weigh different ideas against each other carefully. As such, when you seek writing help online, Eddusaver is the way to go. With our writing experts, you can get high-quality and comprehensible writing assistance.

When creating a dialect essay, the core idea is to develop analytical and critical thinking skills to improve the manner of convincing your arguments. In the writing process, it is important to focus on the following.

  • Take time,e, when reading the essay prompts, to understand what the assignment requires.
  • Choose a debatable topic that interests you and one you can develop fully.
  • Conduct adequate research to get ideas and familiarize yourself with the selected topic.
  • Create your thesis statement

, e.       Organize your points in a plan.

  • Compose your outline and paper structure and how you will place the ideas in the paragraphs.
  • Brainstorm the thesis’s advantages and disadvantages and make your counterarguments.
  • Ensure that paragraphs respond to previous ideas.
  • Give clear, factual, and concise reasons to avoid misunderstanding between those in support and those opposed to your thesis.
  • Ensure that whatever argument you ar making is clear and logical. This is achieved by avoiding subjective statements.
  • Consider your target audience by using appropriate writing style and tone. In addition, be objective in expressing your views.
  • Proofread and edit your paper to create a flawless final draft.

Sample dialect essay topics.

When choosing a dialect essay topic, it is important to choose a topic you are passionate about and have many channels you can use to seek information. If you need help to choose a suitable topic for your dialect essay, look at our list below.

⦁           Should the state be given access to your social media profiles?

⦁           Can social media fame be translated into real fame?

⦁           Should video games be used in education systems for learning purposes?

⦁           IS online dating effective?

⦁           Are online classes better than in-0person class attendance?

⦁           Are we becoming too dependent on computers?

⦁           Does science complement religion?

⦁           Should abortion be legalized?

⦁           Are CCTVs a breach of human privacy in public places?

⦁           Does the belief in God change a person?

⦁           Is regulated screen time hours for teenagers fair?

⦁           Should loans in struggling countries be legalized?

⦁           Should torture be accepted?

⦁           Does COVID-19 affect one’s lifespan?

⦁           Do GMOs have a long time effect on a person?

⦁           Is VAR effective?

⦁           Does the world cup unite the world?

⦁           Should the prime minister be appointed or elected?

⦁           Should the presidential campaign budget be capped?

⦁           Should university education be free?

⦁           Does school uniform affect students?

⦁           Are boys too loving in relationships?

⦁           Should staying in hostels be compulsory for all first-year students?

⦁           Should we remove boundaries around the world?

⦁           Can social; media affect real-life communications?

All you need to know about dialectical essay writing.

A dialectic essay is an argumentative paper in which the author develops a thesis statement, presents supporting evidence to support and then draws a conclusion that upholds the thesis. When writing, the writer states a thesis in the opening paragraph and then presents the evidence to support it. The writer presents an objective conclusion to support the thesis after employing arguments and refutations to support or disagree with it.

To make your dialect essay competitive, you must be familiar with the writing style and outline and stick to them. A dialect essay is an essay that looks at a question from two different angles. The writer’s big task is to address the contrasts, disputes, and oppositions. While working on this paper, it is important to apply dialectical thinking and combine two opposite thoughts in one composition that is sense loaded and logically arranged.

The dialect essay format is another significant criterion affecting your essay quality. Ensure proper citing, a zero plagiarism rate, and grammatical correctness if you find it challenging to create your dialect essay; Eddusaver is here to help you deliver a paper that deserves the highest consideration. We will help you understand how to write a dialect essay without panic and adhere to all dialectical specifications. You can trust our custom writing service for the best help online.

In case you can’t find a sample example, our professional writers are ready to help you with writing your own paper. All you need to do is fill out a short form and submit an order

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  18. Dialectic essay guide

    In dialect essay is an essay that allows the writer an opportunity to test the thesis and come up with an exhaustively objective conclusion. It involves three major steps: identifying the primary argument supporting a thesis statement, offering a strong counterargument, and evaluating the counterargument.

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