Although he accepted the economic and political conclusions of Marxism, he rejected the dialectical materialism on which they were supposedly based, and as a result he was again exiled in 1922, this time by the Communists, after he had served as professor of philosophy in Moscow University. Yet all through his life he remained an independent and a rebel. from the University for these Marxist leanings, he found himself in exile in the north in company with some of the founders of Russian Communism. While Hegel himself drew conservative conclusions from his own system, Karl Marx drew revolutionary conclusions, and the young Berdyaev followed Marx and the early Communists. He was a scion of an aristocratic family, but while studying in Kiev, came under the influence of the writings of Kant and Hegel. Nicholas Berdyaev was born in 1874 in Kiev, the cradle of Russian Christian culture. The manner in which they misrepresent his thought is integral to understanding the development of their own, so this article will also consider Gramsci in brief-specifically his approach to the base-superstructure problem which has bedevilled Marxist scholarship, on and off, since its inception. Althusser, Mouffe and Laclau were all heavily influenced by the great Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci. I will demonstrate how the neo-Kantian reconfiguration of Marxism by post-Marxists annuls its class-based historicism and the possibility of revolutionary praxis therein, and how a reversion to a pre-Hegelian form of methodology results inevitably in the annihilation of the living core of Marxism-its class driven historicism consequently, I suggest some of the grievous political implications which flow from this. When stripped of all its external paraphernalia and specific idiosyncrasies, the thought of each of the thinkers considered here attains a fundamental identity that is, one discovers at the methodological level, a reconfiguring of Marxism according to a post-Kantian paradigm. Specifically the writer endeavours to provide an account of the methodological categories which underpin the thought of these thinkers at the most fundamental level an X-ray like snap shot which reveals the bare bones of the theoretical apparatus each thinker deploys. This article provides a brief examination of the theory of Althusser, Mouffe, Laclau and Žižek. There is certainly a great deal of difference between Hegel and Marx but dialectics is the method, the thread, which runs through both. Marx made reference to Hegel as 'that mighty thinker' in the preface to his Magnus opus while Lenin was later to comment that it is impossible to understand Das Capital without 'having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's logic'.
Dialectics is the method of Marxism but it is the contention of the author that dialectical materialism (Marxism) cannot be appreciated without reference to Hegel, who was the first thinker to consciously apprehend the movement and interconnection of both thought and being - as totality. Subsequently Kant is fiercely critiqued, by Fichte and Schelling among others, and the Hegelian philosophy emerges, to some extent, as the critique of this critique. The author of this article concentrates on the modern epoch in particular, whereby the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume are opposed by Kant. Hegel brought the method of dialectics to fruition through an analysis of the history of philosophy beginning with the ancient Greeks and 'Oriental' thought, before traversing the various stages which would eventually culminate in the philosophy of Hegel himself. This article is an attempt to trace the development of modern dialectics.
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