Focusing on the critical postures of Hegel, Marx, and a series of twentieth-century intellectuals, including Sartre, Adorno, and C. L. R. James, this book explores what dialectical thinking entails and how such thinking might speak to the lived realities of the contemporary political moment. What is revealed is not a formal method or a grand philosophical system, but rather a reflective energy or disposition--a dialectical spirit of critique--that draws normative sustenance from an emancipatory moral vision but that remains attuned principally to conflict and tension, and to the tragic...