Critical Realism

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INTRODUCTION

Dialectic and dialectical critical realism

Roy Bhaskar and Alan Norrie

Prior to 1993, Roy Bhaskar was best known for his realist accounts of the natural and social sciences and, stemming from the latter, his concept of emancipatory critique. Less well known in this period was his interest in the concept of dialectic which was pursued in a number of brief articles concerned with the character of Marxist thought and the Hegel-Marx nexus. In his Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (hereafter DPF), Bhaskar combines these two interests to provide a new dialectical account of critical realism which would recognise the importance of the dialectical tradition in western thought up to Hegel, but which, on the basis of the established critical ...