Individual Autonomy and Social Pressure: An Answer to Dennis H. Wrong

The term “dialectic” seems to be in the course of becoming one of the centrally fashionable terms of our contemporary intellectual world. It clearly connotes—however vague its denotations—some kind of accepting attitude toward the “dynamic,” changing, conflictful and hence, in important respects, unstable aspects of the society of our time. It is perhaps significant that its historical originator among thinkers of the past two centuries, Hegel, was politically an arch-conservative in the later phases of his career, at least by modern standards, whereas the ideological system most consistently using it today purports to be, and politically in a great many contexts certainly is, a revolutionary one. The suggestion is that the virtues of being dialectical cut across some of the commoner lines of division of what is in some sense “opinion.”

My first comment on Professor Wrong's paper is that it is a contribution to the intellectual dialectic of the social sciences today—and of course in particular sociology—in a sense which, in his own obvious predilection for the term, he perhaps does not intend. Wrong, that is to say, strongly tends to absolutize his own position, and to feel that the positions against which he takes such a sharply negative stance are clearly and demonstrably false. His view on this explicit level is thus apparently very undialectical. But seen in a larger context, his paper is one of a long series of statements which seems to fit into a dialectical polarization of opinion in its field. If in some sense a current “thesis” of sociological thinking (which others have not hesitated to call an “orthodoxy”*) exists, Wrong is self-consciously