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This note was written in the hope that it would make a small contribution to the revival, not of Hegel, but of a mental faculty which is in danger of being obliterated : the power of negative thinking. As Hegel defines it, “Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is immediately before us.” What does he mean by “negation,” the central category of dialectic?
Written as preface to the forthcoming new edition of my book Reason and Revolu tion : Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston: Beacon Press). I have revised for this edition the 1954 supplement to the bibliography and omitted the epilogue written for the second edition because it treated in a much too condensed form developments which I discuss more fully in my forthcoming book, a study of advanced industrial society.
2. Maurice Blanchot, "Le Paradoxe d'Aytre," Les Temps modernes, June, 1946, pp. 1,580 ff.
3. Oeuvres (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade) I, 1,333.
4. Ibid., p. 966.
5. The Logic of Hegel, trans. W. Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), p. 55.
