Abstract
This chapter evaluates the strength of dialectical thinking for world politics at this significant historical juncture: the decline of liberal international order and the rise of a multipolar world. Dialectics, it is argued, offers a framework for a genuinely global analysis of world politics because it is a method for exploring questions of doubt with a purpose to unsettle assumptions and fixed ideas, and, because its relationalism means that analysis is centred within the manifold differences in the peoples of the world rather than outside them. In these fundamental ways, dialectics is an ideal way of thinking through the dialogical interactions between peoples with a view to an emancipatory politics of the future. The chapter begins with a brief history of dialectics in the field of International Relations (IR) before highlighting the benefits of dialectical analysis through the philosophy of internal relations and the doctrine of flux. The second part then focuses on the role of metaphysics within the discipline of IR and the many metaphysical assumptions/ideas which have been smuggled in and rarely brought to the light of dialectical scrutiny. Focusing on the metaphysical abstractions at the heart of the grand myth of Hobbes' 'State of Nature', the chapter argues that only by interrogating this concept dialectically can IR hope to meet contemporary challenges of a world order in crisis and turn to sociality.