The Autumn of Dialectics – Zoran Đinđić

A Serbian philosophical study of Karl Marx and the founding of critical social theory

A Philosophical Book on Marx and Critical Social Theory

Jesen dijalektike: Karl Marks i utemeljenje kritičke teorije društva — rendered into English as An Autumn of Dialectics: Karl Marx and the Foundations of Critical Social Theory — is a work of philosophy written in Serbian and published by Mladost in Belgrade within its Velika edicija ideja series in 1987. Its author, Zoran Đinđić, held a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Konstanz, where he worked under Albrecht Wellmer, and the book belongs to his output as a philosopher rather than to his later political career.

The subtitle states the book’s field of inquiry plainly: it is concerned with Karl Marx on the one hand and with the establishment, or grounding, of a critical theory of society on the other. The pairing is the key to what the volume sets out to examine — not Marx as an economist or a party ideologue, but Marx as the point of departure for a theoretically grounded critique of society.

Dialectics and the Critical Theory of Society

The two terms that organise the book’s title and subtitle are technical ones, and each carries a specific intellectual lineage. Dialectics, in the tradition Marx inherited and reworked, is a mode of analysis that treats contradiction, change and historical development as internal to its objects rather than as disturbances to be argued away; it is the method by which social forms are understood as dynamic and self-undermining rather than fixed. Critical theory of society, meanwhile, names the project — most closely associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and later carried forward by Jürgen Habermas — of joining philosophical reflection to the analysis of social and political conditions, with the aim of diagnosing domination rather than merely describing it.

The book’s title places dialectics at the centre of its frame, while its subtitle locates the origins of critical social theory in Marx’s work. Together they announce a study that treats the founding of a critical theory of society as a problem of method as much as of doctrine: what it means for a theory to be critical at all, and what Marx’s dialectical inheritance contributes to that possibility. The word “autumn” in the main title frames this inquiry through an image of the season rather than through a proposition, and no thesis is stated in the title itself.

One of Four Books by a Philosopher

The Autumn of Dialectics is one of four books Đinđić published in Serbian, alongside more than a hundred articles and essays on various subjects. Within that body of writing it stands as his sustained engagement with Marx and with the theoretical foundations of social critique — the philosophical question of how a critical theory of society is established, which the book’s subtitle identifies as its central concern.

Đinđić lived from 1 August 1952 to 12 March 2003. He served as prime minister of Serbia from 2001 until his assassination in 2003 and was mayor of Belgrade in 1997, becoming the first non-communist and first democratically elected official to hold both key positions after World War II. His PhD in philosophy is dated to 1979; Albrecht Wellmer is identified as a student/former assistant of Jürgen Habermas. As a student, Đinđić was greatly influenced by Habermas’s advice that an intellectual had a duty not only to think, but to act. While a student at the University of Konstanz, he maintained close ties to student anarchist groups and participated in the Praxis-run Korčula Summer School. He became proficient in German. In 1979, he returned to Yugoslavia to take a teaching post at the University of Novi Sad. In the 1980s, he was a writer for the Literary Review, an influential Belgrade journal. He also held a post-doctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

The list of books published in Serbian also includes Subjectivity and Violence: The Origin of Systems in German Idealist Philosophy (Istraživačko-izdavački centar SSO Srbije, Izazovi, 1982; second edition Novi Sad, Dnevnik, 2003), Yugoslavia as an Incomplete State (Književna zajednica Novi Sad, Anthropos, 1988), Serbia: Neither East Nor West (Cepelin, 1996), and One Serbian Vision (Ateneum, 2004).