 The second, and modestly promising, strand concerns the “dialectical laws”, associated with Friedrich Engels, but also found in Marx’s own work. In Engels’ famous formulations, these “laws” include: the “negation of the negation”; the “transformation of quantity into quality”; and the “interpenetration of opposites”. Elster scales down the status and explanatory reach of Engels’ account, suggesting that, rather than indicating laws of nature, we think of these terms as describing “not infrequent patterns of change” sometimes found in nature, society, and consciousness (1985: 40). There is no suggestion that all developments, in those various contexts, follow such patterns, and their extent is treated as an open empirical question. However, with those, and other, cautions in place, Elster suggests that these imprecise but suggestive ideas can be illuminating.