Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns

Extract

Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns. By Domenico Losurdo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 400p. $89.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This is a sustained defense of G. W. F. Hegel against his critics, in particular the liberal and conservative critics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This defense focuses on issues in social and political thought, especially on the role of the political state in securing the rights of citizens, including interventions in the economic sphere to ameliorate the conditions of the disadvantaged and the poor. The controversy about Hegel, whether he was a liberal or a conservative, a radical or a reactionary, is long-standing, and Domenico Losurdo attempts to contribute to the debate by situating it historically and concretely in the social and political conditions of Hegel's time, in Europe and in England. Moreover, he argues that these political categories must be understood in terms of how thinkers identified themselves in relation to others, which often was motivated by specific political commitments in particular political environments, particularly in France, Germany, and England.