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Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom. By Paul Franco. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. 391p. $35.00.
Hegel's Idea of Freedom. By Alan Patten. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 216p. $45.00.
Peter J. Steinberger, Reed College
In a sense, these two books, bearing almost identical titles, could not be more different. Patten's work is a narrowly focused study of those passages in Hegel (primarily in the Philosophy of Right) that deal explicitly and pointedly with the idea of freedom. He proposes a "civic humanist" interpretation of Hegelian freedom. Such an interpretation is designed to make sense of what Patten calls the "Sittlichkeit thesis," according to which ethical norms are composed of, or otherwise reducible to, duties and virtues embodied in the central institutions of modern social life. Franco's work is much broader in scope. It offers a commentary on the entirety of the Philosophy of Right and argues, plausibly enough, that Hegel's political philosophy is fundamentally a philosophy of freedom. It briefly situates that philosophy in the context of Hegel's immediate predecessors (Rousseau, Kant, Fichte) and reviews Hegel's own intellectual development, but its main goal is to show how Hegelian arguments about abstract right, morality, and ethical life constitute an account of what it means to be free.
In another sense, though, the two books are surprisingly similar. Each purports to offer an interpretation of Hegel's political thought that takes seriously the larger philosophical or metaphysical claims in which that thought is embedded. Patten's civic humanist view explicitly presupposes the idea that "Hegel is committed to giving a rational warrant for existing institutions and practices through philosophical reflection" (p. 41), while Franco agrees that Hegel's political philosophy cannot be separated from his "speculative logic insofar as that latter articulates and justifies his views on philosophical method" (p. 140). Evidently, this is now the dominant trend in Hegel studies and is much to be applauded. Nothing could be clearer than that Hegel understood his political thought in general and the philosophy of right in particular to be part of a...