Logic and Politics: Hegel's Philosophy of Right (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 321 "reconstructions" of Kant, this one turns out to be a "free construction" using some Kantian materials in a more or less anachronistic way. Though none of this ultimately weakens his case for a socialist ethics that would owe a great deal to Kant, it does not strengthen it either. While I would personally have been more interested in an investigation of the historical relations between Kant and Cohen's Neo-Kantian socialism, I am grateful for this interesting and stimulating, if ultimately wrongheaded book. MANFRED KUEHN Purdue University Peter J. Steinberger. Logic and Politics:Hegel'sPhilosophyof Right. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Pp. xiii + ~54. $~4.oo. The aim of this book is threefold: "I hope to demonstrate the cogency and relevance of certain of Hegel's political arguments, to evaluate the plausibility of his overall position as embodied in the rational state, and to offer thereby an account of his political philosophy considered directly and explicitly as an application of the Hegelian philosophical method to issues of political, social, and moral concern" (3)- What links these aims is the author's insight (which, curiously, he nowhere explicitly formulates) that Hegel's philosophical method--essentially the rational resolution of experiential conflicts and apparent contradictions by means of a rigorous and systematic reconceptualization of their component terms--is designed simultaneously to ferret out and find confirmation in the latent, emergent rationality of the individuals and institutions that together comprise the texture of experience itself. Professor Steinberger is right in his (implicit) claim that Hegel is thus doubly a rationalist, and that the two "dimensions " of his rationalism, the dialectic of concepts as found primarily in the Logicand their applications in his Phenomenologyand his several exercises in "philosophy of .... " cannot even be understood, never mind critically evaluated, separately. Steinberger's insight leads him to argue persuasively that recent attempts to integrate Hegel as a social thinker into the predominandy Anglo-American tradition of "accommodationist" liberalism from Hobbes to the present at once misconstrue what Hegel is basically about and keep us from appreciating the distinctiveness of his alternative , "perfectionist" approach (Chapter 1). The author is thus able, in the second, "applied" portion of this book, to underscore Hegel's rather original perspective on such matters as the nature of crime (it is at its core the absolute negation of the right to own property), the basis of marriage (it is rooted, for Hegel, in something remarkably akin to Rousseau's "general will," manifesting itself in each partner's rational respect for the other and for the societal ends their union is intended to foster), and the constitution of the rational state (its integrity and viability, unlike that of Hegel's organicist predecessors, is predicated on the freedom and rationality of the individuals who bring it into being even as they are brought to fulfillment in it). In light of what this book promises and actually accomplishes, its author's failure to articulate the epistemological principle underlying Hegel's conceptual progressions is a 322 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29:2 APRIL 1991 major disappointment. As Hegel makes clear already in the introduction to the Phenomenoh ~gy, our efforts to comprehend, whether in the realm of practice or in the domain of theory, are driven by a series of felt inadequacies that occasion the alteration simultaneously of the mode of our knowing, the object purported to be known, and the criterion of their mutual adequation. This is Hegel's most radical and distinctive contribution to philosophical methodology, and it governs the organization of his more speculative works. Characteristically, the very title of a subsequent chapter or subdivision in Hegel names the criterion that had haltingly emerged towards the end of the preceding one; in each instance, what might be called a noetic threshold of oblivion has been crossed. Professor Steinberger misses this. He states (60) and reiterates (61, 66, t t6f., 169) that in the dialectical resolution of contradictory propositions F and G in a higher, more comprehensive synthesis H, "H is nothing otherthan F + G" (italics his)--a formulation that leaves utterly opaque precisely what it is about H that enables it to synthesize F and G...