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BOOK REVIEWS 125 recognition that such communal self-consciousness is always subject to a more radical, "negative" examination--an independent assessment of the "pure" universality of those shared goals (a critique in this case generated by the Sophists and Socrates). This conflict between the desires, interests, and even the rational motives of individualcitizens, and the idea of a self-consciously universal political order within which such individuality is neither suppressed nor indulged, is the engine of history itself. Finally, Hegel thinks he can show that, given the only terms within which this attempt could occur ("concepts" that can be shown to have their own inner-related logic), history is rational and can thus come to some "complete," rational termination (i.e., just when the state with which citizens self-consciously identify is universal, more than just the expression of collective interests). But, of course, Hegel's philosophy of history would be only a long series of footnotes or examples to this "inner logic of the concept" (a possibility one should not dismiss too quickly), unless Hegel can also demonstrate the "reality" of this development by showing, in some respect, that in the universal state, the self-consciousness of the state's citizens is or can be actually reconciled or satisfied with this" universal." But, precisely because the "essence of spirit is self-consciousness," the status of actual individual self-consciousness and thus the status of this final, nonalienatingsatisfaction is quite obscure in Hegel. On the one hand, such an identification seems so founded on such a full comprehension of the state's true rationality as to permit full satisfaction only to the philosophic few, and to render the state's actuality a matter of mere contingency. On the other hand, such an identification seems so unreflectively accepted by the state's citizens as to render their supposed autonomy less than fully selfconscious and thus finally unsatisfying (in which case we would not really have progressed historically very far from the immediacy of ortha doxa as the source of identificationwith the whole). While it may be, then, that Hegel's philosophical reflections on the history of the human race could demonstrate, on that philosophical level, the structure of rationality at work in historical events, the lack of any final resolution between this "divine" history and human history and politics as self-consciouslyexperienced, just means the lack of any political order that, in Hegel's own terms, could be called rational and complete. Of course, a good deal more can and needs to be said about such issues. At least we can say that consideration of these and other ambiguities in Hegel can now benefit from a complete English translation of his attempt to demonstrate that there is "reason in history," and a rational end to history--a thesis all the more remarkable and intriguing in the twentieth century for its prima facie implausibility. ROBERT B. PIPPIN University of California, San Diego Commentaire littdral de la Logique de Hegel. By Andr6 L6onard. Biblioth6que Philosophique de Louvain, no.24. (Paris and Louvain: J. Vrin, 1974. Pp. 622. FB 750) Hegel's Logic has remained a unique book in the philosophical literature. Until today, there have been numerous attempts to interpret a text whose difficulties block even the understanding of its most literal sense. Thus all commentaries, including this most recent attempt of L6onard,' carry with them the fascination of a possible success or failure the criterion of which could be only Hegel himself. ' L6onard refers to the commentaries of Erdmann, Marcuse, Findlay, MacTaggart, Mure, Fleischmann , NoEl, V6ra, and Pelloux (see p. 9). In his methodology L6onard follows the studies of B. Lakebrink: Hegels dialektische Ontologie und die Thomistische Analektik (Cologne, 1955), Die europi~ische Idee der Freiheit. Vol. 1, Hegels Logik und die Tradition der Selbstbestimmung (Leiden, 1968), and Studien zur Metaphysik Hegels (Freiburg, 1969). 126 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY L6onard, who is a very competent interpreter of Hegel's philosophy of religion,2opens his commentary with the simple statement, "I1 manquait h la bibliographie h6g61ienne un commentaire litt&al de la science de la logique." He consciously reduces the complex hermeneutical problematic to this simple demand of a "literal" explication of the text--a maxim commonly...

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