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Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 156-158



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Paul Franco. Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Pp. xviii + 391. $35.00

In this work Paul Franco attempts to show that Hegel's political theory should neither be viewed as a part of the Romantic movement, nor be rashly judged as "communitarian" in the present sense of the word. Instead, argues Franco, Hegel's political philosophy—even though it criticizes certain tenets of Enlightenment moral and political thought—stands as the culmination of the modern era of political thought, one that focuses on freedom as autonomy. Franco holds that Hegel's view is the most powerful [End Page 156] and cogent revision of a tradition of political thought that goes back to Hobbes and Locke, but which includes Rousseau, Kant, and Fichte.

The main focus of Franco's work is Hegel's Philosophy of Right of 1821. However, the first four of the eight chapters of the book set the stage for a detailed analysis of the aforementioned text. In the first two chapters, Franco addresses basic issues in Rousseau, Kant, and Fichte that Hegel will be criticizing or developing during the course of his writings on politics. He then looks at Hegel's early writings so as to point out themes and tendencies to which Hegel will return in the Philosophy of Right. In the second quarter of the work, Franco deals with the connection of both the Phenomenology of Spirit and Hegel's logic and he shows that they do shed light on Hegel's political treatise from 1821. Franco is neither a naive apologist for Hegel's sometimes abstract and somewhat contentious metaphysical and logical views, nor someone who wants to edit out any questionable metaphysical or methodological doctrines in Hegel's theoretical writings, thus "sanitizing" Hegel of views that may be unpopular today. While he points out that much of Hegel's political philosophy does not necessarily stand or fall with some of the "problematic" metaphysical and methodological stances that Hegel takes, he stresses that Hegel's philosophy is a system and that one does not do justice to it by removing the political theory from the system.

The last half of Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom concerns an analysis of Hegel's political philosophy as it is set out in the Philosophy of Right and as it has developed from earlier texts. Franco contends that the definitive issue of political theory in the modern era is freedom and, thus, he argues that Hegel's political theory begins and ends with freedom; that is, he holds that the main theme of the text is freedom. (It is in this respect, Franco argues, that Hegel should be seen as the culmination of Enlightenment thought, as opposed to a representative of Romanticism.) This freedom is not the "negative" freedom of Hobbes, Locke, and Mill, whereby one must be allowed to pursue one's desires and wishes. Hegel's political philosophy, in Franco's view, should be viewed as an attempt to develop Kantian themes. Franco claims that Hegel's notion of freedom represents a development of the "positive" notion of freedom of which Rousseau, Kant, and Fichte write, one in which freedom comes to be viewed in terms of autonomy and self-determination. Although Hegel agrees with Kant and Fichte that freedom involves both rationality and autonomy, he criticizes the two for their strict dualistic thinking, that is, their strict separation of duty from inclination, legality from morality, etc. In short, Kant and Fichte err insofar as their account of autonomy merely addresses the form of freedom without supplying a content for this form. He also criticizes the modern tradition for having an atomistic conception of the self and a conception of society in which it is taken for granted that the best interest of society will always be at odds with the best interest of the individual. Thus, Franco shows how Hegel supposedly overcomes the shortcomings of Kant and Fichte, insofar as the state simply is the fusion of morality...

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