Hegel's Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 687 longer as 'making a promise', for no one could rationally believe anyone else's 'promises ' " (169). Would this really be a "logical consequence" of universalizing the maxim of making lying promises? I suspect not. Sullivan is tacitly relying on a number of empirical assumptions about human rationality, the nature of social practices such as promise-making, and the threshold at which widespread deception leads to the breakdown of these practices. Once this becomes apparent, Sullivan's talk of "logical consequences " and of the categorical imperative as a purely "logical" norm begins to appear dubious. As these remarks indicate, I have some disagreements with Sullivan. I also regret his failure to catch more minor errors before the book went to print. Nevertheless, the book has real merits, as I hope I have sufficiently stressed, and in the end these far outweigh its deficiencies. ALL~N ROSEN Queen's University Steven B. Smith. Hegel's Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. Pp. xiv + 25 I. $34.5o. The political thinking of Aristotle and Kant have this much in common: both take ethics and politics to be continuous; the best political constitution expresses a particular conception of the human good. Political thinking is an extension of moral thinking, and the portrait of the ideal citizen completes the portrait of the morally exemplary person. The liberal tradition of the minimal state dissents from such expressivism. Hobbes and Rawls share this much, that the state is neutral with respect to competing conceptions of the good. It facilitates both security and maximum satisfactions, and it does so by divorcing political from moral-religious conceptions of the ideal self. Political personality , to rights-based liberalism, is lean and sparse. Smith, in the present book, places Hegel within this context and others that figure in contemporary political discussion. Hegel, he proposes, is liberal but expressivist. He is, moreover, sensitive to the importance of individuality but also a communitarian of sorts, committed to a notion of the common good but at the same time a rights theorist. His ideal political personality is responsive to history and tradition but involves rational citizenship and the flourishing of a life of freedom. Critical of the social contract tradition and the rights theories of Hobbes, Locke, and others, Hegel supersedes Burke and Fichte by reformulating the roles of community, history, and tradition in political and moral life. "Hegel's goal is to combine the ancient emphasis on the dignity and even architectonic character of political life with the modern concern for freedom, rights, and mutual recognition" (6). The core of Smith's argument comes in Chapters 2- 5. In Chapter 2, after an introductory sketch of the political tradition and the historical context of the early nineteenth century, a sketch focussed on the emergence of the idea of a fragmented, divided self, he turns to Hegel's critique of the natural rights tradition and social 688 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Z9:4 OCTOBER 199t contract theory. Here Smith reviews Hegel's well-known criticisms of Hobbes and I.ocke and their conceptions of the state of nature, of Kant and his formalism and abstractness, and so on. Chapter 3 develops Hegel's own theory of rights, based on a notion of will situated in history, active teleologically, and shaped by community and tradition. The nucleus of the theory is a struggle for recognition and respect that grounds all rights in an aspiration for self-knowledge. The desire for recognition is the fundamental human desire; it is a desire that individuals be seen as worthy and as beings whose desires and values warrant respect. Using the Hegelian account of the master-slave conflict, Smith tries to show how the right to recognition, then to property , privacy, and more, emerge out of an initial need for community. In the end, rights serve the goals of"a common way of life and hence of a life of rational freedom. Smith then turns to the practical, institutional implementation of such a community . This he finds in Hegel's conception of the rule of law, the Rechtsstaat. Arguing for a liberal reading of this constitution, he...