Abstract

By the 1950s the postwar Hegel renaissance in France began to suffer its first challenges. An opening salvo had been launched from the pages of Albert Camus’ moralist-inspired L’homme révolté which reviled “le philosophe de la bataille d’Iéna” as the ingenious intellectual progenitor of both Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism. The following decade was no more charitable: Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche et la philosophie posited a radicalized reading of Nietzsche as a battering ram with which to knock down the walls of Hegel’s humanism, historicism, and dialectics. In this light, Eugène Fleischmann’s La philosophie politique de Hegel, first published in 1964, came as a defense of Hegel against both camps of detractors. Its text, unchanged in the present Gallimard reprint, is a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on the Philosophy of Right which promotes Hegel’s political philosophy as one founded upon the inviolability of individual liberty. For Fleischmann the motive element to PhR was the attempt to establish a mutually recognizing relationship between the individual and the modern state that would safeguard the liberty of each.