Abstract

If one's goal as a scholar is neither rejection nor embrace, whether piecemeal or wholesale, of a classical text, but rather the clarification of its key concepts, arguments and intellectual context, in order to show where those concepts and arguments lead—possibly to conclusions beyond those made explicit in the text itself—then Arash Abazari's Hegel's Ontology of Power: The Structure of Social Domination in Capitalism leads by example. The general premise of this study is that Hegel's philosophy of the real is grounded in the prima philosophia of the system, the Science of Logic. The specific task of the investigation is the uncovering of the foundations of the philosophy of objective spirit, as embodied in the 1820 Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, in pivotal categories of the Logic's Doctrine of Essence. But the ultimate goal of Abazari's work is to disclose how the radically critical potential of these same categories and their relations finds its actualization in Marx's account of the process of capital as the real bedrock of bourgeois society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft).