Abstract

Was Hegel a good guy or a bad guy? Was he a conservative or a liberal? Was he a proto-fascist as Popper has claimed or the greatest philosophic champion of human freedom as Marcuse has claimed? The debate has been a long and heated one and in this volume, Kaufmann includes a number of articles written in English that are concerned with these related issues. But one feels that something is missing from these heated controversies and that is Hegel himself. As Kaufmann himself says: "Whoever wants to know what Hegel's political philosophy really was, must in the end go back to Hegel himself...." These papers do, however, succeed in giving one a sense of what are key issues in understanding and assessing Hegel's political philosophy.--R. J. B.