Abstract

This book provides a lucid commentary on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and on Hegel’s other major writings on ethics and politics. Since it is the only commentary in English that covers the Philosophy of Right almost section by section, from start to finish, and it also carries on an instructive dialogue with many of the other commentaries published in recent years, it will be very useful to students and to scholars who aren’t specialists in Hegel. Although Franco can’t, of course, afford to go into great detail on all of the many issues that he deals with, his judiciousness and wide reading in Hegel enable him to clarify a remarkable number of them, especially in the domain of “ethical life”. His discussions of Hegel’s conceptions of the state and of war and international relations are especially well balanced, neither avoiding difficulties nor abandoning Hegel to his legions of critics. His treatments of Hegel’s earlier works—especially the Jena lectures and the relevant portions of the Phenomenology of Spirit—are also quite helpful. Only readers who have themselves attempted to reconcile these disparate and dense texts and to reconstruct some of Hegel’s major arguments in ordinary language will fully appreciate how much Franco has accomplished.