Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom. By Paul Franco. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. 391p. $35.00

Peter J. Steinberger

American Political Science Review, 2001, vol. 95, issue 1, 205-206

Abstract: In a sense, these two books, bearing almost identical titles, could not be more different. Patten's work is a narrowly focused study of those passages in Hegel (primarily in the Philosophy of Right) that deal explicitly and pointedly with the idea of freedom. He proposes a "civic humanist" interpreta- tion of Hegelian freedom. Such an interpretation is designed to make sense of what Patten calls the "Sittlichkeit thesis," according to which ethical norms are composed of, or otherwise reducible to, duties and virtues embodied in the central institutions of modern social life. Franco's work is much broader in scope. It offers a commentary on the entirety of the Philosophy of Right and argues, plausibly enough, that Hegel's political philosophy is fundamentally a philosophy of freedom. It briefly situates that philosophy in the context of Hegel's immediate predecessors (Rousseau, Kant, Fichte) and reviews Hegel's own intellectual develop- ment, but its main goal is to show how Hegelian arguments about abstract right, morality, and ethical life constitute an account of what it means to be free.

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:95:y:2001:i:01:p:205-206_27

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().