This is a sustained defense of G. W. F. Hegel against his critics, in particular the liberal and conservative critics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This defense focuses on issues in social and political thought, especially on the role of the political state in securing the rights of citizens, including interventions in the economic sphere to ameliorate the conditions of the disadvantaged and the poor. The controversy about Hegel, whether he was a liberal or a conservative, a radical or a reactionary, is long-standing, and Domenico Losurdo attempts to contribute to the debate by situating it historically and concretely in the social and political conditions of Hegel's time, in Europe and in England. Moreover, he argues that these political categories must be understood in terms of how thinkers identified themselves in relation to others, which often was motivated by specific political commitments in particular political environments, particularly in France, Germany, and England.

The author's contextual approach is exhibited in the very first chapter of the book where under the theme of the “search for the authentic Hegel,” he addresses the issue of censorship and self-censorship in Germany during this period. Part of the problem with determining whether Hegel was a reactionary conservative, who idolized and deified the state, or a progressive liberal willing to criticize the status quo has to do with how he presented himself in his written work and whether others interpreted its political implications carefully in an environment of state censorship. More specifically, there is the question of the authenticity of Hegel's main political work, the Philosophy of Right (Berlin, 1821), which provides a defense of constitutional monarchy and a strong state and which was viewed by many as a conservative justification of the Prussian state. The answer, generally, requires not only an appreciation for the “calculated ambiguity” of Hegel's texts but also for the way particular interpretations are motivated by the perceived political stakes.

Among the several controversial motifs in Hegel that Losurdo discusses, two of the more prominent are the thesis from the Preface to his Philosophy of Right that “[w]hat is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” (p. 10 in the T. M. Knox translation, 1967) and the power that Hegel gives to the sovereign monarch in his constitutional conception. On the first point, we see that for Hegel, “actuality” (Wirklichkeit) was not the same as transitory existence or empirical immediacy and, thus, that the rationality of the actual is not a rejection of change but “its anchor to the objective dialectic of the actual” (p. 36). On the second, while Hegel does give strong symbolic significance to the monarch's representing the unity and personality of the nation-state, does not remove it totally from the legislature, and rejects elective monarchy in favor of the right of birth and inheritance, nonetheless Hegel's monarch, who basically functions in “crossing the t's and dotting the i's,” is as a particular person clearly subordinated to a political and institutional role. Moreover, Hegel supports constitutional monarchy “in a period in which often the courts or the government take a more progressive stance than the representative bodies” (p. 40).

According to Losurdo, the question of whether Hegel was a liberal or a conservative rests upon a false dilemma, a way of dividing up political positions into categories that are less than historically accurate. The author seems to suggest that because Hegel eludes categorization, he too easily can be seen through the lens of different ideological positions, depending on the particular issue. Overall, Losurdo's conclusion is that there is a strong thread of coherence and continuity in Hegel's thought, especially regarding support for the sort of changes required for modernization: the centrality of political institutionalization, specifically constitutionalism and shared power; the role of the state in fostering and guiding progressive reform; the importance of a concrete universalization of the rights of citizenship; and the need for the state to provide the means to redress poverty and material want in order that the realm of freedom and equality be inclusive of all social classes, and the likelihood, perhaps inevitability, of revolutionary change when the forces of reactionism and traditional privilege block progressive transformation.

Historically, the forces standing in the way of the actualization of modern freedom are not only those of political reactionism and attachment to feudal privilege but also, paradoxically, the “liberalism” that advocates freedom of the individual but does not accept full political equality and, instead, is wedded to the preservation of property, social distinctions, and privilege for the worthy. Hence, Hegel's “legitimation” of modernity troubles conservatives and liberals alike. It is seen as “philistine,” “servile,” and socialist. At the center of the suspicion is Hegel's defense of the French Revolution, which both in concept and in historical consequence expresses the “march of universality” in the modern world. It is not in the Anglo-Saxon liberal tradition, whose authors are mostly opposed to the Revolution, but rather in the classic German philosophy of thinkers like Kant, Ficthe, and Hegel “that the French Revolution finds its theoretical expression” (p. 305). Moreover, the forces of radicalization grow out of real problems in the relation of modern politics and economics.

As indicated at the outset, Losurdo's book is aimed at situating ideological controversies surrounding Hegel in concrete historical context, and it succeeds well in doing so. It is also very wide ranging in surveying the views of the most important thinkers in Europe and England in regard to modern developments between roughly 1700 and the middle of the nineteenth century and in making comparisons to Hegel. One comes away from the work with a good understanding of why Hegel's views were considered so controversial from a variety of different ideological perspectives and also how it could happen that Hegel could be interpreted in opposite and contradictory ways. However, on the other hand, it is difficult not to suspect that the author, while advocating for a balanced treatment of Hegel, has failed to be evenhanded with some of Hegel's liberal critics, such as Constant and Tocqueville. For Losurdo, early modern liberalism is basically about the protection of property and bourgeois privilege, and that founding thinker of natural rights, John Locke, is (as C. B. Macpherson argued) essentially an apologist for “possessive individualism,” which is likely a one-sided assessment.

Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns is a translation from the Italian, and although it is readable enough, it does have some organizational defects. The author's preface to the Italian edition reduces largely to bibliographical comments regarding Hegel's works, both in German and in Italian translation, along with a brief explanation of the composition of the book. The first six chapters are taken from another book in Italian by the author entitled Hegel, Marx and the Liberal Tradition. Chapters 7 through 10 are based on several published articles and essays (in Italian and in German), while the last three chapters were previously unpublished. Overall, while the sequencing of chapters makes sense (and the breakdown of each chapter into numbered subheadings is helpful), there is a fair amount of repetition, in some cases a reproduction of quotations and phrases that seems unnecessary. Moreover, it would have been of great service to the reader for the author or the translators or an editor to provide an introduction to the book. At the back is a fairly lengthy and useful bibliography of works and a reasonably thorough index.