The leading question of Tatjana Sheplyakova’s book is the connection between public freedom and individuality in Hegel’s philosophy. This question is for the most part addressed with regard to Hegel’s 1802–3 essay On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right (Naturrechtsaufsatz), a generally overlooked but in fact fundamental juvenile Hegelian work. However, the second half of the last chapter of the book broadens the focus by including the 1821 Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. The book is divided into three long and dense chapters preceded by a clear programmatic Introduction. Chapter 1 is dedicated to Hegel’s diagnosis of his own time, Chapter 2 to his critique of the (Kantian) moral-juristic understanding of freedom, while Chapter 3 deals with the Hegelian pars construens.

The inquiry begins with Hegel’s early assessment of the condition of dissociation (Entzweiung) and depoliticization (Entpolitisierung) of modern society and modern human beings. Sheplyakova highlights very well the critical, even ‘revolutionary’ (67) tone of Hegel’s diagnosis of modernity in the Naturrechtsaufsatz. On the one hand, Hegel questions the distinction of legality and morality, rooted already in Roman law and culminating in bourgeois society, because he takes it to lead to a ‘privatisation of freedom’ (51) and to the idea that the state is but an instrumental extension of individual right. On the other hand, Hegel does not only wish for a return of the classical model of the polis, which constitutes the counter-paradigm to modernity. Both paradigms of freedom are, in fact, deficient, so that the diagnosis points out a ‘double lack of true relationships’ (114). In the Naturrechtsaufsatz, unlike Hegel’s later thought, modernity is not conceived as the highest point in history but rather as a ‘period of transition’ (108). Briefly: in the classical model of the polis, individuals were not free as such, but only in so far as they belonged to a certain estate, which implied that ancient ‘substantial’ freedom was a ‘freedom through inequality’ (109). Modernity, conversely, realizes freedom as equality at the cost of a juristic-formalistic levelling of relationships and the disentanglement of individual rights and public sphere (121). As Sheplyakova effectively states, the problem for Hegel is not ‘modern’ individual autonomy as such but rather its merely juristic actualization, based on which individuals do not in fact recognize and relate to each other as autonomous subjects but only as hollow, standardized private persons (145).

The second chapter is for the most part an exegetically and systematically penetrating reconstruction of Hegel’s assessment of Kant’s practical philosophy. Rather than debating whether Hegel’s criticism of Kant is fair or not, Sheplyakova claims that Hegel in this context puts forward a wholly innovative understanding of subjectivity (203). Hegel’s decisive move in this regard is ‘the abandonment of the moral-theoretical foundation of autonomy in favour of a foundation of autonomy through a theory of action and right’ (204). While Hegel famously targets, among others, Kant’s legalism, formalism, hidden empiricism, and his tautological and arbitrary procedures, the unifying trait of his critique is the idea that Kantian morality is ultimately a legitimizing projection of formal-bourgeois right (43–44).

Accordingly, Kant reduces morality to a matter of strict duties, thus disregarding, e.g., imperfect rights and non-enforceable duties which however constitute an important dimension of human action, right and morality (214f.). With regard to this, Sheplyakova opportunely recalls throughout the book the impact of Schiller’s connection of the aesthetic and political realms on Hegel’s critique of Kant’s moral philosophy (see e.g., 218–19). By means of a thorough analysis of this critique, the second chapter substantiates the claim raised at the end of the first chapter, namely, ‘that subjective freedom is legitimate is not disputed by Hegel. But the question of how this freedom comes to its own right is answered by Hegel in a different way than Kant did’ (233). Accordingly, the positive outcome of Hegel’s critique of Kant is the concrete productive force of subjectivity—a subjectivity not reducible to the Roman-bourgeois abstract personality—which becomes the focal point of the reflection on freedom and action. Hegel’s concern is therefore to grasp how freedom becomes right through the power of subjective action, i.e. to elaborate a ‘genealogy of right’ (234–35). This genealogy is the topic of the third and final chapter.

In the first half of this chapter, Sheplyakova presents Antigone and Socrates as paradigmatic figures of the emancipation of the individual as such (247). According to Hegel, however, the process of subjectification leading from the polis to (modern) society carries in itself ‘the danger of the loss of plasticity’ (268): while the classical public realm was shaped by heroic virtues paradigmatically embodied in the plastic, non-dissociated tragic characters, bourgeois relationships are structurally threatened by conformism and abstractness. In the second half of the third chapter, Sheplyakova turns from the Naturrechtsaufsatz to the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, her main claim being that the latter is not able to carry out Hegel’s pars construens, and in fact abandons the former’s ‘revolutionary’ impulse (280). This is particularly evident with regard to the subjective moment of ‘Morality’, which, despite being a central conquest of modernity and essential to subjective action, culminates in a pathological perversion legitimizing the actual restriction of individual action at the hand of the ‘Ethical life’ (294–96). Therefore, on Sheplyakova’s reconstruction, morality does not positively affect the constitution of ethical life, and subjective freedom progressively loses its concrete political charge to a merely intellectualistic and elitist one, until virtually disappearing in the dimension of world history (305). Drawing on Andreas Wildt and Christoph Menke, among others, the book thus reclaims the attractive and revolutionary potential of the Naturrechtsaufsatz, while offering a mostly critical and pessimistic reading of Hegel’s later philosophy of right. The author explicitly opposes some influential optimistic readings such as those of Joachim Ritter, Terry Pinkard and Robert Brandom. As a way out of the signalled inconsistency between Hegel’s original project and its actual execution, the book’s conclusion significantly points once again to Schiller’s vision of an ‘aesthetic freedom’ and the ‘aesthetic appearance’ as the locus of mediation between individuality and political freedom.

The book is remarkably well written, insightful and well-informed. Despite dealing with a topic that is highly frequented not only in Hegel scholarship but in political philosophy in general, Sheplyakova offers an innovative and stimulating perspective. This is so first of all because of the focus on the Naturrechtsaufsatz, a notoriously obscure text, which Sheplyakova successfully interprets by placing it in the context of Hegel’s early critique of modernity. At the same time, she rightly insists that this critique does not result in an anachronistic longing for the return of pre-modern forms of relationships and associate living. By linking the critique of modernity to the critique of Kant’s practical philosophy, the book highlights Hegel’s view that the latter, while constituting a no-return point in the modern development of freedom, does not adequately ground the power and autonomy of individual action in its concrete embedment. Furthermore, the author rightly claims that this is not just a theoretical shortcoming: Kantian formalism leads to a problematic ‘reversal of moral correctness into juridical permissibility’ (174). Kant’s moral philosophy ultimately licences a particular juristic model by claiming its universality, which is to say that it ideologically confirms and reproduces given bourgeois relationships, whereas the individual subject is reduced to a particular and abstract instance of their legitimation. Briefly, in Hegel’s eyes, Kant confirms the Roman-bourgeois separation of individuality and public-political freedom. From the scrupulous analysis of this critical thread, Sheplyakova gains an important constructive point, namely that Hegel aims to overcome the formalistic determination of right through a genealogy of right based on the idea that the subject is, and constitutes itself first and foremost as, a subject of right.

This idea makes up the background for Sheplyakova’s decidedly critical reading of Hegel’s mature Philosophy of Right, a reading that certainly calls for debate, not only between different orientations in Hegel scholarship but also between concurring visions of modernity. Here I would like to address two points. First of all, what Sheplyakova laments as a narrowing of the space for individual action may also be interpreted in the opposite way. On the one hand, the subject’s will is in fact understood as the engine building ethico-political institutions and enabling historical change. On the other hand, Hegel’s famous image of Minerva’s owl can be read as a destitution of the prescriptive power of philosophy toward individual action. This is, however, not because free action is philosophically irrelevant but on the contrary, because taking individual free action seriously also means renouncing the idea that philosophy can or should dictate an ideal, unified picture of what individual free action should look like. In this sense, one can even argue, as John Rawls and others have done, that Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, far from limiting the space of individual action, anticipates some central threads of political liberalism, such as the recognition of the fact of pluralism and the determination of the practical task of philosophy as reconciliation.

This brings me to the second point, which has to do with aesthetics. To the modern ‘normalization’ of individuality Sheplyakova opposes, as was mentioned above, the plasticity of classical tragic characters, as well as Schiller’s project of an aesthetic education. While she is well aware that Hegel connects the concept of plasticity, and the aesthetic paradigm in general, to the classical Greek world and not to modern prosaic society (273), she does not delve into the grounds of this limitation which can be traced back to the Hegelian thesis of the end of art. As a matter of fact, loss of plasticity and end of art are essential components of the Hegelian idea of modernity, and Hegel is very clear that the aesthetic paradigm is inadequate for the full development and actualization of ‘modern’ subjective freedom. More specifically, the ideal of plasticity goes hand in hand with ethico-political substantialism, so that philosophy cannot put forward plasticity as the ideal constitution of the subject without advocating, at least to some extent, the return of pre-modern ethico-political relationships. Seen from a Hegelian perspective, the ideal of plasticity and aesthetic education can certainly be adopted and pursued by individuals, thus constituting one of many possible instances of a non-philosophically-necessitated individual choice, but cannot be used as a philosophically derived antidote to the grey prose of the modern world. To be sure, one can reject Hegel’s view of modernity altogether—which is not Sheplyakova’s aim—but one can hardly try to reform it by ignoring the end of art thesis.

I want to stress, however, that these objections testify to the book’s capacity to stimulate broad and thorough debate on Hegel and the different visions of modernity we can attach to his philosophy, which Sheplyakova’s work proves once again to be alive and relevant to our present.