With this book, Alice Ormiston presents a compelling interpretation of Hegel's philosophy that speaks to the needs of our time. Her central argument is that love is “the continuous foundation at play in Hegel's understanding of the modern self” and the “experiential basis” of his philosophy (pp. 5–6). Hegelian love is an expansive notion that has historical grounding in early Christian mysticism. No longer readily felt in widely shared religious or civic practices, love has been all but eclipsed in the modern world. But love's knowledge is not lost. Reappearing as a moment of grace in situations of moral and political conflict, love helps us heed our conscience. Hegel's political philosophy is, we learn, a call to conscience. If we do not know what conscience requires, we become vulnerable to “the problems of our time”: alienation and social atomism—seen in poverty, weakened commitments to family and local politics, and selfish disregard for the welfare of others—and a collective inability to distinguish right and wrong that contributes to evil (pp. 115–24).

Some of Hegel's readers argue that these very problems indicate a failure of his ontology (p. 115). Ormiston parts with this reading. Locating the problem within reason itself, Ormiston's Hegel warns that reflective rationality must be guided by love, or it will “repudiat[e] its own subjectively experienced, moral understandings” (p. 107). Hegel offers three strategies for how we may temper the destructive tendencies inherent in reflective thought: a courageous return to action from conscience, the cultivation of lasting commitments to family and local communities, and a renewed engagement with philosophy as a practice of justification (pp. 107–14, 125–32).

In Chapter 1, Ormiston investigates the role of love in Hegel's early theological thought. Influenced by German romanticism and idealism, Hegel's earliest essays envisioned “a new society of freedom” grounded in Kantian moral reason. However, in “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” Hegel discovers the importance of love for moral action. Love rather than reason is now posited as “the true substance of subjectivity” (pp. 3–5). The religious mysticism of the early followers of Jesus shows that love of God and one's fellow Christians serves as a force of reconciliation: Not reason but love reconciles man and God, self and other, and the individual and society. But Hegel realized that the task of creating a rational society out of love eludes the modern self from a practical standpoint. Grappling with the nature of modern subjectivity, he recognized that love's reconciliatory power was eclipsed by reflective rationality when the legal conferral of abstract personhood in the Roman world granted individuals the freedom to think and act with a view only to their own particular needs, desires, and wills.

In Chapter 2, the author completes her interpretation of the ontological shifts in Hegel's thought, tracing the experience of reflective reason in the dialectic between conscience and forgiveness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Reason has been cut off from the experience of love, and therefore cannot settle on its content as the dialectic intensifies. The moment of grace in which reason and its content are finally reconciled represents the return of love on the level of experience. Love is not conscious here, and is therefore not explicitly discussed in the text of the Phenomenology, which deals with what is phenomenologically present to consciousness (p. 36). But for us, who observe consciousness, “the inner knowledge of love” is detected as the source of the grace that allowed the acting and judging self to actualize “the truth of love” (pp. 44, 48). Hegel's notion of a consciously felt, mystical experience of love has not been abandoned; love has simply become an unconscious source of the content of the will but brings felt reconciliation on the level of our lives (pp. 11, 23). Because it is in love's nature to reconcile conflicting motivations or desires, it protects us from the divisive and destructive effects of our abstract rationality and instrumental will (p. 16).

The analysis of the Philosophy of Right in Chapter 3 completes Ormiston's interpretation of love's role in Hegel's philosophy. “[T]he movement of the will” that actualizes reason in the world “presupposes the experience of love”; therefore, “the logic of [this] text is meant to affirm the knowledge of love” (p. 71). To demonstrate the “final reconciliation of love and reason,” Hegel formulated the will's objectification of love's knowledge conceptually. We learn that “human willing in history from the time of Christianity forward is … to be comprehended as the objectification of the knowledge of love in life, for reflective consciousness” (pp. 65, 68). Reason gives objective form to moral and political right, but cannot by itself generate the content of morality, justice, and freedom. Hegel's philosophy teaches reason to recognize the fundamental importance of love: The conceptual edifice of his philosophical system is motivated by the aim to vindicate love's knowledge by presenting it to reason in the only form in which reason can recognize it—that of the Concept.

For Ormiston, Hegel views reconciliation rather than recognition as the source of rational freedom. She thus rejects the reading that intersubjectivity alone generates the rational content of Hegelian modernity. She also parts with communitarian readings of Hegel, arguing that individual conscience rather than a collective subject operates at the source of the will. A middle Hegelian, Ormiston contributes new insight into the central thesis of this minority tradition in Hegel scholarship, that finite human rationality draws its content from an infinite, divine substance (p. 5). However, she shifts the focus from a religious understanding of substance, proposing instead that love designates the core meaning of substance for Hegel. While other middle Hegelians fail to explain what happens to love or assume that it has been lost as Hegel's philosophy takes conceptual form, Ormiston concludes that he only abandoned love as the basis of his philosophy (p. 10). In life, love continues to play its crucial mediating role and remains the ontological source of objective reason in the world.

Ormiston's account of the implicit, presupposed role of love in the progression of reflective consciousness in the Phenomenology, and in the objective unfolding of the modern will in the Philosophy of Right, is highly persuasive. Yet, since Hegel neither explicitly defends nor refutes the thesis that love is the unconscious source of objective thought and action, Ormiston may leave some readers wishing that she had attempted a more comprehensive interpretation of these two works, as well as a direct engagement with the Science of Logic and Encyclopaedia Logic. However, she convincingly demonstrates that we must take seriously Hegel's metaphysics if we want to understand his central contribution to modern political thought. In welcome contrast to interpretations of Hegel's metaphysics that proceed with reference to the two works on logic alone, Ormiston's lively and readable examination of the early theological writings, the Phenomenology, and the Philosophy of Right offers an unusually accessible exposition of some the most contested metaphysical aspects of Hegel's thought—the viability of his ontology, the meaning of his philosophical system, and the fate of reason in history.