This book is somewhere between an application of traditional Cambridge School methods of political historiography to Hegel and a plea to understand Hegel himself as offering a defensible version of that kind of historiography. A representative sample of the view comes from the final paragraph of the book:

It is thus to be expected that the book is a work of historiography rather than philosophy; readers interested in either extended interpretations of specific passages of text or engagement with the secondary literature will have to look elsewhere. But many virtues are produced by these absences, not least of which is the greater accessibility of this text. This might be the book I would recommend first to a non-specialist wanting to familiarize themselves with the broad outlines of Hegel’s political philosophy. In addition, the higher-altitude approach allows a broad-minded reading of Kant’s approach to lead into a discussion of Hegel’s political theorizing across early works and a wider selection of later works than is common in Hegel studies at the moment. In this respect the book’s most obvious predecessor is Shlomo Avineri’s work (Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, London 1974).

Within this broad approach, there are three main content areas corresponding to the three parts of the book. In Part I, ‘The Kantian Revolution’, Bourke sets the stage in an account that emphasizes the importance of Kant’s religious and historical thought. This includes readings of Hegel’s early theological writings as political treatises engaged in the conflict between the ancients and the moderns. In Part II, ‘Hegel and the French Revolution’, Bourke turns to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right to read them as political theories for revolutionary times because they are about revolutionary times. Part III, ‘The History of Political Thought’ provides a reception history of certain Hegelian ideas that is partially mixed with a history of the Cambridge School of historiography. The running thread of the book seems to be that Hegel’s early attempts to offer a better version of Kant’s historical treatment of Christianity in his attempts to explain the French Revolution led him to a historicist stance regarding political concepts with which one can see affinities in the early Cambridge School. The later Cambridge School’s shifts away from the earlier stance are censured in favour of a more strictly diagnostic approach reminiscent of J. G. A. Pocock’s own self-confident view.

Part III may be useful to current Hegel scholars for whom the term ‘Hegel Renaissance’ would seem more naturally to refer to Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard’s work beginning in the 1980s or even the movement spawned by Dieter Henrich in Germany than to the figures from the first half of the twentieth century such as Friedrich Meinecke and Alexandre Kojève to whom Bourke’s use of the term refers. The chapter on the Cambridge School is a good primer on a form of historiography which has unfortunately never gained much traction in Hegel studies, despite the respect duly accorded Laurence Dickey’s work (Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807, Cambridge/New York 1989). Finally, discussion of Joachim Ritter’s work as in the conclusion is always welcome—though combining him with Manfred Riedel would have seemed more appropriate than Charles Taylor—but these are the most historically recent Hegel scholars who are discussed in the book. In many respects the book reads like a mid-twentieth-century product, a reception history ending before the developments in Hegel studies which have formed most of its current practitioners. For that reason, I can recommend Part III for pedagogical reasons but will not discuss it further in this review.

The most interesting themes in Part I are a reading of Kant that emphasizes his historical works and discussions of Christianity as the framework for his works on morality, and a reading of Hegel’s early development in which he learns from Kant’s efforts that one must try to understand the causes of historical breakdowns and transitions. There is a natural difficulty with the first theme—namely the paucity of direct text on these topics in Kant’s corpus and the admitted speculative quality of the historical works—and frequently Bourke’s citations to Kant for his interpretations refer to passages which rhetorically lead in a different direction, somewhat like the Hegel’s scholar’s appeal to the line in ¶17 of the Phenomenology’s Preface that the true is to be grasped ‘not as substance but rather just as much as subject’ as evidence that the true is substance. But overall Bourke does not overstate his case and the broader view that Hegel is oriented to the historical question Bourke surfaces in Kant’s text is highly plausible on the basis of evidence in Hegel’s texts.

Bourke provides a nice summary of the relation between the two themes:

This commits Bourke to a strongly diachronic reading of Hegel’s philosophy of history that could use more defence than it gets, but it also opens up a view on Hegel’s nuanced understanding of the way that short-term political events interact with long-term cultural changes that helps to make a great deal of sense of why Hegel thought that the complex relations between Judaism, Catholicism and Protestantism were relevant for explaining the different courses that different European countries took in response to similar pressures of modernization.

Part II offers an interpretation of Hegel according to which he ‘aimed to justify constitutional government as a solution to the conflicts of feudal monarchy that had plagued Europe from roughly the eighth to the seventeenth century’ (191). These conflicts are summarized as the tensions producing modernity that begin in the Reformation and continue with moralizing Enlightenment criticism. Textually speaking, the outline of this part is to use Hegel’s discussions of the historical changes from the German Constitution and Württemberg Estates essays (Chapter 4) and of the French revolution from the Phenomenology (Chapter 5) to provide the justificatory structure for a reading of the Philosophy of Right (Chapter 6).

Chapter 4 is dedicated to offering an interpretation of Hegel according to which he saw the French Revolution just as much as the culmination of extended and subterranean social changes as it was the start of something new. Much of this discussion concerns interesting questions of representation which are handled with subtlety by connecting Hegel’s thoughts in these pieces and the Magistrates essay to changes in the European constitutional order through contrastive analysis of changes in the Holy Roman Empire and French Old Regime but brought to a head by the failures of successive waves of the French Revolution to establish a workable conception of representation. This leads Bourke to emphasize the debt Hegel owed to Montesquieu on mediating institutions, but interestingly Bourke distinguishes quite sharply between those institutions such as cities, guilds and corporations in the Holy Roman Empire and the estates which play such an important role in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Precisely given the importance of the estates for representation, that cleavage seems mistaken to this reviewer and a symptom of an overestimation of Hegel’s shift from status to competence and voluntariness.

Chapter 5 reads the relevant sections of the Phenomenology as providing a detailed analysis of the tensions within French culture which frames the French Revolution as a conflict between the ancient polarity of family and polis with the modern polarity of society and state. Though the general outlines are familiar, the material is handled with great sophistication in the connection between historical specificity and claims in the text, even if Hegel scholars are likely to be scandalized by the pattern of citation which adduces claims from out of order in the Phenomenology and widely dispersed across other texts as well. My own view is that there wasn’t much of a polis in the period under description, and so the traditional element is better understood as a different form of society—the Ständegesellschaft or corporate society—which is at the same time splitting off from bürgerliche Gesellschaft or civil society. But this is primarily to register my side in the difference between Cambridge School and Bielefeld School approaches, which both tars me with the same mid-twentieth-century brush as Bourke and flirts with the narcissism of minor differences. One thing that stands out in this chapter is its attentiveness to paradoxes of autonomy as other status distinctions replaced those of birth and produced the first intuitions of the fraud of meritocracy.

Finally, Chapter 6 presents the Philosophy of Right as arguing for constitutional rather than feudal monarchy—or rather as presenting that change as already having occurred. The apparent novelty of the view is reconciled with Hegel’s explicitly backwards-looking perspective by appeal to the fact that the hierarchies of the old regime had largely dissipated over time. One is reminded of the evocative description James Collins offers of the French experience in The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge 2009: 295): ‘[The Old Regime] passed away, as most social systems do, in its sleep, leaving its citizens unaware that it was gone. No society more fully reflects Hegel’s dictum that the Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk […].’ Bourke traces this quiet death through changes in political, familial and economic life. Again, I think that Bourke overstates the case and so the account squares awkwardly with the estates structure of representation in Hegel’s state as well as his advocacy of primogeniture for agricultural land. But as a broad sweep, Bourke’s animation of the general tenor of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is both illuminating and accessible.