Vicky Roupa's Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel focuses on the role of nature in Plato's and Hegel's political philosophy. In a link that connects ancient and modern thought, the concept of ‘nature’ is an unavoidable horizon that in both periods conditions politics (4). The author guides the reader step by step, through tight demonstrations and precise textual references to texts that at first glance look unrelated, such as Plato's Cratylus and Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Each passage of Roupa's dense volume is perfectly justified.

The project to focus a study on the concept of nature is risky, because it will necessarily disappoint some readers: the word ‘nature’ is extremely vague and it is not possible to take in consideration all its meanings in a single volume—let me recall that in his famous ‘Some Meanings of “Nature”’ (Appendix to A Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas) Arthur O. Lovejoy identifies up to 66 senses of the word. By contrast, Roupa's explicit decision to focus on only two meanings of the word ensures that this vagueness will not affect her research. Through Plato and Hegel, in fact, the author identifies two key concepts of the word ‘nature’ (9), which are then related to the duplicity identified by Hegel in his Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right § 2 (156): on the one hand nature is something immediate and unconscious, on the other it is the essence (or the concept) of something.

The author's decision to focus on these two senses of the word is not simply an arbitrary positioning, since throughout her book she demonstrates that they are strictly interconnected in both Hegel's and Plato's philosophy. Moreover, it is precisely one of the two concepts that helps to understand the vagueness of the term ‘nature’: it is not possible to define precisely what nature is, since it is what allows the question of the essence (the nature of something) to be raised (179).

The volume is divided into two parts, the first of which (Redefining the Natural: Language and Logic) discusses Plato's Cratylus and The Sophist and Hegel's Science of Logic. Roupa considers the Cratylus as a crucial text not only for elucidating Plato's philosophy of language, but also for reshaping the concept of ‘nature’ occurring in it (24). Whereas nature is initially linked to the sensible sphere, and as such hinders thinking, ‘nature’ becomes the guide for thought itself towards the comprehension of the essence of things (of their nature) within the course of the dialogue (25). In a dialectical movement, natural language would be the kind of language that manifests the essence of things in their immediacy, because it has rid itself of its natural elements, namely the phonic components, through which a language imitates reality (32). With reference to Sophist, Roupa then provides a deeper analysis of Plato's position according to which an immediate language, a transparent medium between reality and thought, is in fact not possible.

Plato thus breaks the ontological continuum between world and words; and Hegel shares this view (63). For both, however, it is through philosophy that the link between language and reality can be investigated (57) and only philosophy can remove words from the ‘naturalness’ (understood as immediacy) of their pre-philosophical use, unveiling their mediated meanings (80).

At the end of this section, Roupa focuses on the two already mentioned meanings of the word ‘nature’. It indicates both an ontological level and the essential character of things. In this second connotation, the dichotomy between the artificial and the natural (still persisting in the first meaning) is overcome, as even artifices have their own nature. This second meaning is crucial because with it an ideal or intentional layer is included in the word ‘nature’. For example, according to Plato the nature of the Republic is not a simple fact, the essence of which being grasped by a simple description. Rather, it is the conception of the political community as it should be, in accordance with its concept (81). Similarly, for Hegel, following Roupa's reading, nature is not conceived as mere materiality, but something that incorporates within itself a conceptuality that overcomes the opposition between the natural and the artificial.

The second part of the book (Redefining the Natural: Society and Politics) relates the results of the first part to the political philosophy of Plato and Hegel. The tension between the two meanings of ‘nature’ identified by the author (on the one hand, sensible reality, on the other hand, essence, concept) reemerge in this section. In Roupa's interpretation, the concept of nature is central to Plato's political thought not because Plato structures the political institutions on a predetermined human nature (97), but because politics is about bringing communities and institutions closer to what they are in their essence, that is, to what they are in accordance with their nature (116).

In the next two chapters, the author returns to modernity. These passages are affected more than the others by the succinct length of this volume: the relationship between nature and politics in modernity would need, in the opinion of the reviewer, more extensive and in-depth discussion. A few pages are devoted to Johann Gottlieb Fichte's political thought (in particular his Naturrechtslehre), which is interpreted, however, through an excessively Hegelian lens that risks not doing full justice to the philosopher of the Wissenschaftslehre. In this chapter, the separation between ethical and juridical law in Fichte is defined through the type of obligation implicated. Right must be applied with mechanical necessity: this, according to Roupa, is only possible for Fichte within a state machine, which has the monopoly of the political action (133). A closer analysis of Fichte's text, however, would allow a separation of politics and right. Moreover, if we consider other Fichtean texts—such as the Staatslehre (1813) or the Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808)—the philosopher's criticism of the equation of state and machine is made more than clear. In addition, the concept of the state-machine does not simply imply a specific necessity with which the law is applied, but also a conception that is not Fichte's own, namely the independence of the state from any purpose, value, or idea of justice—as Carl Schmitt has argued in his works on Hobbes's Leviathan.

After this digression towards Fichte, Roupa returns to Hegel's political philosophy. In it, following the author, nature plays a double role that can be respectively placed at the beginning and the end of politics. At the beginning, because—following the modern doctrine of natural law and the modern theory of the social contract—the state of nature must be overcome for civil life to begin; at the end, because it is in the world of nature's causality that the causality of reason must be realized through the monarch (145). Moreover, reason and nature are not opposed to each other: in Hegel the natural law in fact refers to what can be justified by reason and not what derives from custom and history, as for Friedrich Carl von Savigny and Gustav Hugo. Here again, the discussion would have benefited from a larger exploration of the conceptual transformations in modernity of the term Naturrecht, in which the intersections of reason, nature and history are elaborated by authors contemporary to Hegel in a more complex way than the binarism that places natural institutions understood as the product of history on one side and natural institutions understood as rational order on the other. Certainly, this would have changed the editorial intent of the author, who decides to limit herself to a well-focused volume on Plato and Hegel.

This part of the text therefore ends with the Hegelian conception of the monarch, who, through a balanced and interesting dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy, is defined as an ‘impossible’ individual, a pure sign that incorporates the tension between nature and spirit (162–65). The volume closes with a concluding chapter in which the unity and completeness of the volume is fully justified.

Roupa's book is a short, well thought out and well-delineated volume, whose objectives are extremely clear and explicit. Its clarity would have certainly been difficult to maintain if a more in-depth analysis had been offered, going beyond the works of Plato and Hegel dealt with here (in addition to Fichte, the author only considers Karl Marx), even if such a more comprehensive treatment would have afforded greater historical-conceptual context. However, the volume does not lose its value, which lies in the interpretative line made explicit at the beginning of the work (10) and which runs through the whole book, namely the (successful) attempt to show how even the metaphysical question on the essence of being, the philosophy of language, the relationship between rationality and perceptible immediacy, or between nature and technē are intrinsically political themes. And that in order to address both Plato's Republic and Hegel's philosophy of right with this awareness, it is equally necessary to engage with their conception of language, nature and logic.