To the best of my knowledge, this book is unique. Hegel's Logical Comprehension of the Modern State is about Hegel’s work, primarily for Hegelians and masterfully written from an insider’s perspective. It is a rare item insofar as the last century has been dominated by revisionist approaches that seek to rehabilitate Hegel’s political thought on appropriative terms while jettisoning or understating its foundations in his logical work and its metaphysical program. By contrast, Matthew Smetona defends the position that “The Philosophy of Right is the actualization … of the Science of Logic” and that an approach of this sort is “critically important for any accurate understanding of his political philosophy” (p. 6). This position situates his work within a field of scholarship that overwhelmingly reads Hegel’s Philosophy of Right precisely in a way that disregards the “problematic” residue that his logical program is often held to imply.

This trend of partitioning the two works in order to offer a “non-metaphysical” reading of Hegel’s politics is widespread. As Smetona informs us, “Implicit in the standard interpretation of the Philosophy of Right as a work of practical philosophy is the presupposition that it can be unproblematically separated from the system of which it is a part” (p. 64). He is correct in this assertion, and his book sets out to correct this view by drawing out the intimate connection between Hegel’s politics and his overall metaphysical program, primarily as it is found in his larger Science of Logic. The “explanatory priority” of the Logic for Smetona is key to our reading of the Philosophy of Right should we wish to get at the actual meaning and purpose of Hegel’s political thought.

Smetona begins his book by making a case for the presuppositionlessness of Hegel’s Logic and its fulfillment in the doctrine of the concept, and moves on to argue for the Logic’s seamless integration with Hegel’s Realphilosophie. The main task of the book is rejoined more directly in Chapter 3 where the author provides an outline of the logical determination of the Philosophy of Right’s core themes and developments. In Chapter 4, he attends to the conceptions and misconceptions that Hegel’s political thought has motivated among contemporary scholars, and its perception as liberal, conservative, or otherwise. In Chapter 5, Smetona offers us in-depth treatments of the preface to Hegel’s political treatise and the meaning of Hegel’s double dictum—“What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational”—providing a heterodox reading of Hegel’s critique of civil society that puts him in far greater proximity to Marx than most contemporary Anglo-American readings would allow.

Chapter 6 deals with abstract right and morality and connects these up with their antecedents in the Logic. Smetona’s core argument for the inseparability of logic and politics is further advanced through a careful consideration of the different dimensions of Hegel’s ethical life—the family and civil society—in Chapter 7. He provides us with a careful and attentive reading that evokes the presence of the conceptual dynamic that carries over from the Logic throughout the Philosophy of Right. In Chapter 8 he moves beyond the familial and social dimensions to conclude by connecting up the state in the political world with its conceptual foundations: the absolute Idea of the Logic. Here, he opposes the liberal reading of Hegel’s state and instead sees freedom in universalist, rather than particular, individualist terms. The last three chapters rely heavily on exegetical analysis, and it is this assiduous work that provides Smetona with a basis for scholarly reconsideration and a conceptual turn on contemporary accounts of Hegel’s political thought.

Through this exegetical presentation of the core developments of Hegel’s Logic and their reflective determination of his politics, Smetona fleshes out the important confluences of the two works. His reading of the Logic does not simply offer us a form–content analogy between the two works, the Logic providing structure and form, the politics empirical and political content. He stands against such a polarized interpretation. The Philosophy of Right he argues for is not only a carryover of the structure of the Logic but of its conceptual contents as well, and in a way “that corresponds to Hegel's theoretical-philosophical argument for the internality of the form–content relation” (p. 68). The prime mover of Hegel’s Logic, “the concept,” is identified as the primary solution to the problem of dialectical opposition. Not merely a third and synthetic moment, the concept exemplifies the critical function of the Logic itself: “the totality within which the movement from being through essence occurs” (p. 72). This dynamic unifies the triad of elements universal, particular, and individual, as well as their conceptual contents of being, essence, and concept.

To compress things somewhat for present purposes, the creative unity that the concept affords thought is found in the analogous political institution of freedom: “The conception of freedom actualized and objectivized in Hegel's Philosophy of Right as the reciprocal recognition of human subjects is . . . the spontaneity of the Concept in the Science of Logic at its highest level of determinateness” (pp. 81–82). For this reason, the conception of freedom itself and its historical functioning must be referred to the logical procedure of the concept in the Science of Logic. This is the priority and presuppositional nature of the Logic for politics, and the latter’s basis in the process of thought that pervades Hegel’s state: “[T]he state … is nothing but the Concept … at its highest level of determinateness” (p. 81).

While Smetona’s work takes up several goals, its central purpose is primarily to argue that “Hegel's rational political state depicted in the Philosophy of Right derives from the fact that it is comprehended by thought in and through the totality that is the Concept” (p. 1). This is borne out by his reading of the Philosophy of Right, which asserts that “the modern state must be organized in terms of the Concept depicted in the Science of Logic for it to fulfill the criterion of rationality” without which freedom itself collapses (p. 255). What he has achieved is a truly singular, immanent, and dedicated reading of Hegel’s logic and politics, which stands out among the revisionist and rehabilitative offerings of the last generation and beyond. This of course is not to suggest that he is either unaware or unreflective of contemporary scholarship, which he makes ample use of in distinguishing his case. Rather, his work crystallizes and revivifies appreciation for the logico-metaphysical dimension of Hegel’s political philosophy in a masterful and comprehensive way that successfully upsets the standard view.

Nonetheless, with this outline and overview behind us, a strategic issue emerges for the discursive implications of the book, which makes two strong claims: firstly, that Hegel’s political thought is incomprehensible when considered in the absence of an appreciation of the Logic’s influence, and, secondly, that its author asserts “a strongly metaphysical account” of the Philosophy of Right (p. 7). Smetona’s work makes the positive argument against the mainstream and majority readings of both Hegel’s political thought and his Logic. In the former case, his book contradicts Allen Wood’s partitioning of the Logic and the Philosophy of Right and, in the latter, Robert Pippin’s Kantian reading of Hegel’s Logic. As discussed, Smetona’s reading is most competent and extraordinarily loyal to the conceptual framework that distinguishes Hegel’s thought from his liberal as well as his Kantian appropriators. His immanent, exegetical, and historical loyalty to Hegel’s corpus and purpose is valuable in and of itself and beyond censure.

Yet Smetona also rejects his idealism as a “bad argument,” insofar as he claims that Hegel’s ontology takes all things as true or real only as “thought,” and this has immediate implications for the discursive status of the non-metaphysical reading (p. 59). For, in response to Smetona, commentators who embrace the non-metaphysical reading will legitimately ask how such a conclusion in any way inhibits their rehabilitative and pragmatic projects. These readers—such as Zbigniew Pełczyńsk and Allen Wood—generally accept that there is a metaphysics, but they also hold that it is wrong, and as a result they opt for reassembling a version of Hegel’s political thought in its absence, salvaging Hegel’s politics on modern terms that “we” can accept and which make Hegel practically valuable today, beyond the influences of his dead metaphysics.

From these points of view, Smetona's loyalty and fidelity to Hegel's thought seem in fact to add weight to the non-metaphysical strategy: What good does Hegel’s wrongheaded and useless metaphysics do for his politics, and what harm is there, on this basis, in rehabilitating Hegel’s politics on our terms beyond the influences of his logical system even in the face of Hegel’s own admonitions? In defending a position that Hegel is a metaphysician whose metaphysics is inseparable from his politics and simultaneously holding that Hegel’s idealist metaphysics are essentially wrong, Smetona reopens the door to the essential complaints of the non-metaphysical camp concerning Hegel’s political thought. Smetona’s scholarly loyalty and philosophical conscience reconstitutes Hegel’s synthesis of metaphysics and politics and, at the same time, condemns the project to the very obsolescence that motivated the non-metaphysical attempt at rehabilitation in the first place. Again, this in no way ought to cast any doubt on the value and power of Smetona’s reading. Rather, it merely implies that the ironical result of his scholarly rigor is, to a certain extent, discursively self-defeating. Regardless of the merit of Hegel’s metaphysical foundations, a concern which is in and of itself debatable, my own view is that the nonmetaphysical view does not present a viable alternative. This is not merely because it dismisses Hegel’s metaphysics from understandings of his politics. At least as important, it is because all political thought implies metaphysical commitments of one kind or another, and on this matter the non-metaphysical readings are wholly unaccountable.

These concerns aside, Hegel’s Logical Comprehension of the Modern State in and of itself provides a penetrating and intimate view of the inner workings and Logic that drive Hegel’s political thought. It is the best Hegelian reading of the two works to be offered in quite some time. Smetona’s evocation of the conceptual systematicity of Hegel’s logic and politics is both a substantial contribution to current scholarship and a dissenting lens through which it may yet be transformed.