We need Hegel now, according to Timothy C. Luther, and Hegel above all. Luther gives us two reasons. First, Hegel can teach us to question the recent success of neoliberal economics, which has liberated the market from political control both domestically and internationally, thus sapping the principles of democratic governance, precipitating economic crises, and threatening the long-term health of the environment. Second, Hegel can teach us how best to reconcile individual freedom and the community, and thereby to solve some of the problems caused by neoliberal economic practice run amok.

Despite the title of his book, making the latter argument is not Luther's primary aim. In view of the notorious opacity of Hegel's thought, he aims rather to explain this thought systematically in language more accessible than Hegel's own and with its major conceptions “reconstructed … for a contemporary context” (p. 4). Judged by this standard, Luther's book is a success. After an introduction, two chapters summarize Hegel's understanding of the history of philosophy, showing how it culminates in Hegel's dialectical method, and Hegel's understanding of the philosophy of history, showing how it culminates in Hegel's conception of ethical life. The centerpiece of Luther's exposition follows, with three chapters largely devoted to the Philosophy of Right and concentrating on Hegel's understanding of the family, of civil society, and of the state. Next, Luther provides three chapters on Hegel's philosophical afterlife, treating Hegelianism, Hegel's nineteenth-century critics, and postmodernism, before concluding with a chapter devoted to Hegel today. It is a sign of his achievement that he is able to provide clear explanations of the dialectic and of Geist; interesting accounts of Hegel's views on marriage, poverty, and punishment; and helpful statements of Hegel's relations to Kant, Feuerbach, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, among many others.

But Luther's expository success comes at a price. His treatments of fundamental philosophical matters, such as the metaphysical status of the dialectic, are spread throughout the book in accordance with the dictates of his systematic approach, rather than gathered into single thematic discussions. Thus, in his second chapter, which contains his main treatment of Hegel's dialectical method, Luther correlates the dialectic with the concept of Geist, distinguishes it from Platonic or Socratic dialectic, illustrates its connection with becoming, and explains how it overcomes the subject-object distinction, among others. But we must wait until Luther's eighth chapter, in a section on Hegel's critique of modern metaphysics, to learn how the dialectic is rooted in Hegel's interpretation of the Kantian antinomies: “that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements,” so that “reality is contradictory in itself” (p. 302). Similarly, while Luther alludes to the antifoundationalist implications of the dialectic—that it is neither simply a priori nor simply a posteriori—in his second chapter, they are not spelled out until the last section of his ninth chapter, where Luther is primarily interested in demonstrating Hegel's anticipation of his postmodern critics.

Luther's expository treatments of fundamental matters may also not be critical or searching enough to satisfy his philosophically sophisticated readers. By interweaving quotations of Hegel with quotations of his interpreters, often without warning his readers that he is doing so, Luther sometimes gives the impression that there are no contemporary controversies over how to interpret Hegel, controversies like those described in his chapters on Hegel's afterlife.

More important, however, is the price that must be paid for this exposition by Luther's titular argument about Hegel's reconciliation of individual freedom and the community. The elements of this argument—that Hegel is uniquely placed, philosophically and historically, to solve this problem; that reconciliation involves educating individuals about the proper relationship between civil society and the state; and that precisely this kind of reconciliation is needed to curb the excesses of economic neoliberalism—are spread throughout Luther's book, in accordance with the demands of his exposition. Luther must rely on repeated reminders that “Hegel would not likely be pleased with the political direction taken by the United States over the last couple of decades” (p. 348) to keep his argument alive in his readers' minds.

In the end, the titular argument of Luther's book is not entirely persuasive. It seems true that recent developments, both in the United States and around the world, evince an alarming emancipation of economic considerations from political ones—though it goes too far to affirm that “multinational companies … effectively govern the lives of the vast majority of people on Earth” (p. 359). But the superiority of Hegel's solution to this emancipation, the superiority of his reconciliation of the good of the individual and the common good, follows for Luther from the uniqueness of Hegel's philosophical and historical position: from his superiority to all previous thinkers, established by his dialectical sublation of their philosophies, and from his superiority to all subsequent ones, established by Luther's demonstration that they did not refute him.

Here, there is room for doubt, room cleared by Luther himself. In his discussion of Hegel's account of the family, Luther insists that Hegel is wrong to think “that women are inherently limited in their ability to fully and rationally actualize themselves as individuals” (p. 164). This view, characteristic of most nineteenth-century philosophers according to Luther, presumably came to Hegel as a consequence of the limits on thinking imposed by his time. Similarly, Luther postpones comment on Hegel's requirement that the state be led by a hereditary constitutional monarch until his final chapter, where he admits that “[t]here is little question that Hegel's Rechtsstaat fails as a precise blueprint for modern society, especially since a hereditary monarch is not likely to be capable of rising above the private factions of society in the way that Hegel asserts” (p. 372). This willingness to reject aspects of Hegel's thought follows from Luther's explanation of why it is necessary to “critically reconstruct” Hegel's ideas for a “contemporary context” (p. 4): “[t]here is no essential historical Hegel whose personal intentions we can retrieve, or whose historical world we can objectively reconstruct as the central necessary condition in understanding what his texts meant or mean, and there is no essential or core meaning-in-itself in Hegel's texts, eternally waiting to be unearthed” (p. 374).

But if this is true, and it is permitted to reject Hegel's views on women or on monarchy as untimely, is it also permitted to reject his views about the Greeks, for example, that their society was characterized by an “attitude of unthinking, pious devotion to the traditional laws and customs of one's culture” (p. 123), and that “Greek individuals do not step back and reflect on whether what they are doing is really right” (p. 125; compare Homer, Iliad, book 11, lines 401–10)? If so, we might be led to wonder whether Hegel's account of the relationship between the individual and the community is the best such account, or whether the Greek account of this relationship is better.

Even if he casts some doubt on his own argument for Hegel's superiority in this respect, Luther has done us a great service by indicating the pressing need to think about the tension between the individual good and the common good, especially in light of our current economic woes. He has drawn up a detailed map of the Hegelian territory and marked the locations of buried treasure. We should be grateful for his exegetical and philosophic labors.