To produce a handbook of Hegel is an ambitious task, for at least two reasons. First, there is the basic difficulty of adequately summarizing Hegel's views and philosophical legacy up to the contemporary period in all their complexity. Second, Hegel himself would have been highly critical of the idea of a handbook, that is of an instrument that allows for the possibility of a preliminary examination of a philosophical work. Is a handbook not just an attempt of wanting to learn to swim before venturing into the water (Encyclopaedia, §41)? Yes and no. It is striking that the handbook does not function like a dictionary or keyword summary of Hegel's most central concepts and claims. Dean Moyar's introduction points out that the trouble with a topic-oriented handbook in Hegel's case is that it runs the risk of obscuring what remains the most distinctive characteristic of his philosophy, namely its rigorously dialectical character.
For this reason, rather than ordering Hegel's thought according to topics and concepts, the book keeps to the division of Hegel's major writings in order of publication, beginning with two essays on his development in Jena, followed by six essays on the Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic respectively. From there, the book proceeds to an analysis of Hegel's lecture notes and teaching materials, first of all by looking at his Encyclopaedia project and secondly at his Elements of the Philosophy of Right and Lectures on the Philosophy of History. The penultimate section called ‘Absolute Spirit’ engages with Hegel's lectures in Berlin from the 1820s on religion, aesthetics and history of philosophy. The book concludes with a section on ‘Hegel's legacy’, where six authors give a glimpse of the vast impact of Hegel's thought on Marx, the Frankfurt School, American pragmatism, analytic philosophy, strands of liberalism, and 20th-century French philosophy. This part of the book, as well as the previous section, would have profited from a more in-depth engagement with the issues raised by contemporary strands of critical theory.
Given this structure and the decision against thematic entries, the reader still has to orientate herself within Hegel's oeuvre as it evolves. Moyar's chronological approach therefore implies that the movement specific to Hegelian philosophy is not simply explained, but also has to be experienced. Each essay is relative to its own period, meaning that the reader has to understand Hegel's concepts in context. Something akin to a phenomenological narrative is maintained throughout the handbook, which mirrors Hegel's narrative from the point of view of his closest readers.
The introduction to the book outlines Hegel's educational background, his intellectual influences, friendships and those historical and political events that shaped his thought. This contextualization will be particularly useful to new readers of Hegel. However, Moyar does more than this as he also gives a compelling account of the early reception history of Hegel's philosophy, explicating the work of the young Hegelians in Germany from the 1830s and 1840s and up to Marx, as well as Hegel's influence on British Idealism. In the UK, as Moyar outlines, a productive re-engagement of Hegel's logic, his political philosophy and philosophy of religion took place under the name of British Idealism for a period of over fifty years. Moyar gives voice to thinkers such as F. H. Bradley, J. M. E. McTaggart and R. G. Collingwood as well as juxtaposing their work with that of the young Hegelians in Germany. Though Moyar does not go into too much detail, his analysis is nonetheless illuminating as it succeeds in demonstrating that this is a field of Hegel scholarship that deserves more attention.
Mapping the trajectory of the young Hegelians in Germany (the works of Bauer, Strauss and Feuerbach in particular), Moyar highlights that their breakup precedes the failed 1848 revolutions. This historical coincidence, Moyar suggests, sheds light on the revolutionary potential of Hegel's system and the reactions that this system can provoke. It would have been interesting to explore this claim in more detail, even to make it a guiding thread for the volume as a whole. In other words, instead of defining chronology as the exclusive structuring criteria of the handbook, an additional narrative could have been an emphasis on the influence of Hegel's thought on revolutionary struggle, starting with the aftermath of the French revolution, as for example outlined by Rebecca Comay in her ground-breaking study Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution, but also by looking at Soviet Russia, for instance through an analysis of Lenin's annotations of Hegel's Science of Logic and—in view of the later USSR—through György Lukács. Furthermore, space could be given to anti-colonial struggles, for example in Haiti, as studied by Susan Buck-Morss in her influential if heavily criticised study Hegel and Haiti, or by including Frantz Fanon's reading of Hegel in Black Skin, White Masks and his involvement in the Algerian revolution. The urgency of included non-European voices in particular, will be discussed further.
While the book does not follow this direction, it covers a lot of ground as it takes the reader through the entirety of Hegel's oeuvre. The first essay by Birgit Sandkaulen gives an insightful account of the importance of Hegel's Difference essay for the construction of his later system of philosophy. Sandkaulen outlines how the concepts of the ‘absolute’, ‘speculation’ and ‘system’, which constitute Hegel's core conception of philosophy, appear for the first time in this essay. Explaining the meaning of these terms in Hegel's early work and in relation to Hegel's contemporaries, Sandkaulen's essay works well as an opening to the handbook as a whole. This is also because Sandkaulen gives an idea of Hegel's work in progress, as she illustrates the extent to which the Phenomenology of Spirit and its continuation in the Science of Logic can be viewed from the vantage point of Hegel's prelude to the Difference essay.
More so than the other essays in this volume, those engaging with the Phenomenology of Spirit are exegetical commentaries, rather than interpretations that take Hegel's philosophy elsewhere. Offering a close reading of the original text, these essays succeed in guiding the reader—step by step—through the entirety of the Phenomenology. Scott Jenkins, for example, explains the different meanings of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology, while Marx Alznauer pays attention to Hegel's ambiguous concept of spirit. As Alznauer outlines, despite the centrality of this term, as it appears in the title and in chapter six of the Phenomenology, its meaning remains a point of contention. The six contributions on Hegel's Science of Logic, like those on the Phenomenology, cover the entire development of the book. While every contribution can be read in separation and on its own terms, it is striking that the essays also construct a more or less coherent narrative and that the handbook reads as one project. Since the sections under the heading of ‘Objectivity’ in Hegel's Science of Logic (the chapters ‘Mechanism’, ‘Chemism’ and ‘Teleology’) are often neglected in commentaries on Hegel, James Kreines's essay in particular makes an important contribution.
Angelica Nuzzo's essay, which opens the Encyclopaedia section of the handbook and which outlines the conception of philosophy that emerges from an understanding of philosophy as encyclopaedia, is of interest too. Drawing on the common etymological root of encyclopaedia and cyclical, Nuzzo calls into question the often-assumed linear progression of Hegel's Encyclopaedia project. The Encyclopaedia, following its own etymology, displays, according to Nuzzo, a cyclical or circular structure. As is often the case in Hegel scholarship, little attention is paid to the Philosophy of Nature, which forms the second part of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Only one essay on this topic, namely Sebastian Rand's ‘Hegel's Philosophy of Nature’, is included in this volume. However, while the Philosophy of Nature is underrepresented, it is a positive surprise to find work on Hegel's ‘Anthropology’ included in this volume. Andreja Novakovic compellingly contextualizes Hegel's Encyclopaedia anthropology, comparing it to similar and contemporaneous projects, such as Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. The essay explains that Hegel's anthropology, unlike Kant's, does not neatly fit into the emerging field of philosophical anthropology. For this reason, while Hegel's anthropology has to be understood in the context of the emergence of anthropology, it cannot be understood through that lens alone.
In the concluding section, the essays ‘The American Reception of Hegel (1830–1930)’ and ‘Hegel's Revival in Analytic Philosophy’, which focus on the Pittsburgh School and the respective philosophies of Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell and Robert Brandom in their relation to Hegel, complement each other particularly well. By continental contrast, so to speak, James Gordon Finlayson's essay on the Frankfurt School gives an overview of Hegel's influence on Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse respectively. Throughout this section, it becomes apparent that Hegel's philosophy has travelled far and that it is still alive today, even if reconfigured in unexpected ways. Concluding in this way, the book seems to suggest that the task of the reader, too, is to take Hegel's thought elsewhere, that is to address—through a reading of Hegel's work—contemporary philosophical concerns. It is for this reason that the contributions on the reception of Hegel are among the most interesting ones. Moreover, by offering a critical commentary on Hegel's work, they pick up where the essays dedicated to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right and Lectures on the Philosophy of History in the sections on ‘Objective Spirit’ and ‘Absolute Spirit’ fall short.
While the essays on Objective and Absolute Spirit are rigorous in their expositions, they could have been more critical of the implications of Hegel's thought on the state, civil society and gendered distribution of labour, as well as of his Eurocentric and racist claims in his history of philosophy. Terry Pinkard's essay ‘Hegel's Philosophy of History as the Metaphysics of Agency’ is the first to engage with the deeply problematic dimensions of Hegel's notion of ‘Objective Spirit’. While Pinkard acknowledges the Eurocentrism of Hegel's philosophy of history, he does not address to what extent Hegel's racism, instead of being limited to the philosophy of history, might be more generally embedded in his social and political philosophy, as well as in his metaphysics and dialectic. In other words, can the concepts of civil society, dialectical sublation, freedom, etc., be read in abstraction from Hegel's Eurocentrism and racism? Or do we, in our reading of Hegel, also and simultaneously have to come to terms with modern European philosophy's entanglements in interconnected histories of colonialism, eurocentrism, and white supremacism? While Pinkard does not excuse Hegel's racism, he also does not further unpack it, but moves on swiftly to talk about what Hegel has to say more generally about socially and historically embedded agency.
Paul Redding, in his essay ‘Hegel's Lectures on the History of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy’ also addresses the fact that Hegel's treatment of the history of philosophy is Eurocentric. Again, this topic arguably deserved more time and attention. Redding redeems Hegel rather quickly, arguing that Hegel's position can be read as the expression of an approach to rationality that refuses to take the mind as a magical ingredient distinct from the physical, organic, sociocultural and historical forces that have otherwise made one the being one is. Hegel, accordingly, is a man of his time, but he, unlike others, gives us a philosophy that acknowledges this fact. Redding's comment that the history of Greek philosophy, and by implication the history of philosophy in general, begins with Thales and Ionian natural philosophy is moreover questionable. Books such as Peter Parks’ Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830 have demonstrated that the conception of the history of philosophy and its major benchmarks as beginning with the Greeks is inaccurate and needs to be re-thought. While Redding's emphasis on Hegel's understanding of ancient philosophy and its fate is illuminating, the question of Eurocentrism remains unanswered. This would not have to be a problem were there other essays dedicated to this question. This absence is unfortunate as there is an excellent and growing scholarship that includes, but is not limited to, the works of Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Robert Bernasconi, Susan Buck-Morss, Timothy Brenan, Enrique Dussel, as well as writers included in this volume, such as Stone and Rocío Zambrana.
What is missing in other words is an engagement with the reception history of Hegelian thought within critical theory (broadly construed). Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, critical race and queer theory borrows from Hegel, including his political writings, without excusing the misogyny, liberalism and racism intrinsic to his thought. The concluding section, in particular Shuangli Zhang's essay ‘Marx and Hegel’, and Alison Stone's analysis of Hegel and 20th-century French philosophy, is a welcome contribution for this reason. It is only with Stone and her analysis of Simone de Beauvoir's, Luce Irigaray's and Frantz Fanon's respective readings of Hegel that the vast and expansive feminist and post-colonial reception of Hegel comes to be addressed.
Stone raises a concern that is at the heart of a lot of feminist and post-colonial scholarship: that these works should not be included in commentary on the philosophical canon because, at first glance, they have little to do with the ‘actual Hegel’ (or Kant, or Spinoza, etc.). However, as Stone outlines, Beauvoir, Irigaray and Fanon's ideas have an intrinsic relation to those expressed by Hegel. Moreover, it is precisely by recasting Hegel's ideas that Beauvoir, Fanon and Irigaray have forged new and critical ideas about gender and race relations. The tradition of philosophy, though it acknowledges these figures and their contributions still underemphasises feminist and post-colonial scholarship and the extent to which Hegel's thought has travelled, not just to America and the UK but also to Eastern Europe and the former colonies of European empires.
Feminist, queer, indigenous and decolonial liberation struggles are the topic of Sybol Cook Anderson's essay ‘Liberalism and Recognition,’ which concludes the collection. However, this essay marks a missed opportunity in addressing these concerns. This is because while Cook Anderson mentions a number of liberation struggles, she does not substantially engage with the literature that addresses these concerns. With the exception of Nancy Fraser, there is no mention of feminist, queer and critical race theory. Rather, the essay foregrounds the works of John Rawls, Charles Taylor and the American liberal philosophical tradition. The engagement with these authors is rigorous and interesting, yet it remains puzzling why Cook Anderson would make this the starting point of her analysis. Since Frankfurt School, feminist, queer and postcolonial theory have gone to great pains to argue that liberalism is not an answer to relevant liberation struggles. Much is lost by centring only voices that argue the opposite. Moreover, in a rather anti-Hegelian fashion, Cook Anderson essentializes the identities she addresses. By listing a number of liberation struggles (women's, anti-colonial, indigenous, LGBTQ, disability struggles) without further explaining their origins and particularities, these remain ahistorical and undifferentiated from each other. By contrast, an account of how Hegel critically questions all forms of essentialism and offers the tools to analyse how social identities come to be historically and politically constructed would be more in keeping with the Hegelian tradition, not to mention more productive.
Overall and despite some noticeable oversights, the handbook is successful as it does not attempt to give an easy and complete summary of Hegel's views. The aim of the introduction is accomplished, which is that the book is an exercise in learning how to read Hegel and, by extension, learning how to read philosophically. The essays in this volume engage their readers in a reading process that aims at being interactive. The handbook is a tool and yet it keeps alive what Catherine Malabou in The Future of Hegel has described as the ‘plasticity of Hegel’. This plasticity of the Hegelian corpus is enabled by including not only established but also younger scholars of Hegel, not all of whom are from an Anglo-American background. Nonetheless, an Anglo-German focus remains. As has been argued, more contributions from scholars outside of Europe and the US would have been helpful in addressing vital issues of Eurocentrism. Another, additional handbook—Hegel beyond Europe—would be a welcome supplement to an otherwise cohesive and rich collection.
