The result is a long book divided into two almost-equal parts: “Dialectics: History and Meaning” and “Libertarian Crossroads: The Case of Murray Rothbard.” The book ends with a brief chapter surveying recent exemplars of dialectical libertarianism and a briefer epilogue expressing the hope of continuing this new way of thinking. Sciabarra's approach in both parts verges on the encyclopedic: He presents a topic or thinker by encompassing a wide range of secondary sources or alternative positions (or both). Whether the topic is Marx on the dialectic or Rothbard on the origins of the state, he wishes to report almost every possible opinion that might be germane, and his bibliography (48 pages) shows it. He responds to critics of his past two books on points relevant to this one; he appends explanatory or exploratory footnotes that mention interesting, significant, or tangential issues; and he includes many footnotes thanking colleagues for helpful comments or communications, implying a community of scholars and interested parties working together on a novel but important political undertaking. No one can doubt the amount of his scholarship, his commitment to his topic, his generosity of spirit, and his desire to encompass as many opinions as possible.

The result is a hefty book. But I kept wishing that the book were twice as long, so that Sciabarra could have made informative arguments about every issue he mentions, or—and better—half as long, so that he could have focused on the central points and developed them with careful analysis and examples. I also kept thinking that Sciabarra has written two books—one scholarly, the other hoping to influence libertarian ideas—that are melded uneasily into one volume.

In Part One, his first three chapters present a history of dialectical thinkers and his fourth ends with a definition of dialectics (p. 173) and a 15-page “unpacking” of the definition; the chapters are a treasure trove of statements about dialectical methodology. How readers evaluate these chapters will probably vary widely; I do not find them illuminating. In his treatment of Hegel, for instance, Sciabarra uses all sorts of secondary sources—late Victorian Hegel scholars, contemporary ones, those who use Hegel for their own ends such as Fukuyama, and economic historians such as Heilbroner—treating their remarks with equal weight. On the other hand, he does not touch on the masterful discussions of Hegelian dialectic in Michael Forster's Hegel and Stepticism (1989), Charles Taylor's Hegel (1975), or George Armstrong Kelly's Hegel's Retreat from Eleusis (1978). Moreover, most of what Sciabarra says derives from what others say about Hegel's dialectic, not from analysis of what Hegel himself says; and when Sciabarra does refer to Hegel's famous dialectics of master–slave (pp. 71–2) and the opening triad of the Logic [being, nothing, becoming (pp. 67–8)], his brevity means that he necessarily omits what many would see as crucial: He mentions only work and satisfaction in the master–slave relation and, oddly, labels “becoming” as a “halfway-house” between being and nothing. Hegel's stress on the dialectic as concrete, his emphasis on negation and, especially, “determinate negation” (mentioned in passing on p. 64, note 26), his refusal to speculate about the future and his argument that freedom can only be comprehended as existent in the present (not posited in some future)—all these are almost completely ignored. As with Hegel, so throughout Part One: many sources, used (or ignored) without apparent discrimination, few references to (and little analysis of) original texts, and even fewer examples of the dialectic at work. The result, however, is mixed: While I find the resulting definition disconnected from the history and too general and vague (so that many thinkers are dialecticians by Sciabarra's definition without knowing it), some might find the sheer volume of information useful, and Sciabarra himself might well reply that he wishes to present a workable sense of dialectics for libertarian thought and so gives statements that lead to defining it in terms that can be readily understood and easily applied, even if unsatisfactory for scholars.

I have the same types of problems with Part Two. Sciabarra's wide-ranging and extensive presentation of Rothbard's libertarianism is doubtless the best secondary treatment of the subject, including both sympathetic understanding and severe critique—though much of the critique focuses on Rothbard's (nondialectical) dualism. Reading Sciabarra raised for me a further set of questions. Can a philosophy of origins, like Rothbard's, which presents a hypothetical original condition containing central continuing norms, ever be effectively dialectical (because the central norms are historically unchanging from the original condition)? Can a philosophy built on a Manichean dualism between the good market and the evil state be dialectical? Following Hegel's insights (Philosophy of Right, Sections 242–6), does the libertarian tendency to talk about a free market without mentioning wage labor or poverty involve ignoring essential contexts or aspects of the market? Of these three queries, Sciabarra does not address the first; he spells out dualism (pp. 344–6) and asserts that for Rothbard the state will be replaced by voluntary cooperation, but does not show the dynamics or logic for this change (see pp. 346–7); and he mentions and buries wage labor in a two-sentence footnote (p. 259, note 34). Since especially my last query addresses dialectics as “context-keeping,” Sciabarra's informal core definition of dialectics, his refusal to address the issue is as disconcerting as his willingness to mention it. In short, this book is not a scholarly or analytic discussion of dialectics or a complete dialectical critique of Rothbard's libertarianism. But perhaps it was meant to be not a scholarly work but a book dedicated to reshaping libertarian theory and ideology. Total Freedom suggests that relational, contextual, and dynamic (i.e., dialectical) methods might strengthen some of the weak points of libertarian theory and might overcome some of the unpopular gaps in libertarian ideology. So it should be read by libertarians and by those who study Rothbard's thought. Even beyond the project of dialectical libertarianism, Sciabarra's book might provoke some thinkers to look again at dialectics—but they will have to go beyond his book if they wish to make sense of dialectical thinking.