Robert Brandom's A Spirit of Trust, his book on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, has been a long time coming—several decades, according to the book's afterword. But, Brandom has rewarded our patience with a meticulous, self-avowedly idiosyncratic, yet ultimately exciting take on Hegel's ‘Bildungsroman of modernity’ (1).

There is no way to do justice to this enormous book in a short review. I'll confine myself to explaining Brandom's reading of the Phenomenology and its rationale, and then evaluate the book's philosophical contribution in the light of its aims. I cannot touch on much detail, but I hope to get the big picture in focus. Nor will I critique Brandom's interpretation of Hegel; this has been ably done elsewhere, in other reviews and critical notices, as well as in a fine collection of essays edited by Gilles Bouché (Reading Brandom: On A Spirit of Trust). Instead, I shall focus on what I think makes this book valuable and what its virtues are as a reading of the Phenomenology. I set aside the question of whether one should endorse Brandom's reading of Hegel.

A Spirit of Trust belongs to the genre of Anglophone Hegel interpretation forged in the 1980s and 1990s by Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard and Paul Redding (among others). This reading eschews the old picture of Hegel as an extravagantly metaphysico-religious spirit-monist, instead seeing him as a thoroughgoing post-Kantian who aims to complete Kant's Copernican turn in philosophy, because transcendental idealism did not bring philosophical thought from the shadows of dogmatic metaphysics despite Kant's revolutionary efforts. Brandom's unique contribution to this analytic post-Kantian interpretive tradition is narrowly focused; it is a ‘severely selective’ reading of the Phenomenology involving ‘real restrictions’, but which is oriented to ‘an axial, organizing topic’ of Hegel's book (1). Brandom does not claim to offer the only correct or productive reading of the PS (1). Rather, he contends that what is valuable about his reading is that it makes explicit some very important Hegelian ideas which are applicable to contemporary philosophical concerns. Be that as it may, there are important parts of the Phenomenology he effectively ignores in his commentary, namely large parts of ‘Reason’, ‘Spirit’, and ‘Religion’ in particular. While this omission will surely offend some Hegel scholars, at the very least Brandom is honest about what he is and what he is not doing in his book. As such, no one can justifiably say that they were not warned.

Brandom's ‘axial topic’ is conceptual content. Somewhat anachronistically, this focus reads Hegel as engaging in ‘semantics’. This is meant in a broad sense, where ‘conceptual content’ is more or less interchangeable with ‘intentionality’ or ‘meaning’. The ‘Ariadne's thread […] to mark out a path through Hegel's maze’ (3) that Brandom traces out is a set of ideas about what it is for subjects to have ‘determinately contentful attitudes, of thinking, believing, meaning, or intending anything’ (615) at all. As it will turn out, according to Brandom, Hegel's ideas in this regard have momentous import: it is no dry semantic theory but rather a ‘semantics with an edifying intent’ (32). Brandom's Hegel thinks that ‘understanding the nature of the conceptual contents […] we bind ourselves by in our discursive activity is to […] educate and motivate us to be better people: magnanimous people’ (32).

More particularly, his reading of the Phenomenology is a ‘pragmatist semantic reading’ (11); while perhaps doubling-down on anachronism, Brandom thinks it ‘not […] inapt or inaccurate’ (3) to make sense of Hegel's position in these terms. It is a pragmatist reading because he takes Hegel to say that ‘what confers conceptual content on acts, attitudes and linguistic expressions is the role they play in the practices their subjects engage in’ (3). But practices are not only synchronic but diachronic—they have a history. It is their historical nature, and so the historical nature of Geist, that will prove crucial to Brandom's Hegel's ‘pragmatist semantic’ (and absolute idealist) story.

How does this story go? Brandom's reading of Hegel has three parts, and this is reflected in the organization of the book. Part One is about semantics and epistemology (covering the Phenomenology's ‘Introduction’ and the chapters that make up ‘Consciousness’). Brandom's specific concern here is on articulating the conditions for there to be conceptual contents that are adequate for knowledge of the world, namely that both minds and the world are conceptually structured according to a ‘non-psychological conception of the conceptual’ (50) in which conceptual relations are relations of material incompatibility and consequence. It turns out that such a semantics requires institution by self-conscious subjects. This is where Part Two picks up the baton, as illustrated in Brandom's explication of Hegel's normative pragmatics that centres the discursive exchanges between self-conscious subjects engaging in normative practices of (mutual) recognition (‘Self-Consciousness’). The specific details, especially in chapter nine, go beyond Hegel's text. Nonetheless, they display, in novel, fine-grained detail, just how Hegel's account of mutual recognition is supposed to lead to the institution of contentful statuses and attitudes and the ‘synthesis of social substance by relations of reciprocal recognition’ (246).

Once self-consciousnesses are on the scene, reason arrives as well in the form of agency. As Hegel writes, ‘[r]eason is purposive activity’ (§22). Brandom reads the ‘Reason’ chapter as offering an account of the joint determination, by intentional agents and their community, of the content of the conceptual norms by which we bind ourselves through action in the world (with judgement showing up as a special case). The nature of this determination of contents in rational agency is the beating heart of the Phenomenology, because it shows the importance of the historical and recollective dimension of the determination of conceptual content in the activities of Geist. Part Three is, therefore, titled ‘Recollecting the Ages of Spirit’, and amounts to Brandom's take on Hegel's ‘Spirit’ chapter. Here, he outlines the ‘traditional pre-modern’, ‘current modern’ and ‘future post-modern ages’ of Geist. It is the last of these, the Age of Trust, which Hegel shows us that we have a duty to create in order to fulfil the obligations of semantic self-consciousness.

What is the Age of Trust? It is only by instituting normative structures adequate to the historical, recollective form of rationality—Vernunft rather than Verstand—that we will live up to the semantic self-consciousness we already implicitly endorse when we take ourselves to be rational discursive beings. To this end, the ‘punchline’ or ‘final lesson’ of Hegel's book is that to live up to that commitment, we must ‘adopt generous recognitive attitudes of reciprocal confession and recollective forgiveness’ (615). In other words, given that persons are discursive rational beings, when one acknowledges and attributes conceptual content to one's thoughts and deeds (and those of one's peers), one undertakes a commitment to institute a structure of mutual recognition that has the form of confession and forgiveness. One confesses the shortcomings of one's recollective determinations of the conceptual content of the norms by which we govern ourselves, and one petitions for forgiveness for those shortcomings and commits to forgive the confessions of discursive inadequacy of all those others we recognize. This structure of these interlocked practices is thus governed by trust. Importantly, the type of trust in question here is operative not just synchronically in our communities, but necessarily diachronically over time, too. We must take it that those who came before us were trying to determine the contents of the same norms that we are trying to determine as well; we forgive them their trespasses as we hope that those who come after us will forgive us ours, when they in turn come to evaluate our attempts at the recollective determination of the contents of those norms (635).

So, in the activities of speaking and doing, we undertake a commitment to usher in the third age of Spirit, the Age of Trust, where we all ‘engage in the ideal […] recognitive practices that are structured by trust—a commitment to practical magnanimity that is implicit in talking and acting at all’ (32). The apparent initial focus on ‘semantics’, then, turns out to lead us quite far and wide—all the way to the historical and future development of the normative social practices and institutions of mutual recognition of our fellow geistig beings.

While much of this is recognizably Hegelian, Brandom's book is very much a ‘strong reading’ (in his Doktorvater Richard Rorty's sense) of Hegel's text. However, as I said above, Brandom is upfront about this. He notes that he is courting ‘a special danger’, and perhaps even displaying ‘dangerous hubris’: his reading may completely miss the mark in being at all an account of what Hegel said (8). Nonetheless, Brandom thinks that his strong reading is worth the risk: so long as his reading can stand up to the bits of the text he marshals in assembling it, then the effort to ‘make explicit the most important lessons Hegel has to teach us’ about these topics will be worth it, ‘so to improve the expressive power of the metaconcepts that articulate our […] self-consciousness’ (8). The book is, itself, a ‘recollective confession’ and ‘a trusting recognitive petition for forgiveness by more capable readers—readers, ideally, expressively empowered by whatever this reading does manage to reveal’ (2). In the end, even if not exactly Hegel, Brandom's strong reading is not not Hegel, especially as his unique perspective illuminates some of the darker twists and turns in ‘Hegel's maze’.

Regardless of this, I think anyone interested in Hegel and the Phenomenology, and anyone interested in seeing Brandom explicitly develop what many suspected was implicit in his philosophical system all along—a Habermasian discourse ethics-cum-politics—should read A Spirit of Trust. Further, the book's size and subject matter should not deter potential readers who have yet to understand why Anglo-American philosophers have been turning anew to Hegel in excitement rather than dread or ridicule. If nothing else, Brandom shows us, in every chapter, how Hegel's ideas speak to us now—they are not arcane dusty relics, but have as much to teach us and inspire us any other canonical work in the history of philosophy.

In sum, A Spirit of Trust is undoubtedly a great if idiosyncratic book, as difficult but as rewarding as Hegel's equally idiosyncratic original. It will be sure to inspire many worthwhile avenues of inquiry and argument in the already blossoming Hegel renaissance. But whether it will have the enduring influence of the original is up to the geistig beings of the future, and Brandom will have to trust that they will find a way to make its spirit explicit in their own time.