“Metaphysics is the form of philosophy which takes concepts as its objects,” Theodor Adorno says in his 1965 lectures, published under the title Metaphysics: Concept and Problems. Adorno meant metaphysics “in a strong sense, in which [concepts] are always given precedence over, and are assigned to a higher order of being than, existing things or the facts subsumed under them.” I believe it is in this strong sense that Eric Lee Goodfield defends metaphysics and the metaphysical foundations of political thought. In his daring and intelligent book, Hegel and the Metaphysical Frontiers of Philosophy, Goodfield presents Hegel’s dialectic as the great synthesis of metaphysics and political philosophy. Adorno ultimately defends a different metaphysics—and a different Hegelianism, termed “negative dialectics”—against positivism on the one hand and Heideggerian ontology on the other. But I begin with Adorno to emphasize a point upon which he and Goodfield are in absolute agreement: For both of them, the positivist program represents a revolt against concepts and an assault on Hegel’s speculative procedure. Returning to Hegel is an integral part of an anti-positivist agenda.

Goodfield sees the intellectual origins of the behavioral revolution in the anti-Hegelian movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. The first part of Hegel and the Metaphysical Frontiers of Philosophy presents a history of political science as an extended repudiation of Hegel. Goodfield traces this history from Comte and Feuerbach and Marx to William James, George Caitlin, David Easton, and rational choice theory. The story is a bit sweeping and doesn’t pay much attention to the substantial differences between thinkers; what matters is that each rejects Hegel—and Hegel’s metaphysics, in particular. That materialism may be something quite apart from empiricism and still further from positivism doesn’t figure in a narrative that turns primarily on the poverty of anti-Hegelian philosophy, whatever its form. Goodfield sees the marginalization of philosophical inquiry in the discipline, emblematized by the behavioral revolution, as a direct result of this consistent anti-Hegelianism. “Against this background,” Goodfield writes, “we must seek to reinvest political thought with an appreciation of the larger context of philosophical inquiry and tradition which was and continues to be eclipsed and diminished by the lingering methodological hygienics of positivism in its empiricist, quantitative, and logical forms” (64). The return to Hegel’s political philosophy and the explicit embrace of its underlying metaphysics is Goodfield’s program for a counter-revolution in political science.

Goodfield’s history concludes with considerations on the twentieth-century “revisionist” approaches to Hegel, which Goodfield sees as furthering the long assault on the speculative system. These are the thinkers—Charles Taylor, Allen Wood, Steven Smith—who respond to the positivist challenge by divesting Hegel’s political philosophy of its metaphysical commitments. Such interpretive procedures betray Hegel’s intentions and “paralyze” the dialectic—which is to say, they transform the system into a descriptive legitimation of liberal constitutionalism. I found especially welcome this attempt to amplify a philosophical voice in Hegel that was neither descriptive nor conventionally “normative”—indeed, a voice in Hegel that challenges that very distinction itself. For Goodfield, political science has become a discipline that prohibits asking big questions. And political theorists have largely followed the lead, “capitulating with scientific imperatives so as to purchase a seat—and meal—at the disciplinary table” (66). In both its descriptive or normative guises, political theory works in accord with the demands of the larger discipline. It silences its inner speculative tendencies. Metaphysics is a dissident discourse for Goodfield, as much as it is the true foundations of political philosophy.

While I share the desire to work in a scholarly discipline that dares to ask big questions, I am not sure that these are always metaphysical questions or that big questions are the only ones worth asking. Where Goodfield approaches the suggestion that political theory ought to become metaphysics or that the vexing questions in politics are really but conceptual questions with their resolution in Hegel’s Logic, I don’t know that the result is really a more robust mode of scientific inquiry. It’s also curious that Francis Fukuyama is nowhere mentioned in this book, especially in an intellectual history of the discipline in which Hegel plays such a pivotal part. Hegel’s importance in the discipline is both overstated and understated.

The second part of the book, which sometimes reads as a different book entirely, offers an exegetical tour through the 1830 Encyclopedia Logic (hereafter Logic) and the Philosophy of Right. Goodfield reads the Logic in terms of key political-theoretical questions—universality and particularity, being and appearance, form and content, quality and quantity. And he reads the Philosophy of Right in terms of a “universalist logic” at the heart of his political theory of freedom. Whereas the first part of Hegel and the Metaphysical Frontiers of Philosophy presents a large sweep of nineteenth-and twentieth-century intellectual history, the second part pursues a patient and careful reading of two primary texts.

The book’s second part is of tremendous interest to Hegel specialists, but it doesn’t really deliver on the project intimated in the first part. Put differently, Goodfield reintroduces readers to the Hegelian system, showing how the Logic is the systematic framework for resolving the metaphysical problem of universals in Hegel’s political philosophy, but it is not clear what big questions are addressed by this clarification of concepts. Further, when Hegel is taken not as a social and historical thinker, but as a speculative logician and metaphysician, do political questions get transformed into questions of logic? Is this really an antidote to positivism? Still, Goodfield offers a lucid and careful reconstruction of very difficult texts. Readers will get little sense of the major debates surrounding the Logic, but they will get a good overview of Hegel’s great work. The chapter on the Philosophy of Right contains many insights, as well. Goodfield pursues an argument for the “logico-political synergy” in Hegel’s theory of the state.

Goodfield’s handling of Hegel is not only deferential, but also defensive. He insists that reading be guided only by “Hegel’s overt intentions” and that anything less is “eviscerating Hegel’s authorship and appropriating his thought to our own ends” (201). He argues against interpretations that “run wholly against the grain of Hegel’s thought and purpose,” as if these are not precisely the interpretations likely to open new metaphysical frontiers for political theory (172). This book is steeped in the Anglo-American debates about Hegel, and its strengths are there. But other thinkers and traditions, no less invested in the dialectic, assume an altogether different attitude toward the system and its author. For instance, Goodfield says nothing with respect to a tradition of radical political thought that finds footing in The Phenomenology of Spirit. I wondered how a metaphysical reading of Hegel’s political philosophy relates to the split between Right and Left Hegelians—or if we are led to rethink this distinction altogether. Goodfield does turn briefly in conclusion to how his approach allows us to transcend the Anglo-American and Continental divide in contemporary philosophy, though it’s also true that everything about the preceding pages seems to reinforce it.

Hegel and the Metaphysical Frontiers of Political Theory is part of a growing body of Hegel scholarship that speaks for the metaphysics of the system. Political theorists will especially appreciate Goodfield’s focus on political concepts and questions, where a speculative procedure comes back down to Earth. This reader was especially grateful for the occasion to rethink Hegel contra political science.