Few concepts in philosophy have as many meanings, and invite as many types of accounts, as that of freedom. Todd Hedrick's splendid study focuses on what he calls ‘lived’ or ‘social’ freedom. The idea behind this notion, which has its modern roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Hegel, but which can also be found in Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School, is that one is free when one is ‘reconciled’ with one's own society. As Hedrick explains, being ‘reconciled’ means that one is fully ‘at home’ in one's own society, though in a rationally transparent manner. Central to rational transparency and at-homeness is the notion that selfhood and practical identity, the commitments, values and aspirations that shape one's sense of direction in life and provide determinacy to one's reasoning, are intimately connected to, and dependent upon, one's social existence. Significantly, one's social existence includes the institutions and traditions with which one identifies. In the absence of all those collective achievements and settings, the individual cannot be viewed as free.

Hedrick provides a rich rational reconstruction of how freedom in this sense has evolved from Rousseau to figures such as Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls and Axel Honneth. However, building a case for the contemporary prospects of such a view, he also provides his own assessments.

Opposing the primarily ‘contemplative’ view of reconciliation found in Hegel yet sympathizing with significant strands of his philosophy of right, Hedrick claims that freedom becomes possible when civil society and the state (i.e. particular and universal interest), harmonize successfully. While in need of individual, reflective rational endorsement à la Kant, social freedom is principally participatory freedom; it could not exist without participation in the right kind of ‘freedom-enabling’ institutions. Rather than a utopian ideal, or a mere object of thought, freedom requires no more than the rationally acknowledged existence of a ‘well-ordered enough’ society.

With regard to the Frankfurt School tradition specifically, the concept of reification plays an important role in Hedrick's reconstruction. By presenting the subject with features that serve to alienate or distance it from its ability to achieve a well-grounded social identity, reification sets limits to social freedom. Much of Hedrick's complex discussion here hinges on identifying the nature of the actual interplay between, on the one hand, various aspirations to social freedom and, on the other, processes or mechanisms of reification that constrain such aspirations.

Hedrick's overall view seems to be that some degree of reification will always be inescapable. The desire for perfect transparency—the perfectly just society—which he sees in parts of the Marxist tradition, may threaten to make the concept of reconciliation indeterminate and, for the purposes of political action, inapplicable to existing social formations. Given the putative unavoidability of reification, Hedrick thus advocates the cultivation of irony. Rather than responding to disappointment by engaging in some wholesale dismissal of one's social practices, including the legal order undergirding them, the ironist accepts freedom's inherent ambiguity. While one may not be able to hope for the full realization of our commitments, one should at least keep striving and be critical and creative in the way one relates to whatever it is that systematically places strictures on our circumstances.

It is easy to understand why Hedrick finds this ironist policy to make sense. Utopianism of the classical modern form seems to be deeply problematic: it is an exhausted and compromised endeavour. Yet for what specific kinds of proposals would Hedrick's reformist disposition advocate? How radical is his view? He finds that Honneth's theory of recognition is insufficiently attentive to the possibility that acts of recognition may themselves be reified. Therefore, so Hedrick's argument goes here, Honnethian recognition, rather than being conducive to freedom, may serve to hamper the individual's pursuit of freedom. Hedrick finds Rawls's view overly legalistic and potentially blind to social pathologies emerging from ‘the broader institutions and practices of socialisation’ (146). He seems largely sympathetic with how Marx and, in particular, the early Frankfurt School point to capitalist exploitation and commodification as explanatory of pathological modes of subject-formation. Thus, Hegel's rather sanguine view of capitalism as a liberal space of free exchange cannot be accepted uncritically. While detecting great promise in Habermas's discourse model, in particular at the level of law, he objects to his socially oriented model of ego-formation, siding with Adorno's view that the communicatively structured ‘incorporation’ (238) of individuals into systems of action may all too easily be tantamount to no more than a repressive semblance of autonomy. Indeed, Hedrick finds Adorno's culture industry thesis, suggesting the existence of something like total systemic integration, to be ‘substantially on target’ (249).

Hedrick has many worries about modern societies, and in particular capitalist societies: they incessantly create spaces of ‘false reconciliation’, contexts of self-delusion in which the level of reification goes unrecognized, thereby threatening to undermine our most well-intended attempts to achieve lived freedom. Yet despite these criticisms of modernity, Hedrick does not call for any radical social change. He is a reformist, and, rather than articulate a radical critical theory of modern society, Hedrick recommends cultivating an ironic distance that allows for some types of immanent critique. He believes we should pay close attention to the general conditions of socialization such that we may be clear about the extent to which they embody contingency and incompleteness.

However, given his considerable attentiveness to the problem of reification, I am surprised not to find any evidence of a commitment to deeper structural change. Hedrick repeatedly points to how the calculative-instrumental rationality inherent to commodity exchange threatens to undermine any sense of mutual respect grounded in norms and ethical life, infiltrating both democratic politics and the law. Yet, Hedrick, in effect, seems to side with Hegel's view that pathologies associated with capitalist exchange—for example, its systemically induced creation of poverty—can be contained. Yet if he does not see a viable alternative to capitalism, should he not, by virtue of the logic of his own position, call for at least some kind of overhaul of contemporary capitalism? Would he perhaps find the distinction between Anglo-American capitalism and ‘Rhein-style,’ continental European and Scandinavian capitalism relevant? If so, how, specifically, would that affect his overall argument? In my view, the question of lived freedom cannot be disconnected from the ongoing political debates over the role of government in securing welfare and opportunity, and the extent to which—and, if so, how—the widespread neoliberal consensus, with its long-standing monopoly on the discourse of freedom, might be resisted.

Hedrick takes a special interest in the legal realm, orienting his reading of Hegel, Marx, Rawls and Habermas quite decisively in that direction. Surely, any account of social freedom must take the legal and constitutional order very seriously? It is, after all, legislation which more than anything else is supposed to extend the individual's will such as to attain genuine universality. However, as Hedrick also seems to acknowledge, the juridical and thus formal focus of much neo-Kantian political theory may risk ignoring issues pertaining to socialization. This is pointed out by Hedrick in his analysis of Honneth's theory, according to which issues pertaining to socialization are always going to be a central component of freedom.

With this in mind, I wonder why the category of the family in Hegel's Philosophy of Right is hardly mentioned in Hedrick's book. The emphasis throughout his analysis of Hegel is on civil society and the state. Marriage, for Hegel, since it is grounded in feeling and love, suffers from the limitations of contingency and particularity. Yet the more romantic side of Hegel recognizes marriage as a form of dialectically-mediated freedom. It seems to me that a more dialectical and self-critical Hegel could have emerged here had Hedrick paid more attention to this initial formation of Hegelian ethical life.

I mention this because Hedrick, overall, appears quite restrained in his appreciation of Hegel's picture of social life in modernity: he claims that it seems deeply unprepared for the challenges with which modern forms of existence are confronted. It is, Hedrick points out, prosaic and potentially evacuated of deep meaning, thereby implying that Hegel's picture of social life in modernity suffers from some form of one-sidedness. In the face of problems of ‘mass participation, secularism and religious pluralism, alienation, class conflict, and poverty’ (52), all Hegel's view is able to give us is ‘a coalition of bureaucrats, businessmen and old-world aristocrats, and a figure-head monarch’ (52). Clearly, the problems that started to bother Max Weber and later Adorno relating to Sinnverlust beset Hegel's state as well. Since these are problems that only emerge in Hedrick's narrative with Georg Lukács, it seems to me that having introduced them more thoroughly when discussing Hegel could have given his book a clearer thread to follow. I am not claiming, of course, that love or, for that matter, marriage, is the only relevant solution to dissatisfactions related to reification. My point is only that there is a long-standing discourse right under the surface here, one that from the Romantics onwards, and with pervasive implications for how art is understood in this tradition, begins to consider how expressive freedom, related to both cognitive and recognitive achievements oriented towards the exercise of emotionally laden and discriminatory capacities of human judgement, must be an integral part of what may count as lived freedom.

I must admit to being slightly puzzled by the prominence accorded to Rawls in this book. The abstract normativism of Rawls seems indeed to depoliticize freedom. While the Hegelian thinker encourages the politically inclined philosopher to study history, social and economic institutions, and the real world of politics, being open to possible alternatives to the present existing state of affairs, Rawls builds his theory around an appeal to a rather static structure of formal justice (or ‘justice as fairness’). To be sure, Hedrick point outs that Rawls does not see social reality as a ‘brute historical given’ (107). It is, Hedrick writes, for Rawls, ‘a medium through which we collectively acquire a sense of ourselves as free and equal, and strive to actualise these values in social life’ (107). This particular claim by Rawls, Hedrick infers, means that he is Hegelian in a ‘deep way’. The way in which Rawls works that particular claim out, however, does not at all seem Hegelian. While he eventually did move away from the formal universalism of A Theory of Justice to a view more sensitive to achievements associated with political participation, he continued throughout his career to be focused on the ideality of highly abstract, formal principles.

Many of the figures that Hedrick discusses have been sceptical of the concept of reconciliation. While Habermas and Honneth, for example, associate reconciliation exclusively with Hegel's high idealism (which they both reject), Adorno relates it mostly to some false or delusional property of the social order, capable of screening real tensions and contradictions. However, Hedrick's use of it is different. For him, it is a necessary component of what he understands as social freedom. Involving both a form of rationally motivated acceptance and a concrete and situated element of participation in normatively structured institutions, reconciliation has what we may call a ‘subjective’ and an ‘objective’ component.

Yet does Hedrick need this concept? Given the ironic distance that he predicts we must cultivate in order to obtain a critical purchase on our own practices, it seems that reconciliation can never be more than a regulative ideal. Adorno thinks we can only sense what reconciliation would amount to negatively, via an authentic experience of its absence. While Adorno's particular view about reconciliation is extreme, I worry about the highly affirmative connotations of reconciliation, which ultimately serve to weaken the very rationale for conducting social criticism. Without such criticism, a theory of social freedom could easily be interpreted as conservative. Perhaps the degree of affirmation a given social formation deserves will always have to be a historically contingent matter.

Hedrick's study is exemplary. It successfully reconstructs a very deep and rich tradition of social philosophy. Yet it also manages to illuminate important dimensions of our contemporary political options and challenges. I predict that it will find a large and grateful audience.