Jean-François Kervégan's latest book deals with what is likely to be the most investigated and controversial piece of Hegel's philosophy, namely his theory of objective spirit, and more precisely its deep Leitmotiv, the identification of actual and rational as expressed in the Doppelsatz from the Preface to the Philosophy of Right. The Actual and the Rational: Hegel and Objective Spirit consists of four parts, preceded by a dense Preface and Prologue, and followed by an equally dense Epilogue. For the sake of exposition, I will leave the discussion of Preface, Prologue and Epilogue to the end.

The first part opens with Kervégan maintaining that ‘because of its very abstraction, abstract law is judged positively by Hegel to the extent that it is indispensable for adequately thinking the concept of law in a way that accounts for social and political modernity and history as the history of the actualization and concretization of law’ (1). This claim is embedded in Kervégan's general, important methodological insistence on the ‘progressive-regressive’ character of Aufhebung, ‘ratified’ by the Philosophy of Right (341). This insistence is particularly relevant in the first part exactly because it contributes to a demonstration of the ‘positivity’ and fullness of the starting moments of the philosophy of right (abstract right or law, person, contract, etc.), which interpreters have often downplayed in favour of the later moments, most notably the state. In this way, Kervégan not only dismisses once more the old yet resistant paradigm of Hegel as a supporter of an almighty ethical state. He also convincingly questions the widespread assumption of a strong anti-legalism on Hegel's side. Hegel's broad, stratified conception of law (or right) is in the first place a way out of modern political philosophy's abstract dilemma between naturalism (nature is the universal foundation of law and norms) and historicism (laws and norms are always part of a unique historical and cultural tradition). Not despite, but based just on the initial moment of formal, universalizing abstraction, law and rights ‘cover the entire set of processes by which freedom is objectivized’ (25), so much so that ‘there can be no freedom against law’ (36). Thus, while abstract law as such is not historic, its actualization is an historical accomplishment (and a late one at that), namely the construction of a non-political social space expressing and enabling personal freedom and the rule of law.

The second part of the book is dedicated to Hegel's theory of the non-political space of the social (civil society), focusing on its philosophically problematic relationship with the political (the state). Based on a careful historical analysis of the ‘discovery’ (116) of both civil society and of the opposition between citoyen and bourgeois, Kervégan argues that ‘Hegel can be considered an intellectual precursor of the theory of the Rechtsstaat if it is true that this is less a theory of the state than a vision of how it must take into account, in its practices and institutional configuration, the new autonomy of the social. But Hegel was also the first critic of the theoretical grounds of this doctrine even before it found its classical expression’ (148). On the one hand, Hegel recognizes that state of law essentially means legally guaranteed respect of fundamental subjective rights (181), and hence the delimitation of a non-political social space. On the other hand, unlike liberalism or libertarianism, for Hegel the positive functioning and even the very existence of this apolitical space (and of society as a whole) necessarily require the political moment of the state. And yet, ultimately, not even Hegel's state can perform its own final reconciliation with the society: ‘The actuality of an ethical reconciliation of objectivity and subjectivity—which indeed seems to be the end toward which all conceptualization of objective spirit is aimed—ultimately requires a metaethical and metaobjective guarantee’ (205), to be found first in the philosophy of history and then, more in general, in the absolute spirit.

Thus, in the last two parts the structural tensions of modernity and the possible political responses to them come to the fore. In Part III, Kervégan addresses Hegel's attitude to democracy and liberalism in a deeply probing, thoughtful fashion. While Hegel certainly opposed democracy, Kervégan shows, among other things through an accurate distinction between ancient and modern democracy as well as through a comparison between Hegel and Tocqueville, that this was not due to an unqualified reactionary distrust of the principle of equal representation. On the contrary, in the post-revolutionary context, Hegel strove for a middle ground opposing both the one-person one-vote rule and restoration demands. In other terms, Hegel opposed both ‘democratic egalitarianism and selective oligarchy’ (266), which, in his eyes, both hinder the actualization of the modern principle of subjective freedom, in so far as ‘they share the erroneous belief that the general will is exclusively formed by the agglomeration of individual preferences’ (266). For Kervégan, what Hegel contests is ultimately the idea that the individual's freedom is actual independently of that individual's embeddedness in a social fabric, which at the same time enables and is enabled by the rationality of the state. Hence, while sharing many premises with liberal discourse, Hegel's critique of democracy also results in a criticism of the former. This, however, not in the sense of a rejection of the core values of liberalism, but, on the contrary, because for Hegel a purely negative delimitation of the social (and economic) space from the political space prevents the very actualization of those core values. Therefore, despite his apparently conservative philosophical preference for constitutional monarchy, Hegel's liberal critique of modern democracy and liberalism contains for the contemporary reader, as Kervégan aptly highlights, stimulating ‘elements that anticipate what, much later, would be called the crisis of representative democracy’ (208).

Part IV of the book principally focuses on the problem of the reconciliation between subjectivity and objectivity (and, of course, between rational and actual). Kervégan meticulously reconstructs the problem, and localizes the space of its solution in the doctrine of ‘weak institutionalism’ (282). Broadly, institutionalism implies that the presence of social institutions transcending the individual is a necessary condition for the actualization of the latter's autonomous will. However, against Dieter Henrich's thesis of Hegel's strong institutionalism, unacceptable for our time because of the limited space it concedes to the freedom of the subject, Kervégan re-evaluates, also through a focused reading of Hegel's critique of Kantian morality, the fertility of the moral point of view (183). Thus, he speaks rather of a weak institutionalism, ‘meaning that it does not necessarily imply a unilateral subordination of the subjective will to the objective will embodied in institutions, and equally, it undoubtedly excludes any inversion of the priority of objective ethical institutions’ (281). Instead, ‘Hegel's weak institutionalism seeks to account for the institution of individuality without reducing it to a mere trace of what creates it, that is, objective familial, social, and political institutions’ (340). The objectivity of modern social institutions, while being a necessary condition for the actualization of subjective freedom, does not necessarily limit the latter, or, more precisely, actualized subjectivity and modern social institutions cannot be conceived independently of each other. Rather, they are interdependent in a dynamic process, which reflects, though always provisionally and imperfectly, the dynamic character of the logical idea itself.

The book cannot but mostly leave out what Hegel's objective spirit leaves out. However, to cohere with the spirit of Hegel's system, equally, the book cannot avoid substantial references to what precedes and follows objective spirit, namely logic and absolute spirit. The last two constitute the two extremes of the spectrum containing the possible meanings of metaphysics in Hegel (xiii). While choosing between these two extremes would certainly exceed the scope of the book, an investigation of objective spirit in Hegel would be incomplete if it did not take them into account. The book's Preface, Prologue and Epilogue therefore draw the contours of a major issue, apparently in the background of the book, but in fact leading its whole structure: the question, widely addressed in Hegel scholarship, of whether Hegel's social theory can be meaningfully read if detached from its metaphysical background. The question is raised already in the very first page of the book, reappears at intervals (54), and is originally, though not directly, resumed in the Epilogue (353). Kervégan's own position is confessedly ‘if not wavering, at least nuanced’ (xii). He adopts a pragmatic stance of selective ‘epokhé’ (xv), acknowledging that several key tensions in the objective spirit can only be dealt with and possibly recomposed with recourse not only and not so much to the logic, but also to the philosophy of absolute spirit, and that this Hegelian metaphysical optimism (xv) is not necessarily appealing to our own eyes. At the same time, on specific concrete points (such as the relationship between abstract law and statute law, 174 ff.), Kervégan manages to show the attractiveness of Hegel's mutual ratification of logical structure and objective articulation. Through a re-examination of Hegel's conception of the social-historical role of passions, his infamous concept of the ‘cunning of reason’, and its theological backdrop, the Epilogue, aptly titled ‘The Passion of the Concept’, reaches a more comprehensive conclusion. The ‘metaethical and metaobjective guarantee’ (362) of the reconciliation of post-revolutionary tensions is not the statement of a positive, theo-teleological omnipotence of philosophy, but rather the acknowledgement that only thought in its conceptual form is capable of a fully internalized ‘experience of negativity’ (366). We may therefore be more or less sympathetic to Hegel's understanding of philosophy's power of reconciliation, but reading it as a proof of philosophy's self-liberation ‘from the ineffability of back-worlds’ (366) instead of reading it as philosophy's post-historical self-celebration can open up some stimulating clues about tensions in contemporary social reality.

Despite the hackneyed topic, Kervégan, who is a legal scholar as well as a philosopher, manages to be informative and illuminating on a number of specific issues (not least, in legal and political history), as well as offering a wide-ranging and compelling overall interpretation of objective spirit in Hegel. The book, which is clearly written and well translated, challenges the reader to (re)discover, without being unreservedly apologetic, pressing issues of Hegel's practical philosophy beyond its stereotypes. It is worth, in conclusion, mentioning a couple of apparently problematic points. First, Hegel's theory of the family is excluded from the discussion. This is mostly so because, as Kervégan rightly reminds us, in Hegel family belongs to a ‘“sublegal” level’ (38), whereas the book is mostly concerned with institutions—both political and non-political—within the legal spectrum. Hence, the absence of discussion of the family cannot be blamed on Kervégan exclusively. Nonetheless, such a situation is yet an important reminder of the problematic (and justly lamented) spot of a major social institution that still seems to remain opaque to philosophically founded justification claims. Secondly, the copious secondary literature of recent years on this subject, and especially Anglo-American literature, gets almost no consideration in the book. This strikes me as surprising at first, but Kervégan's decision to mostly address and make sense of Hegel's text as such can in fact also act as a refreshing novelty.