A collection of fourteen introductory essays, Hegel’s Thought in Europe is, in Herzog’s words, ‘the first to offer a broad perspective on different European non-Marxist receptions of Hegel’s philosophy in their different social and cultural contexts’ (3). The volume covers four geographical regions of Hegel’s reception: Eastern Europe, Germany and Scandinavia, Great Britain, and Italy and France. Although the volume deals with well-studied themes related to Hegel’s influence on European thought, it also includes chapters that detail some of the less-known receptions of his work. For instance, one essay describes the Romanian thinker Constantin Noica’s attempt to present Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the form of a tale, while another relates how the Italian scholar Giovanni Gentile used Hegel’s political thought to defend a totalitarian regime. Unfortunately, however, the philosophical value of these engagements with Hegel’s thought is often unclear––as some authors of the essays openly admit. Vadim Shkolnikov, for example, acknowledges that the contribution of the three Russian thinkers that he discusses—Bakhunin, Belinsky and Herzen—to the history of philosophy is ‘negligible’ (18). In this review, I will set aside the more historically-oriented contributions and focus on the articles with clearer philosophical import.

Of the essays that deal with the reception of Hegel’s political philosophy, Douglas Moggach and Widukind De Ridder discuss Max Stirner’s criticism of Young Hegelianism. The focal point of Stirner’s criticism lies in his notion of ‘the unique’ [das Einzige], which he opposes to the universalism that Young Hegelianism inherited from the Enlightenment. Instead of understanding freedom in terms of the autonomy of the subject, Stirner conceives of freedom in terms of the freedom to consume and fulfill one’s particular desires. Moreover, for Stirner, the I is not a law-giving and self-transparent subject, but eludes full conceptualization. Interestingly, Moggach and De Ridder warn against exclusively conceiving of Stirner’s conception of freedom and the I as a new theory of the subject. Rather, Stirner’s philosophical contribution lies in taking issue with the very possibility of formulating a comprehensive view of the human subject.

Exploring a more recent engagement with Hegel’s thinking, David Schweikard summarizes and takes issue with Axel Honneth’s effort to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in Suffering from Indeterminacy. In Honneth’s view, we must abandon the logical-metaphysical framework that informs Hegel’s conceptualization of a normative theory and ‘unwelcome’ elements of that theory, such as Hegel’s conception of the state and his ontological conception of spirit. What remains is, in Schweikard’s words, a normative theory of ‘spheres of reciprocal recognition whose creation and stabilization is constitutive of the moral identity of modern societies’ (153). Schweikard agrees with Honneth that we do not have to endorse all of Hegel’s claims––metaphysical or otherwise––or reject his philosophy wholesale. Moreover, he also agrees with Honneth that Hegel offers the outlines of an attractive normative theory. Ultimately, however, Schweikard takes issue with Honneth’s methodology, arguing that Honneth dismisses too quickly the logical categories that inform Hegel’s analysis in the Philosophy of Right. To make his case, Schweikard discusses Hegel’s analysis of the will in the introductory sections of the Philosophy of Right. According to Honneth’s interpretation, Hegel there argues that conceptions of the will as the individual’s capacity for self-determination or as the capacity to choose between alternatives are incomplete. As Honneth sees it, it is only ‘by way of mutual recognition in (or within spheres of) communication that individuals can achieve meaningful self-determination as well as social and political freedom’ (155). Schweikard convincingly makes the point that when we pay attention to the categories that inform Hegel’s analysis of the will––universality, particularity and individuality––we come to see that and how the first two conceptions of the will are in fact integrated into a comprehensive account of the concept. That is, Hegel’s ultimate conception of the will is an account of different moments of the will as well as the way in which these moments are related. While the question of the normativity of Hegel’s socio-political theory deserves more attention, Schweikard’s contribution shows that commentators should not shy away from the logical categories of Hegel’s analysis in order to make sense of his text.

Focusing on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Michael Inwood considers the Hegelian elements in Cassirer’s thinking, Heidegger’s interpretation of the Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology, and Cassirer’s assessment of Heidegger. Not averse to bold claims, Inwood affirms that––despite a number of differences––‘Cassirer is Hegelian’ (110). According to Inwood, Cassirer’s account of a progression of symbolic forms in Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is inspired by and comparable to Hegel’s Phenomenology. Additionally, for both Hegel and Cassirer, philosophical knowledge consists of comprehending the totality of forms under consideration. Lastly, both philosophers are concerned with explicating and understanding Geist, or humanity as such, rather than individual existence. Inwood goes on to suggest that the Hegelian elements in Cassirer’s thinking inform his assessment of Heidegger. In Cassirer’s reading, Heidegger is a religiously inspired thinker whose focus on individual existence prevents him from considering the history of culture, humanity, or humankind as such. For Cassirer, then, Heidegger’s enterprise remains restricted because philosophy’s task or ultimate concern is to comprehend spirit, i.e., the universal structure of culture, history and religion. In his discussion of Heidegger’s own take on Hegel’s Phenomenology, Inwood questions the philological accuracy of Heidegger’s interpretation. Inwood’s reasons for including this discussion in his essay elude me because it does not seem to play any role in the remainder of his discussion of Heidegger and Cassirer. Nevertheless, his unconventional approach to the philosophical differences between Heidegger and Cassirer could serve as an excellent entry-point to a more extensive discussion of their relationship.

Turning to France, in an interesting and concise paper, Gilles Marmasse explores the family resemblances between Kojève’s and Sartre’s reading of the Phenomenology. For Kojève, the dialectic of master and slave shows how man becomes human through the attainment of self-consciousness, which is inherently of an intersubjective and social nature. Kojève stresses that this process is one of conflict and struggle, in which man overcomes the (natural) desire for self-preservation by risking his life and accepting his finitude. Like Kojève, Sartre stresses that humanity is the result of a conflict or struggle and that intersubjectivity is the key to humanization. Specifically, for Sartre, consciousness is initially unreflective, purely open-to-the-world, and absorbed in its object. Only by encountering the other does a ‘self’ arise that enables the subject to become subject. Finally, both Kojève and Sartre assign a central role to the Hegelian concept of negativity in that the genesis of self-consciousness involves a negation of the given—whether it is humanity’s natural desire for self-preservation or the state of purely being absorbed in the world. In his essay, Marmasse argues that while Kojève’s take on Hegel is easy to trace, Sartre’s relationship to Hegel is more difficult to establish because Sartre does not often explicitly engage with Hegel in his works. For some reason, Marmasse neglects to mention Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Despite this omission, he does an excellent job in establishing the importance of the Hegelian themes of self-consciousness, conflict, and negativity to Kojève and Sartre.

Silvia Jonas takes up Adorno’s assessment of Hegel’s theoretical philosophy. For Adorno, philosophy consists of ‘an effort to express things one cannot speak about, to help express the Non-identical despite the fact that expressing it identifies it all the same’ (Adorno 1993: 102; cited by Jonas, 139). Adorno’s preoccupation with the Non-identical, or (used synonymously by Jonas) the Ineffable leads him to take an ambivalent stance towards Hegel’s philosophy. While Adorno maintains that Hegel’s thinking offers the possibility of doing justice to the Ineffable, he thinks that Hegel ultimately resolves all non-identity into a closed system without realizing that there is always something that escapes our conceptual grasp. In Jonas’s view, Hegel overestimates the capacities of conceptual thinking, whereas Adorno’s thinking stands as a model of philosophical modesty. Although I find Jonas’s portrayal of Hegel’s philosophy and Adorno’s criticism overly simplistic at times, the point concerning the limits of conceptuality she raises is nevertheless an interesting one. Adorno seems to struggle with a problem that lies at the heart of philosophy: the very act of showing or naming the non-Identical makes it into something ‘positive’, something conceptual, whereas it is meant to point to a dimension that exceeds straightforward conceptualization.

The limits of conceptualization are also the central topic of Joseph Cohen’s discussion of Derrida and Hegel. According to Cohen, Derrida differs from an entire generation of French philosophers in that deconstruction is not opposed to Hegel, but instead ‘engages and indeed penetrates within that which proliferates the very modality of speculative dialectics’ (251). Derrida wants to spell out a dimension within Hegel’s speculative dialectics that itself exceeds the determination of the speculative dialectic. Another way to characterize Derrida’s way of engaging with Hegel is that Derrida does not posit an irreducible Otherness that ab initio ‘escapes’ the grasp of the dialectic, but rather points to otherness within it. Derrida, then, does not single out an aspect or theme in Hegel’s philosophy but somehow aims to discuss that which drives Hegel’s philosophical project as a whole.

George Pattison reconsiders Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel. While some commentators reduce most of Kierkegaard’s criticism to personal animosity regarding his contemporary, self-professed Hegelians Heiberg and Martensen, Pattison wants to take Kierkegaard’s criticism seriously, tracing it back to critical notes on the speculative theological work Faith and Knowledge by Erdmann. Kierkegaard’s central point in these notes is that faith must be understood as a transformation of consciousness that exceeds the grasp of speculative thinking. While Pattison’s paper does an excellent job in sketching the main lines of Kierkegaard’s criticism and its historical context, I am not sure that he succeeds in reconsidering Kierkegaard’s attacks on Hegel fully. Specifically, the link between Kierkegaard’s points of criticism of Erdmann and his later engagement with Hegel could have been made clearer. The topic of discussion with regards to Erdmann is speculative philosophy’s inability to grapple with Christian faith, whereas Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel, as Pattison sketches it, centres on the inability of Hegel’s philosophy to do justice to individual human existence. Presumably there is a link between these two for Kierkegaard, but Pattison’s article would have benefited from drawing attention to it.

Perhaps less well-known than Adorno’s, Derrida’s and Kierkegaard’s takes on Hegel is Collingwood’s highly ambivalent relationship to Hegel. Gary Browning addresses the glaring discrepancy between Collingwood’s engagement and appropriation of Hegel’s thought in his unpublished writings versus his criticism and neglect of Hegel in his published works. As Browning explains, Collingwood sees the act of interpretation as the attempt to understand the questions that a philosophy seeks to answer. Historical understanding becomes possible on the assumption that thinkers re-think thoughts inherent in historical ideas and actions in new contexts. Browning is critical of Collingwood’s conception of interpretation insofar as it does not account for the inherent ambiguity of philosophical ideas, implying that rethinking them is not as straightforward as Collingwood suggests it is.

With regards to Collingwood’s unpublished writings, Browning tells us that Collingwood does not accept Hegel’s philosophy in its entirety, but acknowledges his critique of the law of identity, his relational view of reality, and his developmental view of thought, as well as the centrality of subjectivity. In terms of Collingwood’s published writings, Browning explains his neglect and dismissal of Hegel as a strategic move: Collingwood simply caters to an audience that he presumed would be hostile towards Hegel’s thinking. While Browning might have delved deeper into the similarities and differences between Collingwood’s conception of interpretation and Hegel’s thoughts on these topics, his paper stands out as a model of philosophical clarity and convincingly problematizes Collingwood’s conception of interpretation.

Browning’s explanation of Collingwood’s dismissive attitude towards Hegel in his published writings fits in well with W. J. Mander’s helpful and resourceful overview of the rise and demise of British Hegelianism in the volume. As Mander shows, the anti-metaphysical thrust of much of early twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon philosophy can be seen as a reaction against the highly prolific movement of British Hegelianism.

While the articles discussed so far describe different aspects of the reception of Hegel’s philosophy, Kenneth Westphal’s extremely rich and dense essay focuses on what he takes to be the lack of engagement with Hegel in current Anglo-American philosophy. Specifically, Westphal takes issue with the widespread view according to which the history of philosophy is more of a historical curiosity than relevant to current debates in philosophy. Westphal characterizes this ‘ahistorical’ view of philosophy as overly formalistic. In a nutshell, he argues that this view rests on the assumption that philosophical justification consists in logical deduction, and hence fails to see that logical deduction is not suited to domains that are essentially tied to socio-historical practices. This in turn means that the justification of knowledge is not a job for one person, but rather an inherently social project which involves constructive self-criticism and is part of a process of mutual critical assessment. According to Westphal, these insights, stripped of Hegelian lingo, represent the core of Hegel’s (epistemological) project.

Hegel’s Thought in Europe will open readers’ eyes to the multi-faceted and diverse nature of Hegelianism and does justice to its catchy if not catch-all subtitle ‘Currents, Crosscurrents and Undercurrents’. Because the volume’s novelty primarily lies in exploring some lesser-known themes in Hegel’s European reception, in my view, it is unfortunate that these papers often do not delve beyond the level of historical book-keeping. In addition, Hegel scholars will likely take issue with the at times overly general and schematic characterizations of Hegel’s thinking and its reception throughout the volume. Nevertheless, students and scholars less acquainted with Hegel and interested in the history of ideas will find the essays in this collection worth their time.