Abstract

Professor Vásquez, who has produced Spanish translations of the Philosophy of Right and Marx’s Critique, continues, in this volume, the studies of his earlier Dialéctica y Derecho en Hegel. Originally a series of articles, in the Revista Venezolana de Filosofia, the chapter titles suggest a miscellany: two on Hegel’s critique of Kantian ethics, five commenting on the first four chapters of the Phenomenology, one on the relation of Hegel to Marx and a concluding chapter on the Kantian origins of the dialectic. This might suggest a collection only loosely connected, but such an impression would be misleading. There are, in fact, three concerns systematically developed in the book. First, Vásquez argues, the concept is central to all of Hegel’s work, determining the dialectical necessity of the key steps in the unfolding of self-consciousness, history, and spirit in general. Second, the centrality of the concept has been ignored or misrepresented by most commentators to such an extent that neither the dialectic in general, nor the particular works in which it is played out, can be made intelligible. Keeping in mind this second concern is important for a proper reading of Vásquez’s book, for in several places his discussion of Hegel’s text is directed not so much to a detailed analysis of that text, but rather to its use as a foil over and against other interpreters. The compressed nature of the arguments can be disconcerting unless you recall that the quarry is not so much Hegel as Hyppolite, Findlay, or Kojève. Finally, there appears to me an implicit moral claim being advanced, in the context of which these essays are not only exercises in the interpretation of Hegel, but the book as a whole an instance of Hegelian ethics.