Abstract

The present book is a reprint of a classical study of Hegel, the first important work marking the renewal of interest in Hegel initiated by Dilthey's Hegels Jugendgeschichte. Rosenzweig's monograph is a still unsurpassed treatment of Hegel's political and social philosophy: a monument of scholarship, of broad vision and patient analysis. Proceeding in chronological order, the first volume concludes with the Phenomenology of the Spirit. Especially interesting are the two long chapters dealing with the less-known yet quite voluminous literary production of the Jena-period. The second volume treats Hegel's "reconciliation" with his time and his unceasing effort to "cover" or better, to "ground" the legal system, the family, society, state, and constitution. The author manages to do justice to the historico-political conditioning of Hegel's metaphysics of the state without allowing himself to fall into the simplistic "sociology of knowledge" practiced with so much zeal by more modern, especially Marxist, authors. The book is written in the characteristically beautiful German prose of Rosenzweig, untouched by the sorry obscurities of so many "learned" interpretations of Hegel's system.--M. J. V.