Abstract

Leo Rauch has written an intelligent, humane, and readable set of studies of six major political philosophers from Machiavelli to Marx. His book is of particular interest to members of the Hegel Society for two reasons. The immediately apparent reason is the sixty-page chapter on Hegel. In this chapter, Rauch does not arrive at any striking or novel interpretation nor produce any sustained confrontation with the scholarly works on Hegel. Not does he intend to. His aim, rather, is to provide an interpretive exegesis of politically important portions of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right. So he undertakes discussions of, for instance, alienation, the struggle for self-hood and identity, the problematic status of individual, labor, and the relations of individual to state and civil society to state. The presentation is lucid; the assertions and arguments are sound and comprehensible. Undergraduates at all levels will be able to make sense of Rauch’s text and hence of Hegel; and advanced students will appreciate Rauch’s breadth, learning, felicity of phrase, and balanced insight.