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A new book on Hegelian political philosophy

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This is a shout-out to Thom Brooks and Sebastian Stein, the editors behind a  new anthology HEGEL'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY from Oxford University Press.

Brooks is a professor of political philosophy at Durham University. I may have mentioned him in this blog before, because he has his own blog that regularly comments on Brit and Eurozone politics in a way I find stimulating.

Stein is with the philosophy department of the University of Heidelberg. Other than that, I know nothing about him at all. But I'm not surprised Hegel is taught in Heidelberg.

And I know little about the book, except what one can gather from a review by Timothy Brownlee of Xavier University, at NDPR:
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/hegels-political-philosophy-on-the-normative-significance-of-method-and-system/ 

It seems from that review that one of the big questions underlying the book is whether what one thinks of the value of Hegel's political philosophy rises and falls with what one thinks of the value of his "logic and his broader system." It seems some of the contributors believe that Hegel's logic is a hopeless cause but that political insights can still be severed from it and saved.

One such contributor is Frederick Neuhouser Wood, who argues in his essay in this book that (in Brownlee's paraphrase), "we need to distinguish between what is necessary to understand the thought of an historical figure, and what is necessary to appropriate that thought." The former is the history of philosophy, the latter continues the philosophical discussion into the preset, with a nod to influences of the past.

It is, I think, in general a valuable distinction, whether it has the use to which Wood wants to put it in re Hegel or not.


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