Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns

Domenico Losurdo author Jon Morris translator Marella Morris translator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:18th Aug '04

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns cover

Translated into English for the first time, this work portrays a different side of Hegel -- not just as a philosopher preoccupied with abstract ideas but a man deeply enmeshed and active in the pressing, concrete political issues of his time

Available in English for the first time, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns revives discussion of the major political and philosophical tenets underlying contemporary liberalism through a revolutionary interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel’s thought. Domenico Losurdo,one of the world’s leading Hegelians, reveals that the philosopher was fully engaged with the political controversies of his time. In so doing, he shows how the issues addressed by Hegel in the nineteenth century resonate with many of the central political concerns of today, among them questions of community, nation, liberalism, and freedom. Based on an examination of Hegel’s entire corpus—including manuscripts, lecture notes, different versions of texts, and letters—Losurdo locates the philosopher’s works within the historical contexts and political situations in which they were composed.

Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns persuasively argues that the tug of war between “conservative” and “liberal” interpretations of Hegel has obscured and distorted the most important aspects of his political thought. Losurdo unravels this misleading dualism and provides an illuminating discussion of the relation between Hegel’s political philosophy and the thinking of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He also discusses Hegel’s ideas in relation to the pertinent writings of other major figures of modern political philosophy such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Popper, Norberto Bobbio, and Friedrich Hayek.

Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns constitutes an extremely valuable and original contribution to the study of the genealogy of modernity and of bourgeois culture.”—Joseph A. Buttigieg, editor, The Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci
“Domenico Losurdo is one of the great contemporary authorities on Hegel; his work needs to be known in the English-speaking world.”—Fredric Jameson, Duke University

ISBN: 9780822332534

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 708g

400 pages