Routledge Hegel and the Metaphysical Frontiers of Political Theory (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

For over one hundred and fifty years G.W.F. Hegel’s ghost has haunted theoretical understanding and practice. His opponents first, and later his defenders, have equally defined their programs against and with his. In this way Hegel’s political thought has both situated and displaced modern political theorizing. This book takes the reception of Hegel’s political thought as a lens through which contemporary methodological and ideological prerogatives are exposed. It traces the nineteenth century origins of the positivist revolt against Hegel’s legacy forward to political science’s turn away from philosophical tradition in the twentieth century. The book critically reviews the subsequent revisionist trend that has eliminated his metaphysics from contemporary considerations of his political thought. It then moves to re-evaluate their relation and defend their inseparability in his major work on politics: the Philosophy of Right. Against this background, the book concludes with an argument for the inherent metaphysical dimension of political theorizing itself. Goodfield takes Hegel’s reception, representation, as well as rejection in Anglo-American scholarship as a mirror in which its metaphysical presuppositions of the political are exceptionally well reflected. It is through such reflection, he argues, that we may begin to come to terms with them. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and readers of political theory and philosophy, Hegel, metaphysics and the philosophy of the social sciences. Review Eric Lee Goodfield’s book is, in fact, two books in one. ...Both elements are strikingly well conceived and defended. Goodfield’s Hegel here is freed from over a century of a scholarship aimed more at dismissing or domesticating him than in taking his most striking claims seriously. As such, it is among the most important works on Hegel and contemporary political theory in recent memory. ...Goodfield’s Hegel stands as an immensely instructive reminder to engage the full scope of political theory with its attending metaphysics and not merely the parts that affirm our own prejudices. - David Lay Williams, DePaul University, USA This splendid book embodies a welcome effort to do justice to the ambitious multi-dimensionality of Hegel’s philosophy, particularly with respect to the inseparability of its metaphysical and political aspects. Eric Goodfield fruitfully places Hegel in the context of positivistic revolts against idealistic philosophy in general, and Hegel’s philosophy in particular, in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Among its excellences is its intelligent recuperation of a rich sense of political theory, by contrast with political science’s more positivist inclination. It courageously and deftly takes issue with recent revisionist readings of Hegel in which the metaphysical dimensions have been expurgated. In helping restore a more genuine Hegel, Goodfield offers very thoughtful suggestions for the reassessment of contemporary political thought with an eye to a renewed engagement with the resources of the philosophical tradition. Very warmly recommended. - William Desmond, KU Leuven, Belgium, Villanova University, USA This outstanding book does many things. The book begins by connecting the…nineteenth-century critique of Hegel to the emergence of…analytic philosophy. The rejection of Hegel’s philosophy…is then in turn connected to the contemporary emergences of both a political science based on methodological positivism and a reading of Hegel…that separates his political philosophy from its logical and metaphysical antecedents… [It] offers a reading of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Logic as an attempt to resolve the ancient problem of universals…[and] provides an original account of Hegel’s political philosophy [as a] ‘resolution to the problem of universals in political terms’… [Goodfield] concludes the book by arguing that…our [political] ‘responses to metaphysical problems