In a better world, all books involving Kant or Hegel might come with a reverse price tag. Instead of making prospective readers pay for the privilege, they would encourage and reward the gruelling labour facing those who would brave the convoluted prose, the merciless grind of thousand-word paragraphs lecturing in German no matter the language in which they appear to be written. In our own world, of course, such learned works tend to be especially expensive, a whopping hundred dollars in this case.

Billed as a collection of “the finest postwar German-language scholarship on Hegel's social and political philosophy” and promising to “be of enormous value to Anglophone students and scholars,” this collection suffers from no false modesty. Its impeccably Teutonic credentials are unmistakable, too, in the sheer relentlessness of the demands it makes on the addled brains of the North American academic in July. As Prof. Dr. Pippin's introduction makes explicit, the intellectual curiosity of the mere historian of ideas—better type of scholarly journalist that he is (4)—will not suffice for the heavy lifting at hand. Better not take this book to the cottage, let alone the beach.

To start with the positive, Joachim Ritter's lucid account of the intimate connection between the person and private property in Hegel reminds us of what is too often overlooked by those who approach Hegel via Marx: namely the unshakably bourgeois core of Hegel's thought. Clearly as he saw the dislocations and challenges of modern civil society, and much as he insisted on the limitations and poverty of man considered merely as a bourgeois, the domain of private property always remained indispensable, in Hegel's eyes, for the free and inalienable development of the individual that is the glory of the modern age. In stark contrast to the Romantic strands of yearning that run from Rousseau through Marx to our day, Hegel insists that man has been able to leave behind the unfreedom of nature precisely by and through appropriating things. While acknowledging that the institution of property goes hand in hand with the objectification of relations in civil society, making things, too, of skills and aptitudes—or making a commodity of labour, as Marx would put it—the business of buying or selling serves also to educate mere bourgeois to the universal. As Ritter puts it, “The ‘mediation’ that finds legal expression in the contract represents the positive character of civil society itself … That is why Hegel describes the contractual sphere of civil society as ‘the true and genuine ground in which freedom has actual existence’” (112).

That being said, Hegel never wavers in his insistence that man as a rational being must be a political being and that the ethical community of the state must therefore never simply be conflated with the perpetual striving of civil society. Citizenship is an indisputably higher calling quite distinct from life as a bourgeois, and the question of how to delineate the two realms has long animated commentators. Rolf-Peter Horstmann's chapter (208–238) discusses this issue with a view to Hegel's efforts, in the Philosophy of Right, at reconciling classical and modern ideals as well as pre-empting misunderstandings of his position resulting from his earlier involvement in the constitutional disputes pitting the Wurtemberg Estates Assembly against their monarch. Siegfried Blasche (183–207) supplements the discussion of property with an examination of the family, the second axis of Hegel's core bourgeois commitments—for Blasche stresses that it is the small bourgeois family, specifically, that Hegel posits as “ethical totality” in its immediate, modern form. Blasche faults Hegel primarily for believing that the family so conceived would be able to withstand and maintain itself intact against the “deleterious ethical effects of civil society”; but Hegel was no naïf, and it is clearly not the case that the corrosive dynamics of modern civil society simply come to a standstill before the family. Hegel would insist merely on the relative robustness of that institution, not its immunity, and in that he surely continues to be borne out. Given Blasche's own attention to the Hegelian family's roots in marriage rather than childbearing, a neo-Hegelian position might even survive the gay-marriage debate.

Wolfgang Schild's defense of the contemporary relevance of Hegel's concept of punishment (150–179)—and indeed his claims for its superiority—may mostly concern the specialist, except insofar as the notion that an offender might be wronged by the withholding of punishment is concerned. (Pippin scoffs at the idea as one that “would come as news to most criminals” (10), and so it would, no doubt; philosophically, however, the notion has impeccable ancient pedigree and might remind us that Hegel professed himself to owe everything to Plato, at least according to Popper.) Of similarly rarified appeal are the chapters on “The Rights of Philosophy” by Hans Friedrich Fulda (21–48), on the Kant-Hegel nexus by Karl-Otto Apel (49–77), as well as on the personality of the will by Michael Quante (81–100) and on the universal will by Manfred Baum (124–149).

The collection culminates with three chapters on the state. Ludwig Siep (268–290) offers a reasonably transparent and interesting treatment of Hegel's conception of the constitution, fundamental rights, and social welfare. Aiming to clear away some common misunderstandings and narrow the gap separating Hegel's thought from Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau and Kant, the piece ultimately reaches some cautiously critical conclusions about the principle deficiencies of the Philosophy of Right. So far as I was able to determine, the remaining two chapters, by Dieter Henrich (241–267) and Michael Wolff (291–322), deal with the formal structure and the ontology of Hegel's “organicist” theory of the state: but beyond the striking fact that Hegel wrote his thesis on the orbits of the planets and deemed their relationships to have great conceptual significance, both pieces read like Greek to me.

Climbing down from the skies, let it be said that the volume's rather inelegant cover, its drab paper and lapses in quality of print are hardly designed to delight the bibliophile. Perhaps all this is meant to convey the Olympian heights, clouds and all, from which the book descends to us; alternatively, perhaps such garb was found, in the spirit of Fawlty Towers or a bout of GDR-nostalgia, to be just how The German Philosophical Tradition deserves to be presented. At the hands of a lesser publisher such low regard for the aesthetics of the printed word might be merely deplorable; in light of CUP's half-millennium in the business of making some of the world's finest books, it is also disappointing.