Richard Bourke’s book Hegel’s World Revolutions begins on a combative note. As a result of the radical critiques of thinkers from Nietzsche to Foucault, the hard-won achievements of modernity are under assault: liberalism is denounced, rights are disparaged, universalism is condemned, and reason is rejected. Bourke, however, does not think these fashionable critiques of modernity hold up under historical analysis. While the modern world is by no means perfect, its history reflects a dynamic of continuous liberation. This is what leads Bourke back to Hegel, who gave perhaps the most powerful account of history as the progressive unfolding of the idea of freedom. Bourke’s book attempts to reconstruct Hegel’s account, focusing on the pivotal transitions or “world revolutions” that have impelled history forward.

Before delving into the details of Hegel’s philosophy of history, Bourke feels compelled to address the issue of the decline of Hegel’s philosophical influence in the twentieth century, a development he traces back to the critiques of Heidegger, Adorno, and Karl Popper. It must be said that Bourke sometimes exaggerates the degree to which interest in Hegel’s philosophy, especially his political philosophy, has declined. He says at one point, for example, that while Hegel’s metaphysics, epistemology, and moral philosophy have received considerable attention in recent decades in the anglophone world, “there has barely been a monograph devoted to his political ideas since the beginning of the 1970s” (2). In fact, many books on Hegel’s political philosophy have come out since the early 1970s. It is true that some of them deal with Hegel’s “ethics,” but for Hegel ethics and politics are inseparable. The main reason for Hegel’s diminished status in the twentieth century, according to Bourke, has to do with the rise of antihumanist thought in France and its influence in the United States. Rejecting the totalizing arrogance of Hegel’s philosophy, thinkers like Derrida and especially Foucault see history not as the march of freedom or reason on earth but as a meaningless succession of arbitrary regimes of power. Finding this bleak view of human history crude and simplistic, Bourke turns back to Hegel for a more satisfying account of how we got to where we are.

Somewhat surprisingly, instead of engaging in a careful analysis of Hegel’s mature lectures on the philosophy of history, Bourke focuses first on Hegel’s youthful “theological” writings from the 1790s. He begins by highlighting the revolutionary impact Kant’s ideas had on the young Hegel and his friends at the Tübingen Seminary, Schelling and Hölderlin, an impact that receives expression in Hegel’s 1795 letter to Schelling: “From the Kantian system and its highest completion, I expect a revolution in Germany.” Kant himself traced the most significant revolution in human consciousness back to Christianity, which replaced Judaism’s focus on outward worship and conformity to law with an emphasis on inner sincerity and free commitment to moral duty. Though Christianity itself eventually succumbed to corruption and superstition, Kant believed that certain developments in his own day, specifically the French Revolution and his own moral philosophy, suggested that the original revolutionary promise of Christianity might still be redeemed. It was these themes that Hegel took up in his early essays, most notably “The Positivity of the Christian Religion” and “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate.” In the former, he showed how the revolutionary impulse of original Christianity, interpreted largely in terms of Kantian morality, came to be corrupted by the externality, positivity, and authoritarianism it had originally sought to displace. In “The Spirit of Christianity,” he argued that Kantian morality itself, with its dualism of duty and inclination, was afflicted with the positivity and coerciveness that Jesus’s message of subjective love was meant to overthrow.

From Hegel’s treatment of the world revolution represented by Christianity, Bourke goes on to consider Hegel’s complex attitude toward the event that shook his own world, namely, the French Revolution. Though Bourke claims that it “is standardly assumed that Hegel was an enthusiast for the events in France” (17; see also 31, 115), it is doubtful that many recent scholars hold such a simplistic view of Hegel’s attitude toward the French Revolution. Be that as it may, Bourke sets out to show that Hegel’s attitude toward this event was far more skeptical than is sometimes assumed. Hegel’s critique of the French Revolution receives its most vivid expression in the section of the Phenomenology entitled “Absolute Freedom and the Terror,” and Bourke accordingly gives it careful attention. He concludes his analysis by considering Hegel’s account of the modern constitutional state in the Philosophy of Right. In keeping with his concern to defend modernity, Bourke focuses on Hegel’s emphasis on the modern principle of subjectivity, especially as it finds expression in civil society. But in general, the analysis here is too brief to shed new light on Hegel’s elaborate masterpiece of political philosophy.

The third and longest part of Bourke’s book is titled “History of Political Thought.” Though it includes discussions of Hegel as a historian of political philosophy as well as of the reception of his own thought in the twentieth century, this part of the book ranges far beyond Hegel and only tangentially relates to the theme of world revolutions in the first two parts. The central issue of this part of the book concerns the applicability of past political philosophy to present political circumstances. With respect to this issue, Bourke finds Hegel’s treatment of Plato’s political philosophy exemplary. For Hegel, the Platonic state embodied the substantiality of Greek ethical life and lacked the principle of subjective freedom that defines modernity. For this reason, it could not serve as a model for modern political life. Bourke points out that the same criticism could be applied to the Hegelian state. He then takes up the attempts of various twentieth-century thinkers—Strauss, Voegelin, Arendt, Wolin, and the early Habermas—to regenerate aspects of classical political philosophy, concluding that all failed to appreciate Hegel’s fundamental insight that the beauty of Athenian society could not be revived. For Bourke, we always “need to estimate the differences between prevailing conditions and arrangements in the past. Among other things, political theory is a study in how values become superannuated” (193).

This historicist approach to the study of political thought would seem to ally Bourke with the Cambridge School associated with J. G. A. Pocock, John Dunn, and Quentin Skinner. It is to these historians of political thought, among others, that Bourke devotes his final chapter. Focusing mainly on Dunn and Skinner, he argues that they initially rejected the notion that past ideas have current application. As Skinner succinctly put it in an early essay, as interpreters of past political thought, we need “less philosophy, and more history.” This historicist verdict, however, left Dunn and Skinner without a compelling response to the question, Why study the political thought of the past at all? The charge of irrelevance led them to reverse their position and argue that past political ideas could indeed illuminate our present political circumstances. In the case of Skinner, it was the Renaissance tradition of civic participation that retained special relevance for contemporary politics. In the case of Dunn, while he denied that the model of Athenian democracy could be directly applied to contemporary politics, he still maintained it could be used to highlight the deficiencies of modern elitist conceptions of democracy. Bourke does not sympathize with Skinner’s and Dunn’s betrayal of their earlier historicism. At the end of the book, this time in connection with Charles Taylor’s and Joachim Ritter’s attempts to revive Hegel’s political philosophy, he once again denies that the political principles of one age can be applied to the political circumstances of another: “The most important task of contextualization is to highlight the diversity of contexts.… We do not study Hegel to confound his circumstances with our own, but precisely to evaluate the discrepancies between past and present.… As Hegel emphasized, it is imperative to recognize the distance between ourselves and Plato” (299).

There seems to be a tension here between Bourke’s appeal to Hegel’s judgment and his relegation of Hegel’s thought to the past. It is a tension that runs through the whole book insofar as Bourke turns to Hegel for a more satisfying account of history and modernity than is found in postmodern thinkers, while at the same time denying the relevance of Hegel’s thought to our present world. The former tack seems to me the more promising one to take, though it would require a more penetrating analysis of Hegel’s political philosophy than Bourke’s to yield significant philosophical insights.