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What Is the Core of German Idealist Freedom?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2023

Shterna Friedman Open the ORCID record for Shterna Friedman [Opens in a new window]
Shterna Friedman*
Affiliation:
Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
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Extract

One of this book's many important contributions is Rosen's argument that the German Idealist conception of freedom arose from a theological attempt to make the workings of divine justice intelligible in the world. I suggest a possible amendment to this profound suggestion. In chapter 4, Rosen takes the fundamental conception of freedom at the heart of the German Idealist enterprise to be the absence of arbitrariness. But might freedom from arbitrariness be, for Kant and Hegel, a species of a more fundamental genus—freedom from external determination? Since Rosen develops his account of German Idealist freedom mostly in relation to Kant, I focus on him but conclude with a note about Hegel.

Type
Review Essay
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 85 , Special Issue 4: Part II of The Crowd in the History of Political Thought: A Symposium on Populism , Fall 2023 , pp. 557 - 560
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The University of Notre Dame

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References

1 Marx, Karl, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 157Google Scholar and 197.

2 Marx, Karl, Capital (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 1:381Google Scholar and 450.

3 Hegel, G. W. F., Werke in zwanzig Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 2:476Google Scholar.

4 As I argue in Shterna Friedman, “Freedom and Totality: How Hegel Became Hegel,” History of Political Thought (forthcoming).