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Hinchman’s approach to Hegel will appeal to a wide range of readers, including political scientists, intellectual historians, and students of comparative and nineteenth-century German literature, as well as philosophers interested in the history of their own discipline. He brings together for comparison texts and passages that are frequently studied in isolation from each other by scholars in diverse fields.
The burden of Hinchman’s argument falls upon his reconstruction of Hegel’s concept of the self. He shows how Hegel partly adopts ideas of the self that were longstanding among Enlightenment philosophers such as Descartes, Kant, and Fichte, and partly develops a novel conception in response to inadequacies in his predecessors’ theories. Hinchman contends that Hegel is the first philosopher to work out a truly nonsubstantialist idea of the self, one that does not “reify” this most elusive of human activities. He then demonstrates that implications of this conception of the self when one applies it as Hegel did to a critique of the Enlightenment’s epistemology and sociopolitical practice.
