It is often assumed that Hegel's philosophy contains no practical dimension, no doctrine of how human beings should live, but is concerned exclusively with showing that human existence, as the product of reason, is already fully rational. As a consequence, even though Hegel's social and political thought (which is set out mainly in his Philosophy of Right) has been the subject of extensive and detailed study over the years, few commentators have ever tried to develop a Hegelian ethical theory to place alongside those of Aristotle, Kant and Mill. In his book, Hegel's Ethical Thought, Allen Wood has set himself the task of remedying this situation and, in my view, has succeeded in producing one of the most thoughtful, informative and provocative accounts of Hegel's Philosophy of Right to date.

Wood's achievement is extraordinary. He offers a coherent and sophisticated account of virtually all the major elements of Hegelian “objective spirit”, including freedom, happiness, recognition, right, property, punishment, morality, conscience, civil society, poverty, the state and history; and in the process he engages Hegel in a fascinating and highly instructive dialogue with a whole host of thinkers, including Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Fichte, J F Fries and J S Mill, in a way that exceedingly few commentators have succeeded in doing (or have even tried to do). As a result, I believe that Wood has shown conclusively that Hegel is an ethical theorist who is every bit as sophisticated as Aristotle, Kant and Mill, and whose contribution to ethical theory can no longer continue to be disparaged or ignored (as is largely the case) by contemporary students of the subject.

Allen Wood's treatment of Hegel's ethics is one of the deeper, more informed and thorough treatments of the subject to come along in any language. Wood treats Hegel as offering something like an ethical theory in the sense in which ethical theory is done in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Different themes - happiness, freedom, self-actualization - are treated in terms of how they fit into Hegel's own view and how they compare with alternative accounts (particularly, Kantian and utilitarian accounts). The usual treatment of Hegel's thought is almost always the opposite, following Hegel's own exposition of his ideas.

It is not due to accident, failure of nerve or slavish devotion to the text that most commentators closely follow Hegel's own exposition. In Hegel's case, this has a definite logic to it, since Hegel claims the really significant body of what we would call his “arguments” for his position are supposed to be found in his serial dialectical exposition of his ideas. Each new development is supposed to follow dialectically from the preceding one. Thus, if Hegel is right about what he says, then one should not be able to find any arguments on his part for his views outside of his dialectical exposition of them. To expound Hegel's reasons for holding his views quite naturally leads to the idea that we must expound them in the order he gave them.

It is not surprising that a book entitled Hegel's Ethical Thought (hereafter, “HET”) should attract the attention of Hegelians. But I hope the Hegelians who read HET will forgive me for the fact that they were not its intended audience. My principal aim in the book was to contribute to contemporary discussions of the history of ethics and ethical theory by showing the direct relevance of Hegel's thought to issues that still interest moral philosophers.

This aim does not presuppose (as Pinkard would have it) that philosophy consists of a “menu” of positions from which we are to choose arbitrarily. On the other hand, you can't expect a hearing from an audience of non-Hegelians if you arrogantly assume beforehand that Hegel's philosophy encompasses what is true in all others. (HET does include some attempts to argue that Hegel's ethical theory has such advantages, especially over eudaimonistic and Kantian theories. See HET, Chapter 3, §§ 7-8 and Chapters 8-9.) Hegel's thought is now taken more seriously among English speaking philosophers than at any time during my life, but a major obstacle to this welcome change has been the narrowminded sectarian arrogance often found among his admirers.

The same aim also dictated that I not read Hegel's ethical thought so as to make it dependent on his speculative logic. Here Hegelians must descend from the mists of speculation long enough to face up to some cold, hard facts. First, there is no generally accepted interpretation even of what Hegelian logic is about, not to mention matters of finer detail. Second, on no interpretation does Hegelian speculative logic have any credibility at all for philosophers today.