While Hegel s political philosophy has been attacked on the left by republican democrats and on the right by feudalist reactionaries, his apologists see him as a liberal reformer, a moderate who theorized about the development of a free-market society within the bounds of a stabilizing constitutional state. This centrist view has gained ascendancy since the end of the Second World War, enshrining Hegel within the liberal tradition.

In this book, Renato Cristi argues that, like the Prussian liberal reformers of his time, Hegel was committed to expand the scope of a free economy and...