Emancipation After Hegel

This is the book we were waiting for after long years of being bombarded by Hegel as a closet liberal whose last word is recognition. With Todd McGowan, the revolutionary Hegel is back—however, it is not the old Marxist Hegel but the Hegel AFTER Marx, the Hegel who makes us aware that revolution is an open and risked process which necessarily entails catastrophic failures. Hegel’s problem—how to save the legacy of the French revolution after its breakdown—is our problem today: how to save the project of radical emancipation after the catastrophe of Stalinism. In a truly democratic country, Emancipation After Hegel would be reprinted in hundreds of thousands of copies and distributed for free to all students. Read this book… or ignore it at your own risk! -- Slavoj Žižek, author of Less Than Nothing and Absolute Recoil
Todd McGowan's Emancipation After Hegel could not come at a more appropriate time: the time when we truly need to carefully (re)think and reestablish the idea of emancipation. The book does this in a brilliant and compelling way, taking contradiction—as understood by Hegel—as the key to the understanding of emancipation and its relationship to freedom. -- Alenka Zupančič, author of What Is Sex?
In Emancipation After Hegel, Todd McGowan forges an unprecedented type of left Hegelianism. From Marx and Engels onward, leftist defenders of Hegel either downplay or repudiate Hegel's accounts of Christianity and the state. McGowan's distinctive achievement is to prove that Hegelian freedom would not exist without both the Christian legacy and the modern state. McGowan opens up new horizons precisely by venturing where traditional left Hegelianisms have feared to go. -- Adrian Johnston, author of A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical Materialism
The ten chapters canvass a wide range of topics—logic, reason, history, love, freedom, politics, experience, universality. In each case, McGowan shows with devastating clarity how the received view of Hegel has been founded on serious misreadings, then unfolds a fresh interpretation as deeply insightful as it is far-reaching. The result is an absolute tour de force. In McGowan's book, Hegel rises from the dead and assumes the status of an indispensable resource for the next chapter of Western intellectual history. -- Richard Boothby, author of Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan
Sparklingly articulate. * Marx and Philosophy Review of Books *
If Todd McGowan’s book on Hegel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it. McGowan is the giant of Vermont, the Bernie Sanders of the academy, the Larry David of Lacanian theory. * Continental Thought and Theory *
This book is particularly helpful for someone trying to better understand Slavoj Žižek’s thought. Žižek resonates with McGowan’s emphasis on the necessity of embracing contradiction for understanding anything. * European Legacy *