"Hegel is difficult enough to read that any attempt to make sense of him can earn the gratitude of someone interested in him. Charles Taylor's work has been particularly useful to me in this. Beiser has here written the clearest exposition of a handful of Hegel's most characteristic themes that I have (in my rather limited exposure to the Hegel literature) encountered. His forte is the placing of Hegel (and other German Idealists) into the context of their immediate intellectual environment, from Kant through many now forgotten Kantians and post-Kantians and anti-Kantians through the German Romantics to the Idealists. This is enormously informative, and he succeeds in cracking the codelike references in Hegel's work to the ideas of his predecessors and contemporaries.



What Beiser doesn't do, though, that Taylor does, is to argue in what respects Hegel is relevant now--in fact, he does rather the opposite, leaving the reader at the end of his book with a much better sense of how Hegel fits into intellectual history, but wondering why this knowledge should matter."