Shlomo Avineri’s Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State is a landmark work in the interpretation of Hegel’s political philosophy, not only because it offers a comprehensive reconstruction of the development of Hegel’s political thought across his entire career, but also because it succeeds in dissolving the long-standing caricatures of Hegel as either a rigid apologist for Prussian authoritarianism or a mere precursor to Marxist critique. Avineri approaches Hegel with an eye to the historical totality in which his work was situated—the turbulence of post-Napoleonic Europe, the French Revolution’s legacy, the emergence of bourgeois society, and the new economic and political questions raised by modernity. By drawing on Hegel’s published works, political essays, private correspondence, lecture manuscripts, and his early theological writings, Avineri situates Hegel as a philosopher deeply attuned to the conditions of his time, yet capable of elevating those conditions into a systematic philosophical account of freedom, history, and political community.
The book opens by tracing Hegel’s early engagements with politics, law, and religion, revealing a thinker who, from the outset, sought to understand how ethical life could be grounded in shared institutions rather than abstract moral commandments. Avineri emphasizes that Hegel’s early concern with “positivity” in religion—his critique of rigid, external, law-like prescriptions—directly prefigures his later critique of a purely mechanical conception of the state. For Hegel, freedom is not the mere absence of restraint but a lived ethical reality, achieved when individuals recognize themselves in institutions that embody their rational will. Avineri shows how Hegel’s preoccupation with education, culture, and social integration in his earliest writings prepared the ground for his mature conception of the modern state as the culmination of ethical life, not its negation.
Central to Avineri’s interpretation is the idea that Hegel does not conceive the state as a monolithic Leviathan or as a mere guarantor of abstract rights. Instead, Hegel’s state emerges as the historical mediation between the atomization of civil society—marked by market competition, economic inequality, and social fragmentation—and the higher unity of communal ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Civil society, in Hegel’s view, is indispensable for the cultivation of individuality, economic dynamism, and social plurality, but it also generates poverty, alienation, and the erosion of solidarity. The state is the rational synthesis that reconciles these contradictions by embodying freedom not as abstract independence but as the concrete interrelation of rights and duties within a constitutional framework. Avineri highlights this dialectic, demonstrating that Hegel’s state is the institutional embodiment of mutual recognition: a sphere where freedom is realized not in isolation but through participation in a shared ethical order.
Avineri’s treatment of Hegel’s political economy is particularly illuminating. Drawing on Hegel’s engagement with Sir James Steuart, Adam Smith, and the English debates on poverty and representation, he shows how Hegel was among the first German philosophers to grasp the profound implications of political economy for modern social life. Unlike Fichte, who clung to mercantilist notions, Hegel recognized the market as both a source of innovation and as a generator of inequality that no spontaneous self-regulation could overcome. Avineri underscores Hegel’s awareness of the structural incapacity of civil society to solve the problems of poverty and exclusion, and his conviction that only the state, through rational institutions, could address these contradictions. This insight places Hegel as a precursor to Marx, not in terms of revolutionary advocacy, but in recognizing that the political cannot be separated from the economic.
The book also confronts the polarized legacy of Hegelianism. Avineri traces how the ambiguities and paradoxes of Hegel’s formulations allowed later thinkers to claim him for sharply opposed positions: Marx and the Young Hegelians radicalized his critique of civil society; liberal idealists such as Green and Croce emphasized his vision of rational freedom; conservative or authoritarian readers miscast him as a defender of state power for its own sake. By disentangling these interpretations, Avineri restores Hegel’s philosophical subtlety, showing that his commitment was neither to reactionary conservatism nor to revolutionary destruction, but to a historically mediated form of rational freedom grounded in institutions. In this way, Avineri presents Hegel as the first major political philosopher of modern society, one who integrated historicity into the very structure of political philosophy—thus moving beyond the preoccupation with static legitimacy that dominated earlier traditions.
In reconstructing Hegel’s trajectory, Avineri situates the Philosophy of Right within a broader arc that stretches from the early theological writings to the Realphilosophie lectures of Jena and beyond. This contextualization reveals the dynamic development of Hegel’s thought, rather than presenting his mature system as a frozen doctrine. Avineri shows how Hegel’s responses to the French Revolution, his reflections on Greek ethical life, his critiques of Judaic and Christian religious forms, and his analyses of contemporary European states all fed into his conception of the modern constitutional state as the culmination of a historical dialectic. Hegel’s state emerges not as an abstraction but as the rational outcome of centuries of social struggle, political experimentation, and cultural transformation.
Finally, Avineri’s study invites reflection on the continuing relevance of Hegel’s vision. At a time when modern politics oscillates between individualist fragmentation and authoritarian centralization, Hegel’s conception of the state as an ethical community offers an alternative that refuses both extremes. Freedom, for Hegel, is not a solitary possession but a collective achievement, realized through institutions that embody reason and enable mutual recognition. Avineri persuasively argues that this vision, far from being antiquated, speaks directly to contemporary crises of alienation, inequality, and the erosion of civic bonds.
Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State is thus more than a study of Hegel’s political thought; it is an exploration of the philosophical foundations of modern political life. Combining historical erudition, philosophical rigor, and interpretative clarity, Avineri delivers a work that challenges reductive readings of Hegel and reclaims him as a thinker of freedom, historicity, and ethical community. For readers of political philosophy, intellectual history, or modern theory, this book remains indispensable, not only as an interpretation of Hegel but as a key reflection on the nature of the modern state itself.
Simon Gros 
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