The first chapter of Emancipation After Hegel lays out the argument of the entire book in detail, so this is a good starting point. Starting at the beginning would give readers a good sense of what the whole book is up to. But who wants to start at the beginning?I think that my favorite chapter is the third, entitled “What Hegel Means When He Says Vernunft.” Even though this title sounds uninviting and not like something one would thumb through for laughs, I feel like this chapter is the most important because it overturns the received wisdom about Hegel’s supposed conformism. In this sense, there is an interesting political dimension to it. The idea that Hegel tries to justify the ruling status quo took hold soon after his death and has been the common understanding of him ever since then. This chapter tries to demolish this interpretation of Hegel’s political position by showing that his most apparently conformist statement is actually one of his most radical.The most damning piece of evidence for Hegel’s conformism is his famous statement from the preface to his last work, The Philosophy of Right. There he proclaims, “What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.” The fact that a monarch ruled Prussia at the time and that Hegel had a prestigious university post led people to see this statement as an explicit endorsement of the hierarchical status quo. It certainly seemed far removed from the radicality of someone like Marx, who was concerned with changing the world rather than simply discovering the rationality of what is.But everything depends on what Hegel means by the rational (which is Vernunft in German). If by rational he means that it is justified and unquestionable, then this becomes a completely regressive statement. But this is not at all what Hegel means. He uses the term rational in precisely the same sense that Immanuel Kant uses it when he writes the Critique of Pure Reason. For Kant, reason is the faculty we use that leads us into contradictions, which is why he wants to critique its use. When we reason, we think beyond the bounds of possible experience and consider questions that we can’t answer, such as whether the world has a beginning or not. Kant shies away from these questions because he wants our philosophy to avoid running into insoluble contradictions. Hegel does not shy away from them.Starting from Kant’s conception of reason, when Hegel claims that the actual is rational, he is making the audacious claim that the actual is really contradictory. Far from insinuating that the status quo is justified, this statement demands that we see the contradiction in even the most logical social structure imaginable. The status quo is contradictory and must be confronted as such. Hegel’s statement about the rationality of the actual demands that we look for the site of contradiction within the ruling order, whatever it might be. At the point of apparent conformism, he evinces his radicality. This I most treasure about Hegel as a thinker.The final two chapters of the book deal with the political implications of Hegel’s thought. This is the part of the book that goes beyond any interpretation of Hegel’s thought and envisions how this thought might impact our thinking about politics. I don’t think that Hegel has all the answers for us politically—he’s not a magic eight ball—but he does provide an approach that has dramatic implications for how we orient ourselves with regard to political problems.Even though Hegel died when Marx was in his teens, Hegel’s philosophy nonetheless offers a political corrective to Marxism that can be valuable for us today, as Marxism has again arisen as an alternative to ubiquitous capitalism. We all know that Marxist attempts at restructuring society in the twentieth century went horribly awry. I think Hegel’s philosophy points to a theoretical reason why that was so, which is what makes taking stock of him so important in our times.Hegel doesn’t really have much to offer as a critic of capitalism, although he does make the point that massive increases in wealth will necessarily correspond to widespread poverty. I think Hegel basically must defer to Marx’s critique of capitalism and his revelation of capitalism’s fundamental contradictions. What Hegel adds, however, is the insight that our political response to capitalism cannot aim at eliminating contradiction altogether, as it is for Marx. If our response tries to do this, something akin to the gulag or the killing fields will inevitably develop. In our theorizing about politics and in our political practice, the attempt to sustain contradiction must remain in the foreground. I see this as Hegel’s fundamental political lesson and one that retains its importance in the contemporary world.Furthermore, Hegel’s philosophy of contradiction has important implications for how we think about identity, one of the key political questions today. He sees that every assertion of identity involves itself in non-identity. There is no pure identity. As identity movements rage throughout the world, it is important to consider how fraught the question of identity is. Identity only becomes what it is through a differentiation that relies on what it excludes. It needs what it rejects in order to be what it is. Thus, all identity claims involve a disavowal of what they negate in order to create an identity.What Hegel offers in the place of identity is universality. He is a firm believer in universal political struggle. He grounds universal values such as freedom and equality not in some vision of human essence or in natural law but rather in contradiction itself. Because of the contradiction that undoes every identity, we are all free. Because of the contradiction that undermines the highest authority, we are all equal. Hegel provides a way of thinking about universality that removes it from dominance and imperialism. Universality connects us through what we aren’t, not what we are. Hegel holds up universality as the only way to combat the retreat into the isolated trap of identity.