By Glenn Harcourt
Waller Newell’s new book, Tyranny and Revolution introduces us to a long philosophical discussion initiated in eighteenth-century France by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but for the most part played out in Germany across the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. The author quite successfully draws out the intertextual particularities of this discussion, essentially providing a critical history of what he describes as “The Philosophy of Freedom.” … In some ways, this program was doomed from the start, but it produced some of the most elegant and powerful system building in all of philosophy…