Reconciliation and Reification : Freedom's Semblance and Actuality from Hegel to Contemporary Critical Theory

This book defends Hegel's concept of "reconciliation" as the best understanding of human beings' emancipatory interest and presents "reification" as a systematic blockage to its realization. Drawing upon psychoanalysis and legal theory, it explores the extent to which recent theories (Rawls, Honneth, Habermas) succeed in spelling out how society could be organized in such a way that reconciliation between individual and society could be realized on something approaching a universal basis.