Bernard Bosanquet was, in his time, widely recognized as Britain's most important and influential living philosopher (with the possible and partial exception of fellow Idealist F.H. Bradley). Unfortunately both he and the "neo-Hegelian" tradition he represented have since been eclipsed by analytical philosophy -- Moore and Russell having undermined the Idealists' speculative metaphysics, and Karl Popper having quite unfairly tagged Hegelian thought as a statist enemy of the "open society." But thanks to the efforts of William Sweet and a handful of other scholars, a renaissance in Idealist studies is afoot. And the present work is as fine a contribution to it as I have seen. In this volume Sweet sets himself the task of recovering Bosanquet's doctrine of _rights_. That Bosanquet even _had_ such a doctrine may come as a surprise to anyone who knows of Bosanquet only through secondary sources, but he did indeed develop a fairly thorough account of rights in _The Philosophical Theory of the State_ and elsewhere. Since the table of contents of Sweet's marvelous work is helpfully listed on this page, I shall keep my comments brief. Bosanquet's account of rights is thoroughly teleological: he holds that both rights themselves and their moral authority derive from their contribution to a common end which consists at heart of a society in which everyone is able to live a "good life." For him, the existence and action of the "state" are justified precisely insofar as they contribute toward this end. Central to this account is Bosanquet's doctrine of the "real will," of which Sweet provides an excellent exposition. Basically, in my own paraphrase, one's "real will" consists of what one _would_ explicitly want, all things considered, if one were fully and completely rational. Sweet provides a thorough and careful explication of this centrally important concept (including an admirable account of why it should be called our "_real_" will). This doctrine, which strongly influenced Brand Blanshard's similar account (in _Reason and Goodness_) of what he called the "rational will," has been attacked on any number of grounds (notably by Hobhouse early this century), and part of Sweet's concern is to defend it against contentions that it e.g. leads to statism, fails to assign the proper place to individual good, and so forth. He handles the task well, and to my mind makes a case that should be heard by libertarians and free-marketers of all stripes. (My own view, for what it is worth, is that Bosanquet's teleological account of rights is essentially correct and with almost no modification can be invoked to provide the real basis of the libertarian society. I do not think statist conclusions follow from Bosanquet's premises at all; indeed, I think Austrian economics would benefit from placing its analysis of "market process" on such a philosophical foundation.) Sweet's volume is enormously helpful for another reason: Bosanquet's own prose style has been found somewhat uncongenial by many readers. Despite a brilliance that repays close reading, he does at times stand in need of a more felicitous expositor who can make clear what Bosanquet himself leaves rather obscure. Sweet is a fine expository prose stylist and handles this task with clarity and skill.

Bernard Bosanquet was, in his time, widely recognized as Britain's most important and influential living philosopher (with the possible and partial exception of fellow Idealist F.H. Bradley). Unfortunately both he and the "neo-Hegelian" tradition he represented have since been eclipsed by analytical philosophy -- Moore and Russell having undermined the Idealists' speculative metaphysics, and Karl Popper having quite unfairly tagged Hegelian thought as a statist enemy of the "open society." But thanks to the efforts of William Sweet and a handful of other scholars, a renaissance in Idealist studies is afoot. And the present work is as fine a contribution to it as I have seen. In this volume Sweet sets himself the task of recovering Bosanquet's doctrine of _rights_. That Bosanquet even _had_ such a doctrine may come as a surprise to anyone who knows of Bosanquet only through secondary sources, but he did indeed develop a fairly thorough account of rights in _The Philosophical Theory of the State_ and elsewhere. Since the table of contents of Sweet's marvelous work is helpfully listed on this page, I shall keep my comments brief. Bosanquet's account of rights is thoroughly teleological: he holds that both rights themselves and their moral authority derive from their contribution to a common end which consists at heart of a society in which everyone is able to live a "good life." For him, the existence and action of the "state" are justified precisely insofar as they contribute toward this end. Central to this account is Bosanquet's doctrine of the "real will," of which Sweet provides an excellent exposition. Basically, in my own paraphrase, one's "real will" consists of what one _would_ explicitly want, all things considered, if one were fully and completely rational. Sweet provides a thorough and careful explication of this centrally important concept (including an admirable account of why it should be called our "_real_" will). This doctrine, which strongly influenced Brand Blanshard's similar account (in _Reason and Goodness_) of what he called the "rational will," has been attacked on any number of grounds (notably by Hobhouse early this century), and part of Sweet's concern is to defend it against contentions that it e.g. leads to statism, fails to assign the proper place to individual good, and so forth. He handles the task well, and to my mind makes a case that should be heard by libertarians and free-marketers of all stripes. (My own view, for what it is worth, is that Bosanquet's teleological account of rights is essentially correct and with almost no modification can be invoked to provide the real basis of the libertarian society. I do not think statist conclusions follow from Bosanquet's premises at all; indeed, I think Austrian economics would benefit from placing its analysis of "market process" on such a philosophical foundation.) Sweet's volume is enormously helpful for another reason: Bosanquet's own prose style has been found somewhat uncongenial by many readers. Despite a brilliance that repays close reading, he does at times stand in need of a more felicitous expositor who can make clear what Bosanquet himself leaves rather obscure. Sweet is a fine expository prose stylist and handles this task with clarity and skill.

In this massive two-volume work, Bernard Bosanquet offers what is arguably the most complete development of Idealist logic ever set to paper.

Idealist logic has fallen out of fashion, though perhaps with little excuse. More or less "analytic" philosophers become exercised every now and then over the ontological status of propositions; perhaps they should remind themselves of an earlier tradition that began instead with the _judgment_ and never allowed the divorce between mind and reality which seemed to confer independent existence on the wraithlike entities with which propositional logic deals.

For Bosanquet, as for the Idealists generally, there is not "knowledge" over here, on the one hand, and the reality it is "about" over there, on the other. As he puts it later (in _Implication and Linear Inference_), knowledge just _is_ reality itself _qua_ known, and that same reality is in some manner "constituting and maintaining itself in the form of truth" in the very process of becoming and being known.

The knowledge of which logic is the reflective analysis, as H.H. Joachim develops this view in _Logical Studies_, is not something "in" the mind, on the one hand, and opposed to the reality it is "about," on the other; there is just "knowledge-or-truth" in some process of self-fulfillment or self-development, which simply _is_ reality manifesting itself; reality may be more than this self-development, but it is not less. And it is _this_ logic -- not abstract formal logic but the logic of reality's own "self-development" -- which Bosanquet discusses at length in this classic work.

Undoubtedly this way of putting things will sound strange to modern readers, at least those who have not steeped themselves in the Idealist tradition. But in its way this approach to logic seems strangely and naively correct; is there really a difference between reality "in itself" and reality "as we understand it"? Granted that the latter is always incomplete, but is it really of a different _character_ from reality altogether? If so, how do we come to "know" anything at all?

At the very least, Idealist logic deserves a second look in view of the paradoxes to which formal "propositional" logic leads. And there is no better place to start than this great work, now all but forgotten.

Warning: Bosanquet is not the clearest writer ever born. It will be helpful to have a copy of -- say -- H.H. Joachim's aforementioned _Logical Studies_ at hand in order to work out what in the world Bosanquet is talking about.

Another helpful source is Brand Blanshard's _The Nature of Thought_, which in many respects advances the Idealist argument into genuinely new territory. Blanshard later modified (indeed, all but abandoned) his view that an idea just _is_ its object _in posse_ and would, if developed, simply become identical with its object. But whether he should have abandoned that view or not (I personally suspect not), his development of it in _The Nature of Thought_ will be helpful to the reader who wants to get a handle on Bosanquet.