Robert Pippin disputes many traditional characterizations of the distinctiveness of modern philosophy. In their place he defends claims about agency, freedom, ethical life and modernity itself, all of which are central to the German idealist philosophical tradition, and in particular, to the writings of Hegel. Having considered the Hegelian version of these issues the author explores other accounts as found in Habermas, Strauss, Blumenberg, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

1. Introduction: Hegelianism?; Part 1. The Original Options: Kant Versus Hegel: 2. Kant on the spontaneity of mind; 3. On the moral foundations of Kant's Rechtslehre; 4. Hegel, ethical reasons, Kantian rejoinders; 5. Avoiding German idealism: Kant, Hegel, and the reflective judgment problem; Part II. Critical Modernism: 6. Hegel, modernity, and Habermas; 7. Technology as ideology: prospects; Part III. Greeks, Germans and Moderns: 8. The modern world of Leo Strauss; 9. Being, time, and politics: the Strauss-Kojève debate; Part IV. Narrating Modernity: 10. Blumenberg and the modernity problem; 11. Modern mythic meaning: Blumenberg contra Nietzsche; Part V. Modernism and Nihilism: 12. Truth and lies in early Nietzsche; 13. Nietzsche's alleged farewell: the Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern Nietzsche; 14. Morality as psychology; psychology as morality: Nietzsche, Eros, and clumsy lovers; Part VI. Heidegger's 'Culmination': 15. On being anti-Cartesian: Hegel, Heidegger, subjectivity and sociality; 16. Heideggerian postmodernism and political metaphysics; Part VII. Hegelianism: 17. Hegel's ethical rationalism.