The first part of the present book is the translation of my 1981 Hegel et la Critique de la Métaphysique: étude sur la Doctrine de l'Essence (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin). The second part consists of two essays written in the early nineties, in which I offered a somewhat different perspective on Hegel's philosophical project.

Hegel et la Critique de la Métaphysique was originally written as my Thése de Doctorat de Troisième Cycle (Ph.D.), which I defended in the fall of 1980 at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. Throughout the late sixties and seventies in France, the question of the relation between Marx's historical materialism and Hegel's dialectical method had been at the forefront of philosophical discussions. A view prominently defended by Louis Althusser was that the true ancestor of Marx's naturalistic treatment of society and history was not Hegel's dialectical method, plagued with metaphysical idealism and a teleological view of nature and society, but Spinoza's version of naturalistic monism. My interest in Hegel's Science of Logic was thus sparked initially by my interest in Marx, in contemporary political and social theory inspired by Marx, and in Althusser's provocative statements concerning Marx's and Lenin's relation to Hegel.