For our continuing series of harsh book reviews:

[T]he approach taken in the book limits it in other ways. It is relentlessly self-referential and self-promoting ("Žižek and I" is a constant refrain), often self-congratulatory, and frequently quite polemical, at times to the point of agitprop. "Anything short of this reckoning [Johnston's own position] signals a disrespectful underestimation throwing the doors wide open to a surreptitious replacement of Hegel with a dummy made for exploitation by post-Hegelian ventriloquists." (p.73) (Full disclosure: I am the main target of the chapter that concludes with this swipe. More to come below.) Much of the polemic sounds like an intra-party squabble about purity (as in, "who is the true dialectical materialist"). Positions are "betrayed" (p.129); there are charges of unacceptable backsliding, slippage from the right position (p.147) and there is an unfortunate sectarian cast to the whole enterprise….

A final comment. At one point, Johnston quotes an apt remark from a letter by Althusser, that "Hegel . . . remains, after all, the fundamental reference for everyone, since he is himself such a 'continent' that it takes practically a whole lifetime to come to know him well." (p.80) That is certainly true, but it is also true that Hegel cannot be "known well" at all if one's survey of his work is from such a high altitude that one ends up trading in catch phrases, jargon, arbitrary interventions in and citations from isolated texts, repetitive formulae, and so a sectarian appropriation of a great thinker for a kind of internal party politics. To return to Johnston's image, in that case we end up with a ventriloquist's dummy.

UPDATE:  Philosopher Adrian Johnston (New Mexico) wrote to me and kindly gave me permission to share the following with readers:

For what it's worth, Pippin's ire was provoked specifically by the book's second chapter, which is a revised version of an article that first appeared on-line here:

http://crisiscritique.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/adrian.pdf

I critique his construal of Hegel's remarks about Kant's transcendental unity of apperception (such as his very favorite quotation from the Science of Logic's "Doctrine of the Concept") as supporting the Kantianizing interpretation of Hegel he has been pushing since 1989's Hegel's Idealism.  I provide plenty of evidence for my criticisms, despite Pippin dismissing them without providing much, if any, counter-evidence or counter-argumentation.  If either you or your blog readers have any interest in the version of this text that appeared in my book, I can scan and send a PDF of chapter two.