The paper discusses the philosophical perspective developed by Giuseppe Duso in his latest book, Libertà e costituzione in Hegel. Taking distance from some recent interpretations of Hegel that see in his Philosophy of Law a prefiguration of social theory and sociology, Duso shows the internal need for a dialectical reading of Hegelian thought, as the only condition enabling us to grasp its critical dimension, in particular with regard to the cen-tral concepts and main institutions of modernity, as well as its irreducible nature both to normative political philosophy and to socio-historical empirical sciences. In this framework, the essay focuses on the analysis of the two principal issues in which the Hegelian challenge launched by Duso comes to light: the epistemological primacy of philosophy for an understanding of the reality of human relations and the ontological privilege of a differently conceived State as the level in which the socio-political totality constituted by such relations actually emerges and from which the full achievement of modern autonomy becomes properly thinkable. Addressing the question of democracy, understood as a form of political socie-ty taken in a historical process of self-transformation, the essay then tries to measure the strength and the limits of Hegel's political philosophy, which finally appears as an alternative to the social sciences.
