[...] For Hegel, art was one of the organs through which a society could reflect on - by making explicit to itself - its form of life, which meant not only its habits of thought or speech but also the institutional structures and power relations that continuously shaped those habits. Much of Pippin's philosophical criticism is devoted to making explicit how novelists like James and Proust can help us recognize configurations of thought that are less eccentric than common, less a function of individual history than of "the situation of modernity itself". One of his recurrent points is that exclusively psychological readings of individual action can itself become a sociohistorical habit, so seemingly "natural" to us that we cease to see it as a choice?

That so much of our social and communal life has become so fine-grained and circumstantail that is it difficult, from any amount of distance, to see as anything other than the result of arbitrary pathology is in large part why Pippin believes the novel "might be the great modern philosophical form". He means that novels can show in a manner that philosophy cannot - or has not been inclined to - how ordinary people struggle to be recognized as moral agents and to do justice to the claims of others in th everyday social world. [...]