Before moving to Chicago, he taught for a number of years in the department of philosophy at UCSD, where he counted Henry Allison and Herbert Marcuse among his colleagues.
[6][7] Pippin is best known for his work on Hegel, but he has also published articles and books on Kant, Nietzsche, Proust, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Henry James, and on film (including the Hollywood Western, film noir, Alfred Hitchcock, and Douglas Sirk).
But because of the actual plurality of shapes of spirit (or forms of life) any account of human agency which is socio-historical is in danger of getting into relativism.
But according to the non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel (such as Pippin's, Pinkard's and Redding's) there is a distinctive feature of the Hegelian approach - mutual recognition as the condition of free, self-determined and so authentic rational agency - which can transcend the alleged dangers of socio-historical relativism or, on the other hand, returning to dogmatic metaphysics or trans-historical subjectivity.
Such a revisionist reading of Hegel has gained a following, inspiring important works by Terry Pinkard, Paul Redding, Diego Bubbio and others, as well as influencing less historically oriented philosophers of mind such as John McDowell and Robert Brandom.
In Pippin's 1991 Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture, he develops what he calls a socio-cultural corollary to his 1989 work.
Nonetheless, he admits that, and attempts to explore why, the dominant high culture of that society has been one of what might be termed self-hatred: he ranges from Flaubert and later modernist avant-gardes to the intellectual trends of New Historicism and Derridean deconstructive thought.
Generally speaking, Pippin's argument is that modernity is "never-ending", that it is an attempt to bring greater rational transparency to all of our social practices and that much of the self-hatred of modern high culture is motivated by attempts to bring such transparency to areas where it had previously not existed.