Alexandre Kojève

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexandre Kojève died on the 4th of June 1968, shortly after giving a talk in Brussels. He had appeared before European Economic Community officials as a representative of the French government. That double life, philosopher by training and statesman by vocation, defined everything about him. Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov was born in the Russian Empire on the 28th of April 1902. His uncle was the abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky, about whose work Kojève would write an influential essay in 1936. He moved to Germany in 1920 and studied at the University of Berlin and the University of Heidelberg. He completed his doctoral thesis under Karl Jaspers in 1926. He spent most of his adult life in France. What made a self-declared Stalinist devote decades to building European institutions? What did Kojève mean when he argued that philosophical history had already ended? And why did he once describe Henry Ford as Karl Marx's truest heir? Kojève studied Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, Latin, and Classical Greek. He was also fluent in French, German, Russian, and English. Those resources would all be trained on a single lifelong question. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit was the text through which he first asked it aloud.

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• 2. The Paris Circle

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  From 1933 to 1939, Kojève delivered a series of lectures in Paris on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. The circle that gathered to hear him was extraordinary. Raymond Queneau attended, alongside Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Breton, Jacques Lacan, Raymond Aron, Michel Leiris, Henry Corbin, and Éric Weil. Kojève read Hegel through the lens of Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger, producing an interpretation no orthodox Hegelian would have recognized. His treatment of the master-slave dialectic proved especially consequential. Lacan drew on it in developing his mirror stage theory. The post-structuralist philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida would later acknowledge that Kojève's reading had shaped their own thinking.

  Queneau collected and edited the lectures into a book, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, published in 1947. An English translation appeared in 1969, translated by James H. Nichols Jr., and covered slightly under half of the original French text. That 1947 collection is now described as a classic of twentieth-century thought. The dispute those lectures set in motion had, by 1947, already been running for more than a decade. It involved Kojève's oldest and most formidable philosophical friend.

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• 3. The End of History

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  Kojève argued that ideological history had concluded with the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. What the Revolution had established, in principle, was the "rational supremacy of the regime of rights and equal recognition." No violent struggle could improve on that foundation. The battles of ideology were, in his reading, effectively over.

  His version of this thesis differed sharply from the one Francis Fukuyama would later advance under the same name. Fukuyama's end of history celebrated liberal capitalism's triumph. Kojève's reading pointed as much toward a socialist-capitalist synthesis. He saw the United States as representing right-Hegelianism and the Soviet Union as representing left-Hegelianism. Mark Lilla, writing about Kojève's logic, described the projected endpoint of either path as "a rationally organized bureaucracy without class distinctions."

  Among European intellectuals of the 1930s, capitalism and democracy were widely seen as failed Enlightenment relics. Many expected communism or fascism to destroy them. Kojève, as Lilla observed, rejected this analysis. His rejection would guide him toward the most concrete work of his career: building the institutions of postwar Europe.

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• 4. Philosophy and Power

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  Kojève and Leo Strauss began their friendship as philosophy students in Berlin. Between them they generated one of the most searching exchanges in twentieth-century political thought. Kojève wrote that he "never would have known … what philosophy is" without Strauss. That acknowledgment, from a man not given to personal sentiment, conveyed something of the depth of their bond.

  Their central disagreement was over the philosopher's proper relation to political life. Kojève, drawing on his own experience as a senior French official, held that philosophers should take an active part in shaping political events. Strauss disagreed. He pointed to the disastrous outcome of Plato's involvement in the politics of Syracuse. A philosopher's proper role, in Strauss's view, was to ensure that contemplative life remained free from the seductions of power.

  The debate found formal expression when Strauss published a commentary on Xenophon's Hiero and Kojève responded. That exchange was collected into the book On Tyranny. Kojève's contribution, "Tyranny and Wisdom," pressed his case for philosophical engagement with politics. Despite the depth of their disagreement, Strauss regularly sent his best students to Paris to study under Kojève. Allan Bloom worked to bring Kojève's lectures into English. Stanley Rosen made the same journey. Kojève also corresponded with the legal theorist Carl Schmitt in the 1950s. Schmitt's "Concept of the Political" was something Kojève had implicitly criticized in his analysis of Hegel's text on "Lordship and Bondage." Their subsequent correspondence showed that the critique had registered.

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• 5. Stalinist Paradoxes

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  By his own account, Kojève had been a communist from youth and enthusiastic about the Bolshevik revolution. He knew, he later said, "that the establishment of communism meant thirty terrible years," and so he left. His relationship with Soviet communism never became straightforward after that.

  Kojève called himself a Stalinist, yet he regarded the Soviet Union with contempt. He described its social policies as disastrous and its claim to genuine classlessness as ludicrous. He called the Soviet Union the only country in the world where nineteenth-century capitalism still existed. His Stalinism was ironic rather than literal. He saw Stalin's willingness to purge opponents as evidence of a desire to bring history to its conclusion. This was comparable, in his view, to the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution. The violence, in his framing, was philosophically significant rather than politically legitimate.

  His reading of Henry Ford followed the same paradoxical logic. Kojève called Ford "the one great authentic Marxist of the twentieth century." In an article for Yevraziya, a left Eurasianist journal, he had praised the Communist Party's struggle against bourgeois philosophy. He was writing in the 1920s, when something genuinely new still seemed possible. His endorsement was conditional on the hope that a truly new culture might emerge, whatever name it eventually carried.

  Between 1940 and 1941, Kojève composed a manuscript of more than 900 pages addressed to Stalin. He titled it Sofia, filo-sofia i fenomeno-logia. Boris Groys, writing about the manuscript, explains that for Kojève the universal and homogeneous state was none other than communism. In such a state, wisdom could finally spread through the whole population. Several versions, including a typeset copy, were completed in the first week of March 1941. One copy was delivered to the Soviet vice-consul in person, who promised to send it to Moscow in the next diplomatic bag. Less than three months later, Nazi troops burned the Soviet embassy and its contents. Whether the manuscript ever reached Moscow remains unknown.

  Isaiah Berlin, who met Kojève in Paris around 1946 or 1947, left a memorable characterization. Kojève, he wrote, "was an ingenious thinker and imagined that Stalin was one too." Kojève had even written to Stalin, Berlin reported, but received no reply. Berlin suspected that Kojève had identified himself with Hegel and Stalin with Napoleon.

  Berlin gave several accounts of a dinner in Paris at which Kojève expressed astonishment at his defence of Zionism. He questioned why Jews would give up their unique place in history simply to achieve statehood. He described them as "miraculous survivors from the classical age of our common civilisation." To become Albania, he asked, was this not "a failure of national imagination"? Berlin replied that 600,000 Jews in Romania had been "trapped like sheep to be slaughtered by the Nazis and their local allies." But 600,000 Jews in Palestine had not fled even when Rommel stood at their door. They considered Palestine their own country. "We reached no agreement," Berlin recorded.

  In 1999, Le Monde published a report claiming that a French intelligence document showed Kojève had spied for the Soviets for over thirty years.

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• 6. Building Europe

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  The French Ministry of Economic Affairs employed Kojève after World War II. He became one of its chief planners in the project to form the European Economic Community. That institution would later become the European Union. Roger Scruton described Kojève as "a life-hating Russian at heart." Scruton credited him with "a leading behind-the-scenes role in establishing both the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the European Economic Community." He also called Kojève "a dangerous psychopath."

  Kojève's work at the Ministry gave practical expression to one of his convictions. Europe needed to carve its own path between the two dominant postwar powers. Neither the capitalist model nor the state-socialist alternative had, in his analysis, fully realized the rational potential of the modern state. The European Economic Community represented, in principle, a different possibility.

  Kojève's 1943 work on justice, the Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, did not appear until 1981. The first volume of his major study of ancient philosophy, the Esquisse d'une histoire raisonnée de la pensée païenne, was published in 1968. The final two volumes followed in 1972 and 1973. His career stretched from a doctoral thesis on the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev to the corridors of the European Economic Community. Many of the works it produced are still finding their first readers.

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