Alexandre Kojeve

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Alexandre Kojève (Alexandre Vladimirovitch Kojevnikov) (1902 - 1968) was Marxist and Hegelian political philosopher, who had a substantial impact on intellectual life in France in the 1930s. The then-dominant idealistic tradition in France was of a Kantian type with little influence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's idealism, which had been popular in Germany, England and Italy. Kojève changed this in France. (In the countries where Hegelian idealism had been strong, it was being challenged by rationalism, partly as a consequence of G.E. Moore and his Refutation of Idealism.) He was born in Russia, and educated in Berlin and Heidelberg, Germany. Kojève would spend most of his life in France where in Paris from 1933-1939 he taught a series of lectures on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's work, Phenomenology of Spirit. After World War II, Kojève worked in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs as one of the chief planners for the European Common Market. A Marxist, Kojève came to postulate as early as the 1950s that while Karl Marx's philosophy of history was correct, and that history was progessing towards the emergence of a universal and homogenous state, it would be liberal capitalist in character, rather than socialist or communist. Liberal capitalism had proven to be more efficient in garnering the technological requirements necessary to master nature, banish scarcity and meet the needs of humanity. This view created much controversy when it was restated by Francis Fukuyama in his work The End of History (1992), which drew heavily on Hegel as seen by Kojève. Kojève's views on this were reprinted in the Spring 1980 (Vol. 9) edition of the French journal Commentaire in an article entitled 'Capitalisme et socialisme: Marx est Dieu; Ford est son prophète.' Many of Kojève's lectures on Hegel have been published in English in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on Phenomenology of Spirit. Kojève's interpretation of Hegel has been one of the most influential of the past century, if not the most respectable academically. His lectures were attended by intellectuals including Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Andre Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan and Raymond Aron. Other French thinkers have acknowledged his influence on their thought, including the post-structuralist philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. His most influential work was Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (1947). Kojève also had a lifelong friendship and correspondence with the US conservative thinker Leo Strauss; their correspondence has been published along with a critique Kojève wrote of Strauss's commentary on Xenophon in Strauss, Leo On Tyranny: Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence(edited by Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth). Several of Strauss's students went to Paris to study under Kojève in the 1950s and 1960s. Included in those was Allan Bloom, who endeavored during his lifetime to make Kojève's works available in English language translations. Prior to going to France, Kojève studied under the existentialist thinker Karl Jaspers, submitting his doctoral dissertation on the Russian mystic Vladimir Soloviev's views on the mystical union of God and man in Christ. Kojève's uncle was the abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky.
Kojève died in Brussels in 1968.