Alexandre Kojève

Alexandre Kojève (, ; 28 April 1902 – 4 June 1968) was a Russian-born French philosopher and statesman whose philosophical seminars had an immense influence on 20th-century French philosophy, particularly via his integration of Hegelian concepts into twentieth-century continental philosophy.

As a statesman in the French government, he was instrumental in the formation of the European Union.

Kojève was born Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov (Алекса́ндр Влади́мирович Коже́вников) in the Russian Empire to a wealthy and influential family.

His articles from 1920s, talked positively about the USSR, saw it as something developing new.

In an article to magazine Yevraziya, a left Eurasianist journal, he praised the CPSU's struggle against bourgeois philosophy, arguing that it would lead to something new, whether one calls it proletarian or not:

"'(...) Marxist philosophy can express the world view of the new ruling class and new culture, and every other philosophy is subject to destruction. (...) Everything currently taking place in the USSR is so significant and new that any assessment of the Party's cultural or 'philosophical' politics cannot be founded on preconceived cultural values or preformed philosophical systems. (...) the question of the Party's 'philosophical politics' can be assessed, it seems, not entirely negatively. (...) Toward the end of the nineteenth century Western thought effectively concluded its development [...] turning into a philosophical school of 'scholasticism' in the popular, negative sense of the term. (...) being a philosopher, one can nevertheless welcome 'philosophical politics' leading to the complete prohibition of the study of philosophy. (...) The Party is fighting against bourgeois culture in the name of proletarian culture.

Many find the word 'proletariat' not to their taste.

This is after all only a word.

The essence of the matter does not change, and the essence consists in the fact that a battle is raging with something old, already existing, in the name of something new, which has yet to be created.

In Heidelberg, he completed in 1926 his PhD thesis on the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev's views on the union of God and man in Christ under the direction of Karl Jaspers.

The title of his thesis was Die religiöse Philosophie Wladimir Solowjews (The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev).

Early influences included the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the historian of science Alexandre Koyré.

In the 1930s, the two began a debate on the relation of philosophy to politics that would come to fruition with Kojève's response to Strauss' On Tyranny.

Kojève, a senior statesman in the French government, argued that philosophers should have an active part in shaping political events.

On the other hand, Strauss believed that philosophy and politics were fundamentally opposed and that philosophers should not have a substantial role in politics, noting the disastrous results of Plato in Syracuse.

Philosophers should influence politics only to the extent that they can ensure that philosophical contemplation remains free from the seduction and coercion of power.

In spite of this debate, Strauss and Kojève remained friendly.

In fact, Strauss would send his best students to Paris to finish their education under Kojève's personal guidance.

Among these were Allan Bloom, who endeavored to make Kojève's works available in English and published the first edition of Kojève's lectures in English, and Stanley Rosen.

According to his own account shortly before his death, Kojève was a communist from youth, and was enthusiastic regarding Bolshevik revolution.

However, he "knew that the establishment of communism meant thirty terrible years.", so he ran away.

Kojève spent most of his life in France and from 1933 to 1939 delivered in Paris a series of lectures on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's work Phenomenology of Spirit.

After the Second World War, Kojève worked in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs as one of the chief planners to form the European Economic Community.

Kojève studied and used Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, Latin and Classical Greek.

He was also fluent in French, German, Russian and English.

His uncle was the abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky, about whose work he would write an influential essay in 1936.

He was educated at the University of Berlin and the University of Heidelberg, both in Germany.

Kojève's lectures on Hegel were collected, edited and published by Raymond Aron in 1947, and published in abridged form in English in the now classic Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit.

His interpretation of Hegel has been one of the most influential of the past century.

His lectures were attended by a small but influential group of intellectuals including Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Breton, Jacques Lacan, Raymond Aron, Michel Leiris, Henry Corbin and Éric Weil.

His interpretation of the master–slave dialectic was an important influence on Jacques Lacan's mirror stage theory.

Other French thinkers who have acknowledged his influence on their thought include the post-structuralist philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Kojève had a close and lifelong friendship with Leo Strauss which began when they were philosophy students in Berlin.

The two shared a deep philosophical respect for each other.

Kojève would later write that he "never would have known [...] what philosophy is" without Strauss.

From now on, he once claimed in his letter to Tran Duc Thao, dated October 7, 1948, that his "... course was essentially a work of propaganda intended to strike people's minds. This is why I consciously reinforced the role of the dialectic of Master and Slave and, in general, schematized the content of phenomenology."

Kojève died in 1968, shortly after giving a talk to civil servants and state representatives for the European Economic Community (now the European Union) in Brussels on behalf of the French government.

Although not an orthodox Marxist, Kojève was known as an influential and idiosyncratic interpreter of Hegel, reading him through the lens of both Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger.

The well-known end of history thesis advanced the idea that ideological history in a limited sense had ended with the French Revolution and the regime of Napoleon and that there was no longer a need for violent struggle to establish the "rational supremacy of the regime of rights and equal recognition".

Kojève's end of history is different from Francis Fukuyama's later thesis of the same name in that it points as much to a socialist-capitalist synthesis as to a triumph of liberal capitalism.