Alexandre Kojève
From Freepedia
Alexandre Kojève (Alexandre Vladimirovitch Kojevnikov) (April 28 1902 - 1968) was a 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. Early influences included the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the historian of science Alexandre Koyré. 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 of the right," as he called himself, Kojève came to postulate as early as the 1950s that while Karl Marx's philosophy of history was correct, and that history was progressing 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), which summarized many of his lectures and included, in full, some others.
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 meet 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. It is worth noting, however, that the Straussian interpretation of Kojève is slanted and often patronizing. In the 1950s, Kojève also befriended the former Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, whose "Notion of the Political" he had implicitly criticized in his analysis of Hegel's text on "Lordship and Bondage."
In addition to his lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Kojève has published other articles and books in French, a book on Kant, and articles on the relationship between Hegelian and Marxist thought and Christianity. A book Kojève wrote in 1943 was published posthumously in 1981 by the French publisher Gallimard under the title Esquisse d'une phenomenologie du droit in which he contrasts the aristocratic and bourgeois views of right. Le Concept, le temps et le discours," also published by Gallimard, further extrapolate on the Hegelian notion that wisdom only becomes possible in the fullness of time. Kojève's response to Leo Strauss, who disputed this notion, can be found in Kojève's article 'The Emperor Julian and his Art of Writing' published in Ancients and Moderns: Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss, edited by Joseph Cropsey, as well as in the above-mentioned edition of Strauss's On Tyranny. Kojève also challenged Strauss' interpretation of the classics in a 1000+page book "Esquisse d'une histoire raisonnée de la pensée païenne," including one volume on the pre-Socratic philosophers, one on Plato and Aristotle, and one on Neoplatonism. Recently, three more books have been published: a 1932 thesis on the physical and philosophical importance of quantum physics, a extended 1931 essay on atheism ("L'athéisme"), and a 1943 work on "The Notion of Authority;" like "Le Concept, le temps et le discours" these have not yet been translated into the English.
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. It is said that Kojève spoke Chinese, Tibetan dialects and other Eastern languages alongside his French, German, Russian, and English.
Kojève died in Brussels in 1968, right after a giving talk at the European Economic Community (now European Union) on behalf of the French government. One of his repeatedly expressed positions in later years was that what had, in Marx's time and afterward, been known as a European proletariat, no longer existed, and the wealthy West sorely needed to support developing countries through large monetary gifts (in the mold of the Marshall Plan) that would permit them to overcome widespread poverty.
