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http://www.iep.utm.edu/k/kojeve.htm#H5
French philosopher (1902-1968), born Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov in Russia. Kojève studied in Germany (Heidelberg) where, under the supervision of Karl Jaspers, he completed a thesis (Die religöse Philosophie Wladimir Solowjews, 1931) Vladimir Solovyov, a Russian religious philosopher deeply influenced by Hegel. He later settled in Paris, where he taught at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Ētudes. Taking over from Alexandre Koyré, he taught a seminar on Hegel from 1933 till 1939.
Along with Jean Hyppolite, he was responsible for the serious introduction of Hegel into French thought. His lectures exerted a profound influence (both direct and indirect) over many leading French philosophers and intellectuals - amongst them Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille, Althusser, Queneau, Aron, and Breton. His lectures on Hegel were published in 1947 under the title Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, appearing in English as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1969).
After the Second World War Kojève worked in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs, until his death in 1968. Here he exercised a profound, mandarin influence over French policy, including a role as one of the leading architects of the European Union and GATT. He continued to write philosophy over these years, including works on the pre-Socratics, Kant, the concept of right, the temporal dimensions of philosophical wisdom, the relationship between Christianity and both Western science and communism, and the development of capitalism. Many of these works were only published posthumously.
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The influence of Kojève outside France has probably been most pronounced in the United States. His ideas achieved a new salience and exposure with the publication of Francis Fukayama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in the wake of the Cold War. Fukayama was a student of Allan Bloom's, who in turn was a 'disciple' of the 'esoteric' émigré political philosopher Leo Strauss.
It was Strauss who introduced a generation of his students to Kojève's thought, and in Bloom’s case, arranged for him to study with Kojève in Paris in the 1960s. The book, an international bestseller, presents nothing less than a triumphal vindication of Kojève's supposedly prescient thesis that history has found its end in the global triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy. With the final demise of Soviet Marxism, and the global hegemony of capitalism, we have finally reached the end of history. There are no more battles to be fought, no more experiments in social engineering to be attempted; the world has arrived at a homogenised state in which the combination of capitalism and liberal democracy will reign supreme, and all other cultural and ideological systems will be consigned irretrievably to the past.
Fukayama follows Kojève in tying the triumph of capitalism to the satisfaction of material human needs. Moreover, he sees it as the primary mechanism for the provision of recognition and value. Consumerism and the commodity form, for Fukayama, present the means by which recognition is mediated. Humans desire to be valued by others, and the means of appropriating that valuation is the appropriation of the things that others themselves value; hence lifestyle and fashion become the mechanisms of mutual esteem in a post-historical world governed by the logic of capitalist individualism.
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http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/kojeve03.htm
Alexandre Kojève, KGB spy
Ideas have consequences. We suppose that is one lesson of the recent revelation by the French secret service that the Russian-born French philosopher and civil servant Alexandre Kojève was a Soviet agent for some thirty years. It would be difficult to overstate Kojève’s eminence in the pantheon of twentieth-century French intellectuals. Daniel Johnson, who reported the story in the London Daily Telegraph, noted that “Kojève’s subterranean influence is ubiquitous. His ideas echo around our political arena. Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ is recycled Kojève. So is Tony Blair’s vision of a post-conservative, post-national, post-political, post-historical Europe.”
In intellectual and cultural terms, Kojève’s influence is even more extensive. Born Alexander Kochevnikoff in Moscow in 1902, Kojève left Russia in 1920, going first to Poland and then to Germany, where he encountered two life-changing personalities: his uncle Wassily Kandinsky, who became a close friend, and the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, which seduced him utterly. In 1926, Kojève moved to Paris, changed his name, and became a French citizen. In 1933, he embarked on what is probably the most famous philosophical seminar of the century: his Marxist-inspired, line-by-line dissection of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. His students included André Breton, Georges Bataille, Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eric Weil, Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Queneau: the good, the bad, and the ugly of twentieth-century French intellectual life. Among Kojève’s later admirers was Allan Bloom, who described him as “the most brilliant man I ever met.” Aron thought him “more intelligent than Sartre.”
Recalling Kojève’s seminar in his Mémoires (1983), Aron wrote that “the subject was both world history and the Phenomenology. The latter shed light on the former. Everything took on meaning. Even those who were suspicious of historical providence … did not resist the magician: at the moment, the intelligibility he conferred on time and events was enough of a proof.” It is difficult for the uninitiated —namely, anyone who did not come under the spell of Kojève’s personality— to understand his influence. The printed version of his lectures —Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1968) — is almost comical in its fuzzy megalomania. (Though in this, it has to be admitted, itclosely resembles the teachings of Hegel himself.) The book is full of statements like this: “there is History because there is Philosophy and in order that there may be Philosophy.”
Although like Hegel he professed to believe that history —or at any rate History — came to an end with the Phenomenology, in 1945 Kojève nevertheless decided to join the Ministry of Economy and Finance because, Aron reports, he “wanted to know how it [history] happened. … Like Plato, he wanted to advise a tyrant, in the shadows exercise influence over the visible actors.” For more than twenty years, Kojève (who died in 1968) succeeded in just that. He was by all accounts a brilliant negotiator. Dreaming of a resurgent [Roman] Empire, he was instrumental behind the scenes in the formation of the European Economic Community and encouraged de Gaulle to block British membership. If nothing else, Kojève was a living testimony to the mesmerizing power of personality. Even Aron was taken in by Kojève. Although he noted that in
1938–1939, Kojève referred to himself as a “strict Stalinist,” Aron believed that Kojève later abandoned his Stalinism for the sake of serving France. “Did there,” Aron asks, “remain in him a kind of Russian patriotism, hidden and rationalized? I don’t doubt it, although there is no question that he served the French nation, freely chosen, with unshakable loyalty.”
It turns out, though, that Kojève was unshakably loyal only to the Hegelian ideal of the World Historical Personality. The young Hegel idolized Napoleon when he was on his way up, referring to him in 1806 as diese Weltseele — “this world soul.” Stalin was Kojève’s Napoleon: a tyrant through whom the forces of history seemed to converge.The French government has not yet released Kojève’s dossier, so it is not clear how much damage he did in his decades of espionage. He was the confidante of de Gaulle and Giscard d’Estaing, and doubtless had access to numerous French secrets. As Mr. Johnson points out, this “miraculous mandarin turns out to have been a malevolent mole. Nobody of his eminence has ever been exposed as a traitor on this scale before.” The French, though they have exposed Kojève, have yet to condemn him.
Perhaps that is a sign of the lingering influence of his ideas. If it is true that we are at the dawn of the “post-historical” era, then working as a spy for the greatest tyranny of the twentieth century might be able to be dialectically interpreted as a “progressive” gesture. Then, too, many of the people Kojève worked with are still alive. Honest condemnation might be embarrassing or worse. And after all, Kojève was universally admired for his beguiling brilliance. For our part, the saga of Alexandre Kojève’s treachery reminds us of Walter Bagehot’s comment on Ruskin’s harebrained economic ideas: “In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.” Bagehot might have added: In the faculty of perpetrating evil, common sense is no match for Hegelian dialectic.
From The New Criterion Vol. 18, No. 3, November 1999-----------------------------
http://www.uregina.ca/arts/CRC/book_kojeve.html
Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics
by Shadia B. Drury
(Summary of Basic Themes)
1. Right and Left Nietzscheans
Drury describes postmodernism as a contest between the Left and Right- wing disciples of NIETZSCHE. On the left she focuses on Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, and Michel Foucault; on the right, she focuses on Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama. Drury shows how all these thinkers share Kojève's picture of the world. According to Drury, Kojève's philosophy of history has the effect of historicizing, Hegelianizing and dramatizing Nietzsche's insights. Kojève has bequeathed to postmodernism a dark picture of the world as the incarnation of the march of reason in history. But it is a cold, soulless, and uninspired rationalism that rules over the world. In this rational wasteland everything wild and wonderful, sublime and splendid has been totally banished. In this totally disenchanted world, the only glorious actions left are destructive. As a result, postmodern politics is radical and deadly.2. The Philosophy of History at the Root of Postmodernism
There is a great deal of interest in postmodernism, but no recognition of its roots in the thought of Alexandre Kojève. Uncovering these roots reveals an entirely new picture of this intellectual movement. What emerges is a fascinating philosophy of history that explains the source of postmodernism's deadly logic. Drury describes it as a Manichean dualism and a dark romanticism. What she means is that it is a philosophy of history that begins with a radical opposition of man and nature, reason and madness, masculine and feminine, master and slave ends with the total defeat of one set of dualities. This transfiguration of Hegel's dialectic into a radical dualism is the work of Alexandre Kojève. He has taught his postmodern followers to see the world in terms of the absolute and irreversible triumph of an arid rationalism. By the same token, he has bequeathed to them a profound nostalgia for everything that reason has banished. As a result, they celebrate madness, crime, power, and mastery. This involves a celebration of what Drury criticizes as a perverse conception of masculinity that pervades postmodernism on the right as well as the left.3. Postmodernism is not a Leftist Movement
Postmodernism is generally believed to be rooted in a profound philosophical skepticism that has led to a celebration of the meaninglessness and eclecticism that manifests itself in novels, films, fashions, art and architecture. Its image is generally frivolous and light. Politically it is regarded as a philosophy of liberation intent on unmasking the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism, with its attendant regimentation of life, subtle oppressions and exploitations. And while all this is true, Drury argues that postmodernism also has a dark side. Contrary to popular belief, Drury claims that postmodernism is not a philosophy of liberation. On the contrary, postmodern writers such as Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille decry the excesses of modern freedom; they long for the forms of power that made transgression and revolt perilous and glorious; they long for the prohibitions and taboos that made sexuality exciting and intense. The new light that her work sheds on postmodernism leads to the conclusion that the enthusiasm with which liberals, Marxists and leftists have embraced postmodernism is highly inappropriate.4. Gratuitous Violence
One of the themes of Drury's book is that the gratuitous violence of the contemporary world mirrors the values enshrined by Kojève's philosophy of history. Kojève believed that, what made man human was his capacity to negate the given world and to create something new. But at the end of history, there is nothing new it in the name of which we can negate the present. As a result, Kojève surmised that man has sunk into a life of animality and consumption; he thought that man has been subsumed into the bosom of nature or the predictable order of things. Indeed, Kojève was the first to announce the death of humanity -- an ominous phrase that has been echoed by French intellectuals from Claude Levi- Strauss to Michel Foucault. In an effort to escape from this dark conclusion, Kojève hit on the idea of the acte gratuit of existential fame. The idea is that only human beings are capable of committing a totally gratuitous, surprising, purposeless, and totally unpredictable act, especially an unmotivated crime or suicide. If the death of man is to be avoided, it is necessary to recognize the value of man's capacity for unemployed or purposeless negativity. It seems to Drury that this view of man's humanity mirrors the drive-by shootings and the purposeless crimes that characterize our postmodern world.5. The Global Village
Kojève picture of the world as a global village, or a universal and homogeneous state cannot be dismissed tout court. We do indeed live in a global village in which the speed of travel and communication has succeeded in homogenizing cultures and values to a large extent. And while this trend is not altogether wholesome, Drury believes that by inculcating profound contempt for everything universal, the Kojèvean sensibility fuels the virulent nationalism, tribalism, and parochialism that is an equally significant feature of our world.6. Drury's Criticisms
Drury believes that evil is never attractive to human beings and that it must take the high moral ground if it is to have any appeal. This is precisely why a deconstruction of the current trends in European philosophy is necessary to reveal the dark core at the centre of what otherwise seem like high-minded ideas. Drury launches a radical critique of the Kojèvean legacy as it manifests itself in the postmodernism of the Right as well as the Left.She decries the Manichean dualism, the perverse conception of masculinity, the celebration of madness and violence, the preoccupation with recognition, the abhorrence or everything universal, the radical rejection of the present, and the Nietzschean conceptions of power, politics, and culture. By the same token, she warns against the smugness of rationalism, which leads to the mistaken belief that there is a single true, right and good moral order that can be discovered by reason and that is applicable to all mankind at all times and places.
She concludes her book by sketching the beginnings of a philosophical position that is as Hegelian as it is Platonic.
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