Alexandre Kojève [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] http://www.iep.utm.edu/k/kojeve.htm

Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968)
Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you
to those parts of this article)
1. Chronology of Life and Works
2. The Hegelian Context
3. The Influence of Marx
4. The Influence of Heidegger
5. The End of History and the Last Man
6. Kojève's Influence
7. References and Further Reading
1. Chronology of Life and Works
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 Çtudes.
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. Via his friend Leo
Strauss, Kojève's thought also exerted influence in America, most
especially over Allan Bloom and, later, Francis Fukuyama. 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 EEC 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
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Alexandre Kojève [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] http://www.iep.utm.edu/k/kojeve.htm

were only published posthumously.

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2. The Hegelian Context
Hegel's philosophy of history, most especially the historicist philosophy
of consciousness developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit, provides the
core of Kojève's own work. However, Kojève’s Hegel lectures are not so
much an exegesis of Hegel's thought, as a profoundly original
reinterpretation. By reading Hegel's philosophy of consciousness through
the twin lenses of Marx's materialism and Heidegger’s temporalised
ontology of human being (Dasein), Kojève can rightly be said to have
initiated 'existential Marxism'. Here I will briefly sketch the most salient
dimensions of Hegel's philosophy of history, before proceeding to outline
Kojève's own interpretation of it.

Perhaps the core of Hegel's philosophy is the idea that human history is
the history of thought as it attempts to understand itself and its relation
to its world. History is the history of reason, as it grapples with its own
nature and its relation to that with which it is confronted (other beings,
nature, the eternal). The historical movement of this reason is one of a
sequence of alienations (Entfremdungen) or splits, and the subsequent
attempt to reconcile these divisions through a restoration of unity. Thus,
for example, Hegel sees the world of the Athenian Greeks as one in
which people lived in a harmonious relation to their community and the
world about, the basis of this harmony being provided by a pre-reflective
commitment to shared customs, conventions and habits of thought and
action. With the beginnings of Socratic philosophy, however, division and
separation is introduced into thought -customary answers to questions
of truth, morality, and reality are brought under suspicion. A questioning
'I' emerges, one that experiences itself as distinct and apart from other
beings, from customary rules, and from a natural world that becomes an
'object' for it. This introduces into experience a set of 'dualisms' between
subject and object, man and nature, desire and duty, the
human and the divine, the individual and the collectivity. For Hegel, the