The Russian-born philosopher Alexandre Kojève is best-known for his impact on 20th century French intellectual history through seminars he conducted on GWF Hegel in Paris in the 1930s.
Kojève’s rewriting of Hegel’s philosophy focused on the struggle for recognition between two individuals who, in the allegorical narrative, emerge as master and slave. The master is recognised as such because, unlike his opponent, he is willing to risk his life in a struggle to the death. However, the master’s position is complicated by the fact that he can only sustain his mastery if the slave continues to recognise him in this role. In his dependence upon the slave, we see that not even a master can escape the essential interdependence that characterises human existence.
Kojève examined how to achieve a world beyond masters and slaves where all could be recognised as equal in what he called the “universal and homogenous state”. Initially, he believed the answers could be found in Soviet communism, which he even viewed as inaugurating a post-historical condition. But beyond this notorious “end of history” thesis, Kojève’s views changed considerably throughout his life.
After the second World War Kojève worked as a senior civil servant in France, where he was instrumental in shaping trade policy as well as planning for the European Economic Community. Instead of revolution, he came to invest in institutions as the best means available of attaining a mass of equal and self-aware citizens.
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This development is evident in a 1945 essay in which Kojève advised France to join Spain and Italy in a “Latin Empire” to avoid decline in the face of the Anglo-American and Soviet empires. For Kojève, political modernity was characterised by the tension between undesirable and backwards nationalisms and impossibly idealistic cosmopolitanisms. The notion of a “Latin Empire” proposed a way out of this impasse through states coming together to form larger cultural blocs.
Such writings clearly relate to Kojève’s subsequent planning role in the EEC, but reading them today evoke alternative visions of European and world politics. As Groys explains, Kojève viewed the philosopher as a “social engineer”, who must evaluate ideas based on their successes and failures in practice.
