Alexandre Kojeve 1902 – 1968

Alexandre Kojeve was a Russian-born French philosopher whose lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes from 1933 to 1939 shaped a generation of French intellectuals, including Sartre, Beauvoir, Bataille, Lacan, and Merleau-Ponty. His reading made the master-slave dialectic the center of Hegel's thought and presented history as the progressive realization of mutual recognition in a universal homogeneous state. After the war he served as an architect of postwar European trade policy, while continuing to write on philosophy, religion, and art.

Alexandre Kojeve was born in 1902 in Moscow as Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov, the nephew of the painter Wassily Kandinsky. After the October Revolution and a brief imprisonment as a teenager he made his way through Berlin and Heidelberg, where he studied with Karl Jaspers and took his doctorate in 1926 with a thesis on Vladimir Solovyov. He settled in Paris in 1928.

From 1933 to 1939 he succeeded Alexandre Koyre at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, where his weekly seminar on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit drew Bataille, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Aron, Queneau, Hyppolite, Andre Breton, and Eric Weil. The lectures, edited by Queneau and published in 1947 as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, gave French thought its principal version of Hegel for the next generation. After the war he served until his death as a senior official in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs, where he played a decisive role in the design of the European Economic Community and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Kojeve read Hegel through Marx and Heidegger as a philosopher of the historical struggle for recognition, of master and slave, and of the end of history in the universal homogeneous state. His half-jesting, half-serious version of the end of history was revived in modified form by Francis Fukuyama in 1989. He died at Brussels in June 1968 in the middle of a meeting of the Common Market Commission.