1001Philosophers

Alexandre Kojeve Quotes

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. The quotes below are attributed to Alexandre Kojeve, organized by topic.

Alexandre Kojeve on Knowledge

  • Attributed to Alexandre Kojeve:

    “Philosophy is the wisdom of the wise man at the end of history.”

  • Attributed to Alexandre Kojeve:

    “Wisdom is the consciousness that we are at the end of the journey of consciousness.”

Alexandre Kojeve on Love

  • Attributed to Alexandre Kojeve:

    “Man is desire, and human desire is the desire of another desire.”

Alexandre Kojeve on Politics

  • Attributed to Alexandre Kojeve:

    “History is the dialectic of master and slave.”

  • Attributed to Alexandre Kojeve:

    “The end of history is the universal recognition of the dignity of every human being.”