Alexandre Kojeve Quotes on Politics
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. This page collects quotes attributed to Alexandre Kojeve on the topic of politics, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Alexandre Kojeve:
“History is the dialectic of master and slave.”
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Attributed to Alexandre Kojeve:
“The end of history is the universal recognition of the dignity of every human being.”
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“True, since the Minority is necessarily weaker (physically, that is to say quantitatively) than the Majority, its power can only derive from its Authority (minority regimes are necessarily 'authoritarian'). But this Authority never derives from the fact that the Minority is a Minority . The 'justification' ('propaganda') is always of the kind: " even though we are only a minority, we . . ." The Authority that is endorsed by a Minority 'justifies' itself or explains itself by 'quality' and not by quantity. (Even the 'snob' claims to belong to the elite and not to the minority .)”
p. 39 -
“In all times and ages, political crimes have always been punished more severely than others – even in the degenerate State of Nicholas II . The fact that in modern ' democracies ' we lean towards political clemency proves only one thing: the loss of any sense of the 'political' in general.”
p. 79