Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

(1902–68) The best-known interpreter of HEGEL. He was a Russian émigré who settled in Paris where he taught his famous Hegel seminar at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes from 1933 to 1939. After the 1939-45 war and until his death in 1968, Kojève worked in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs, where he was one of the earliest architects of the European community and the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) talks.Kojève's seminar on Hegel exerted a remarkable influence on a whole generation of French intellectuals including Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-ponty, André Breton, Jacques Lagan, Raymond Aron, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Leading figures of Postmodernism such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida also pay tribute to him and are deeply indebted to his reading of Hegel. And thanks to his lifelong friendship with Leo STRAUSS, his influence on American Straussians such as Allan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama is unmistakable.Kojève read Hegel through the eyes of Marx and Heidegger simultaneously. For Kojève, history begins with the relationship between master and slave and ends with a “universal and homogeneous state” in which men and women live in conditions of equality, prosperity, and mutual recognition, free of war. According to Kojève, history ends with Capitalism, not Communism. Marx could not have anticipated the fact that twentieth-century capitalism ... log in or subscribe to read full text