Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—with their unique emphasis on the master-slave dialectic—shaped the course of post-war French philosophy. They also had a strong influence on conservative American thought, with Kojève’s student, Allan Bloom, editing and introducing Kojève’s work to an American audience, and Francis Fukuyama drawing on Kojève’s idea of the “end of history” after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Kojève’s lectures had deep repercussions on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon (as we will see in the segments on their writings) and continue today to influence our political debates, as evidenced by the provocative thesis of Susan Buck-Morss in her essay and then book, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. In this segment, we start with Kojève to explore contemporary debates.
Core Reading
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson, in three volumes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1892)
G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction: Reason in History. Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World (1822-1828 and 1830-1831 versions), trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Leçons sur La Phénoménologie de l’esprit, ed. Raymond Queneau (Paris : Gallimard, 1947)
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1969).
Susan F. Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (Summer, 2000): 821-865.
Additional Readings
Jeff Love, “Alexandre Kojève and Philosophical Stalinism.” Studies in East European Thought 70, no. 4 (2018): 263–71. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48700921
Samantha R. Hill, “The scar of identity,” Aeon, March 21, 2023. Available at https://aeon.co/essays/the-philosophical-legacy-of-alexandre-kojeve
Isabel Jacobs, “Introduction to Alexandre Kojève’s ‘Moscow, August 1957’,” Studies in East European Thought 76 (2024): 117–122. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11212-023-09572-8