SO MUCH DEPENDS UPON La Vache qui rit, which you know as the Laughing Cow, the individually wrapped wedges of spreadable cheese from your childhood. Founded in 1921 by a French veteran of the First World War, the company’s name is based on a pun on Wagner’s Valkyries and an anti-German slur. The product’s package—a circular box with a jolly red-faced cow wearing ear tags that have jolly red-faced cows on them—has gone down in advertising history as an early instance of successful branding. In the mid-1920s, a Russian émigré who had recently arrived in Paris from Heidelberg, where he received a doctorate in philosophy, invested his sizable inheritance in the company, only to see his stocks wiped out in the 1929 Wall Street crash. For the first time in his life, he needed to find himself a job. Man plans . . . the cow laughs. The job he wound up getting would alter the course of twentieth-century intellectual and political history.
His name? Alexandre Kojève. Never heard of him? You’re far from alone.
Alexandre Kojève was born Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov to the upper strata of the Russian bourgeoisie in Moscow in 1902. His uncle, with whom he would remain close, was the painter Wassily Kandinsky. After his father, a merchant, was killed in the Russo-Japanese War, his mother married a jeweler. Kojève received an education in modern and classical languages from a prestigious grammar school and soaked up the philosophical and artistic climate of Moscow in the decade and a half before the October Revolution, with its heady brew of orthodox theology, spiritualism, Marxism, Spenglerian pessimism, and the decadent modernity of Russia’s Silver Age poetry. Already, the teenage Aleksandr seems to have decided on his future vocation, titling one of his notebooks “Diary of a Philosopher,” which he filled with diagrams, explorations of the concept of the “inexistent,” and ruminations on love.
In the chaos following the revolution, Kojève was sent abroad to study. Later, his mother told him that had he stayed in Russia he would have been “shot five times over.” Whether this was because of his class background, the contrarian streak already evident in his thought, or his puckish sense of humor she did not specify. Getting shot, alas, was to be the fate of his stepfather, who was killed resisting an attempt to collectivize his estate. Kojève literally inherited the family jewels—two pint glasses full of diamonds—which he split with his bosom friend Georg Witt, who daringly smuggled them across the border. Witt, an avid cinephile, became a producer; his share of Kojève’s inheritance helped finance, among other things, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Kojève’s share went to his philosophy degree at the University of Heidelberg, where he would desultorily work on a dissertation on Vladimir Solovyov, “the Russian Hegel.” During the early ’20s, Kojève shuttled back and forth between intellectually rigorous but sleepy Heidelberg and the University of Berlin, where he indulged in his eclectic interests in Indian and Chinese religious philosophy as well as all the sex, drugs, and artistic experiment on offer to a man of means in the dissolute capital of the Weimar Republic.
It was in Berlin that he seduced Cécile Léonidovna Shoutak, a married woman. The two eloped to Paris, where they were visited by Shoutak’s brother-in-law, the philosopher Alexandre Koyré, who came to break up the affair, but ended up charmed by Kojève instead. Kojève contributed to Koyré’s journaland studied mathematics and the new physics. Everything was going well until October 1929. Not long after the Wall Street crash, Shoutak returned to Berlin and filed for divorce. During the first years of the Depression, Kojève sold Leica cameras he imported from Germany to make ends meet. Meanwhile, he worked on The Idea of Determinism, which argued that quantum physics entailed atheism, and Atheism, which argued that the essence of the human being is awareness of mortality.
Matters started to improve in January 1933, when Koyré received an appointment from the University of Cairo and asked Kojève to cover his Hegel seminar at the École Practique des Hautes Études. For the next six years, Kojève would lecture on The Phenomenology of Spirit, the German philosopher’s notoriously difficult 1807 book. A philosophy seminar is hardly a remarkable thing, it would at first seem. Until, that is, you look at the names of the people who attended the class: the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the philosopher and pornographic novelist Georges Bataille, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the anthropologist and memoirist Michel Leiris, the surrealist André Breton, the political scientist Raymond Aron, and Raymond Queneau, the mathematician and novelist who founded the Oulipo. Queneau compiled Kojève’s papers with his own notes from the seminar to form Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, published by Gallimard in 1947. Aside from his dissertation, it was the only book Kojève allowed to appear during his lifetime.
The Phenomenology of Spirit is a house with dozens of doors, whose interior looks very different depending on which one you enter through. When I was a student, I took three classes on the Phenomenology with three eminent Hegelians—Michael Inwood, Étienne Balibar, and Robert Pippin—and came away with three incompatible impressions of what the book is about. Kojève enters the Phenomenology through the door marked “B.IV.A: Self-Consciousness: The Truth of Self-Certainty: Self-Sufficiency and Non-Self-Sufficiency of Self-Consciousness; Mastery and Servitude,” the Master/Slave Dialectic, as it has come to be known. Kojève’s interpretation of this short chapter—with its emphasis on the themes of desire, death, struggle, recognition, and labor—brought Hegel into simultaneous conversation with Heidegger, whose Being and Time had appeared in 1927, and the young Marx, whose “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1844” were first published in 1932. It has always irritated more scrupulous scholars; Pippin, for example, calls it “incredibly eccentric.” Like Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Leo Strauss’s On Tyranny, and Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel is creative philosophy passing itself off as commentary on a better-known text. Kojève himself thought of it as an “update” of the Phenomenology for the twentieth century.
As such, its influence was enormous, in ways that were often surprising. Paraphrasing Brian Eno on the Velvet Underground, we might say that not many people attended Kojève’s seminar, but everyone who did started a school of thought. Beyond the attendees themselves, it made its mark on existentialism via Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, feminism via Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and anti-colonialism via Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Kojève is the first philosopher we encounter in Subjects of Desire, Judith Butler’s first book, a study of Hegel’s reception in France, published in 1987. During the ’90s, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel was at the center of academic debates on the “politics of recognition,” an early formulation of what today we call identity politics. His musings on “the universal and homogeneous state” that would bring about “the end of history” found a wide audience in the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, thanks to Francis Fukuyama. This means that, along with Strauss, whose correspondence with Kojève is included in an appendix to On Tyranny, and Strauss’s student Allan Bloom, who wrote the introduction to the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel when it appeared in English in 1969, there are also three Kojève proteins in the intellectual DNA of American neoconservatism.
THE HEGEL SEMINAR CAME TO AN END with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Kojève was called up to serve in the French military, but when the Wehrmacht broke through the Ardennes, he was on leave, and was unable to rejoin his unit. By the time he returned to his apartment on the outskirts of Paris, the northern half of France had been occupied, and a puppet government had been installed under Marshal Pétain in Vichy. He would soon leave for Marseille in the “free zone” with his new partner, Nina Ivanoff.
Even by the standards of the Second World War, the next four years were dramatic ones for Kojève. During the Hegel seminar, he had moved away from physics and metaphysics to an interest in more practical matters, examining the bases of political right and authority in long texts that would be published posthumously. He also wrote a 900-page-long treatise with an unwieldy title: “The Phenomenology or Essays of Dialectical Introduction to Philosophy on the Basis of Hegel’s Phenomenology Interpreted in the Light of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism.” He sent the manuscript to Bataille, for safe-keeping at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and to Stalin himself, who, in June 1941, was otherwise occupied, and did not reply. (Later, he would joke that he was “Stalin’s conscience,” a contradiction in terms that anticipates Slavoj Žižek’s sense of humor; in the same vein he called Henry Ford a “right-wing Marxist,” a statement that perhaps better applies to himself.)
Within the space of a few years, Kojève went from declaring himself an avowed Stalinist to collaborating with a high-ranking Vichy minister, all while participating in clandestine groups aimed at the violent overthrow of the latter’s government. What did he think he was doing? While we cannot discount the possibility that he was playing both sides or navigating choppy ideological waters necessary for survival in occupied France, there were less risky ways to go about it. (His work on behalf of a resistance group in Puy-en-Velay got him arrested by the Gestapo; anticipating his future talents as a negotiator, he managed to talk his way out of the firing squad.) Certainly, he had a nose for power and a keen sense of which way its winds were blowing at any given moment. More philosophically, you might say he was shopping for a client: someone who would help him realize the universal and homogenous state he described in his Hegel seminar. This gets to the heart of his understanding of the role of the philosopher, and why he didn’t publish his writing for the consideration of the general public, but preferred to send his work privately to powerful elites. Not for nothing did he approvingly refer to his work as “propaganda.”
All things being equal, had Kojève been shot that day in Puy-en-Velay, his name would have gone down as a footnote in the intellectual history of twentieth-century France. As it stands, he wound up a footnote anyway, but to something far more consequential.
In 1945, an attendee of the Hegel seminar who had been appointed as the director of foreign trade in de Gaulle’s Fourth Republic hired Kojève to work with him in the Ministry of Economic Affairs. He took to his new work with relish, mastering the intricacies of trade policy with the alacrity with which he mastered Sanskrit, quantum physics, and The Phenomenology of Spirit. While Introduction to the Reading of Hegel was going to the press with Gallimard, he was part of the French delegation hammering out the receipt of Marshall Plan aid from the US. He would go on to be a key negotiator in talks on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which established the international trade regime recently shivved by Donald Trump, and the Treaty of Rome, which established the Common Market and the European Economic Community, the legal antecedents to the European Union. When Raymond Aron asked him why he had given up his work as a philosopher to become a civil servant, he replied: “I wanted to know how to make history.”
Two texts show how closely the two professions were related in his mind. The first, “The Latin Empire,” was written shortly after the war as a white paper for his new boss. Setting aside the bizarre proposal for France to become the hegemon of a renewed Mediterranean empire with the Papacy as a unifying ideological force, “The Latin Empire” does contain one idea that would in fact be put into practice. “To be politically effective,” Kojève argued, “the modern state must rest on a broad ‘imperial’ union of related nations.” To bring about this union—which elsewhere he calls a “Federation” or simply an “Empire”—a preliminary type of organization would be necessary: a customs union that would secure “increasingly aligned living standards” for its members and a corresponding “easing of social tensions.”
The second was a talk given in 1957 to a group of German industrialists in Düsseldorf at the invitation of Carl Schmitt, the former Nazi jurist and legal philosopher. In “Colonialism from a European Perspective,” Kojève argued that the industrial nations of Europe should give financial aid to the “underdeveloped countries” that were their current or former colonies. Drawing on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift and Bataille’s theory of expenditure, Kojève called this “giving colonialism.” Unlike “The Latin Empire,” this one did travel up the ranks of the French bureaucracy, inspiring one senator to draw the following lesson from it: “by helping [underdeveloped countries] to become more important consumers, good customers, the rich countries could further increase their own wealth.” If “The Latin Empire” contained a blueprint for what would become the European Union, “Colonialism from a European Perspective” is an early theorization of what we today call “development policy,” a cornerstone of European—and, until Elon Musk got ahold of the federal budget, American—soft power. In both cases, Kojève’s frankness allows us to see them for what they are: a financial update of the old territorial imperialism.
For both his talents as a thinker and his skills as a negotiator, Kojève was respected in France (his colleagues called him “The Professor”) and feared abroad (his American counterparts called him “the snake in the grass”). When a trade delegation consisting of Olivier Wormser, Bernard Clappier, and Kojève arrived in Washington sometime during the second Eisenhower administration, the French ambassador to the United States identified the first two for Henry Kissinger as Bouvard and Pécuchet. “And who’s he?” Kissinger asked, referring to Kojève. “Oh, him?” said the ambassador. “That’s Flaubert.”
The ambassador’s witticism was more apt than he probably knew. As with God in his world and Flaubert in his novels, in Kojève’s work both as a philosopher and as a civil servant, he was “present everywhere, visible nowhere.” He died of a heart attack in 1968, while giving a talk to the European Economic Community in Brussels, the city that would become the de facto capital of the new state form he masterminded in 1992.When Fukuyama claimed in The End of History and the Last Man, published that same year, that the universal and homogenous state had in fact been realized, bringing history to an end, his example was not the United States but the European Union.
“SO, IS HE A GIANT OF THOUGHT OR A COMPLETE UNKNOWN?” asks Marco Filoni, associate professor of political philosophy at Link Campus University in Rome, in the second paragraph of The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève, now out from Northwestern University Press. An expansion of his slim 2008 monograph, The Sunday Philosopher, which ended in 1945, Filoni’s Life and Thought, translated from the Italian by the historian David Broder, is the first complete biography of Kojève available in English. Those who have French can consult Dominique Auffret’s 2002 Alexandre Kojève: La Philosophie, L’État, la fin de l’histoire, which remains the definitive treatment. Those who do not have had to rely, until now, on the scattered information in James Nichols’s 2007 Wisdom at the End of History—useful as a survey of Kojève’s writings, most of which have yet to be published in the United States—and Jeff Love’s 2021 The Black Circle, which bills itself as a biography, but is really a study of the Russian philosophical, cultural, and historical background of his thought. In November, Verso will publish Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography by the Russian philosopher and art critic Boris Groys to supplement its editions of Kojève’s study of political authority, which appeared in 2020, and his book on Kant, which it brought out in June.
The answer to Filoni’s question is probably both—though he and his publisher can safely assume that anyone who does pick up a biography of Kojève will already know enough about its subject to take his importance for granted. But this is only one of the many unique challenges Kojève’s life presents to would-be biographers. Because he did not write for the general public, but conveyed his thought in lectures, letters, memoranda, and treatises written only for the eyes of his fellow intellectuals, powerful politicians, and his posthumous archive, Kojève’s impact on the philosophical debates of his time is indirect at best; assessing his influence would require us to rethink the concept entirely, as a network of Kojève effects, perhaps, a fingerprint rather than a finger. He has no real constituency in philosophy departments, either as an original thinker or as an interpreter of Hegel, which is no longer the “near compulsory reference point” it once was. Nor is there an obvious disciplinary space for scholars to put together the third of his life spent doing philosophy and the third spent doing economic diplomacy, though according to the biographical note at the bottom of his informative essay “The Art of Diplomacy,” published last December in e-flux Journal, the German intellectual historian Danilo Scholz is currently giving it the old college try. Outside of the academy, where his work has had more impact, he has been claimed by some on the left and on the right, though not without ambivalence on both sides, thanks to his orthogonal relationship to the way ideological positions were sorted during the Cold War.
To top it all off, he was a man whose convictions were as protean as his interests; he seemed to view every subject, no matter how serious, as a game. Kojève may not have been the “dangerous psychopath,” the conservative British philosopher and crank Roger Scruton complained of, but there is something of the trickster and even the charlatan in him, which makes him all the more intriguing as a subject. I find myself more compelled by what I have learned of the man than what I know of the work. Although his insouciance and his irony are parts of his charm, they do make him hard to fix in place with the pin of intellectual biography.
But after an opening “portrait” in which the character of “our philosopher”—an epithet which enjoys diminishing returns on cuteness each time it is used—is sketched with the broad brushes of anecdote and personal testimony, much of which is dropped as block quotes in the text rather than narrated, intellectual biography is how Filoni proceeds. The strongest chapters of Life and Thought are the genuinely thrilling one on Kojève’s wartime activities and the substantial one on Kojève’s time at Heidelberg. One only wishes that Filoni applied the same degree of historical contextualization he lavishes on the academic infighting at Heidelberg to the far more exciting intellectual climate of Paris in the ’30s, and the same degree of narrative interest in the nitty-gritty of Kojève’s diplomatic efforts in the ’50s and ’60s that he devoted to his time in the resistance.
As is the case with many intellectual biographies, the treatment of the thought progressively overshadows the treatment of the life. Blink and you will miss the appearance in Filoni’s biography of Nina Ivanoff, Kojéve’s second wife. I had to learn that he took up a late in life hobby as an amateur photographer, and that he found himself in China during the Cultural Revolution and in the Soviet Union when the tanks rolled into Prague, from Alex Dubilet’s review in Radical Philosophy of an exhibition of his photographs curated by Groys in 2013. His two trips to Japan, which inspired the important note on post-historical society he added to the edition of Reading Hegel he revised shortly before his death also go undescribed. Kojève’s interactions with Bataille, Strauss, and Schmitt each get a page or two, but his reception by Lacan, Beauvoir, and Fanon—all more familiar to contemporary audiences than he is—get a sentence at most. Of the “intense debate” about the end of history sparked by Fukuyama, who is more responsible than anyone for Kojève’s continued relevance, Filoni writes that “recently, it has been greatly trivialized” and that is all. He mentions that a number of rumors dogged Kojève in his later life, but a discussion of the juiciest of these—that, for thirty years, he and Ivanoff were agents of the KGB—is buried in a footnote.
At the end of The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève, Alexandre Kojève remains a cipher—though a cipher is what he no doubt was. In a more charitable moment, Scruton said that Kojève “wore a Mephistophelian mask that nobody has ever deciphered” and called him “inscrutable”—no pun intended, surely. Like Scruton, Allan Bloom was hardly an astute judge of character, but his impression of Kojève, when he visited him in Paris as a young man, was essentially correct: “He was like a character in a novel.” Which novel? In Queneau’s 1951 black comedy The Sunday of Life, he appears as “the Hegelian naïf” Valentin Brû. Filoni compares him to Sunday in G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. The character he reminds me of more is Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, the chaos agent who operates behind the scenes of Dostoyevsky’s Demons. In a similar vein, you’ll recall, the French ambassador compared him instead to Flaubert, a novelist. Filoni’s biography is a welcom edition to the existing literature on Kojève in English, but perhaps it is a novelist who will be needed to do full justice to the life as well as to the thought.
Ryan Ruby is the author of Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry (Seven Stories Press, 2024).