Abstract
When discussing the French Revolution and Napoleon in his lectures from 1933 to 1939, Alexandre Kojève had in mind events in Russia. The clash between the “old order,” with its Masters, and the worker Slaves corresponded for him more with the images of pre-revolutionary Russian journalism than with the wigged aristocrats and French bourgeoisie of the end of the eighteenth century. In his lectures, behind Napoleon, as a revolutionary emperor, there exists, however secretly or openly, the figure of Stalin, with his plans for the “building of socialism in one country,” his five-year plans, collectivization, and terror. Kojève’s ontology and anthropology diverge both from Hegel’s version of the two as well as with Marxism, incorporating different theses from Nietzsche and Heidegger’s Daseinanalytik. Just as in The Phenomenology of Spirit, terror plays a central role in interpreting revolution, yet it is conceived in the spirit of a Heideggerian “being-toward-death.” The relation between Master and Slave begins with fear of death, and it is destroyed by fear of death in the face of revolutionary terror. In this article, Kojève’s philosophy converges with the various versions of “left Nietzscheanism,” which were particularly widespread in prerevolutionary Russia.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Stalin frequently referred to communism’s waging of war for a “kingdom of labor,” one founded on earth in contrast to the “heavenly kingdom” described in religious teleology.
Kojève writes about this in Outline of a Phenomenology of Right in 1943, while a member of the French Resistance.
A similarity between Kojève’s understanding of dialectics and Bakunin’s, in whose article “The Reaction in Germany” negation precludes any reconciliation of contradictions, can be extrapolated to one more important point. Even in the period of his shift from Fichteanism to Hegel, the future founder of anarchism consistently emphasized that the transition to true existence in the light of the Absolute is possible only through suffering, despair, and self-negation, all taken to their limit. It is a question of a great leap, recalling not only Kierkegaard’s “fear and trembling” but also Heidegger’s Angst. Bakunin wrote about this in letters to his sisters, and there is evidence of it in recollections from contemporaries. Worldwide communist anarchy, of course, is different from a “universal and homogeneous empire,” but it is conceived just like an “end of history,” in which social classes, nations, and states clash.
This phrase belongs to Herzen, who wrote in his memoirs: “Hegel’s philosophy is the algebra of revolution, it extraordinarily liberates man and leaves no stone unturned in the world of Christianity, in the world of traditions that have outlived their time” (Herzen 1956, p. 14).
Hegel spoke of England as of a country in which beneficial laws “at the same time turn out to be the greatest lawlessness,” and where under the guise of discussion on freedoms “nowhere else can one find so few truly free institutions as in England;” “for them, both that one can sell one’s vote, and that one can buy a place in parliament, is called freedom.” See Hegel 2000, pp. 453–454.
See, for example, an article from one of the greatest French Hegel scholars: Jacques D’Hondt (1989).
That Kojève was familiar with Ivan A. Il’in’s The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity is not recorded in any available texts, but it is possible, given that Il’in brought together Hegel’s philosophy with Husserl’s phenomenology. Such a convergence had already been realized by Il’in in his early (1912) article “On the renaissance of Hegelianism”.
The article was subsequently published in a collection of essays by Koyré (1971).
One can juxtapose the image of the “slave-soldier” in Kojève, replacing the bourgeois type, with what Junger wrote in his essay The Worker; in Freyer’s Revolution from the Right, one can find similar ideas on a revolutionary unity of people and state. There is also considerable overlap with the essays of Ernst Niekisch, who was moreover a Hegelian, but whom Kojève clearly did not read; several ideas “were in the air.”
We find something similar in France a half-century later: French Theory (sic) in general, and in particular the work of Deleuze and Foucault, can also be seen as a variety of “left Nietzscheanism.”
It is true, at certain moments Kojève claims that masters cease to be as such: the Roman Optimates turn out to be slaves to the emperors, and medieval barons agree that they are “holy slaves.” Even the bourgeoisie is characterized as “slaves to capital,” until the moment has come for a “universal and homogeneous empire.”
See Rutkevich 2017.
Even more banal are the fancies of some interpreters, who reduce the philosophy of Kojève to vanity, the aim of becoming famous, etc. That is why he wrote his “letter to Stalin” and subsequent “letter to Petain.” See Weslati 2014. For such “radical philosophers,” such a jeu à la baisse is natural, as well as the decoding of all motives as an ambitious urge for notoriety. But if we have a minimal knowledge of Kojève’s biography, it is not difficult to see that those strategies of self-promotion, typical for inheritors of Sartre and Lacan, were completely alien to Kojève. His squeamish scorn toward the “left intellectuals” originated from the estimation of “radicalism” and “revolutionary” prattle, having only one aim of being famous in république des lettres.
See Hegel 1956, p. 227. Of course, this state of general freedom is still a “forcible division of spirit into different selves,” monads which are impenetrable and oppose one another.
See, for example, Ustrialov 1916.
References
Aron, Raymond. 1983. Mémoires. 50 ans de réflexion politique. Paris: Julliard.
Avksent’ev, Nikolai Dmotrievich. 1906. Sverkhchelovek. Kul’turno-eticheskii ideal Nitsshe, Saint Petersburg: Iakor’.
Descombes [Dekomb], Vincent. 2000. Sovremennaia frantsuzskaia filosofiia. Moscow: Ves’ mir.
D’Hondt [D’Ont], Jacques. 1989. Gegel’ i oruzhie svobody. Istoriko-filosofskii ezhegodnik. Moscow: Nauka.
Hegel [Gegel], Georg Friedrich Wilhelm. 1956. Sochineniia. Vol. 3. Moscow: Sotsegiz.
Hegel [Gegel], Georg Friedrich Wilhelm. 1959. Sochineniia. Vol. 4. Moscow: Sotsegiz.
Hegel [Gegel], Georg Friedrich Wilhelm. 2000. Filosofiia istorii. Saint Petersburg: Nauka.
Herzen, A. 1956. Sobranie sochinenij v 30 tomah. M., AN SSSR. Byloe i dumy t. 9.
Geroulanos, Stafanos. 2010. An atheism that is not humanist emerges in French thought. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Il’in, Ivan Alexandrovich. 1993. Sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 2. Book 2. Moscow: Russkaia kniga.
Kojève, Alexandre. 1947. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Paris: Gallimard.
Kojève, Alexandre. 1981. Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit. Paris: Gallimard.
Kojève [Kozhev], Alexandre. 2021. Sofiia, filo-sofiia, fenomenologiia. Moscow: Praksis.
Koyré, Alexandre. 1971. Etudes d’histoire de la pensée philosophique. Paris: Gallimard.
Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich. 1967. Poln. Sobr. Soch. 5-izd. Vol. 43. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury.
Nolte, Ernst. 1963. Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche. Munich: Piper.
Rutkevich, Alexei Michailovich. 2017. Alexandre Kojeve: From revolution to empire. Studies in East European Thought 69: 329–344.
Strauss, Leo. 1997. De la tyrannie. Paris: Gallimard.
Ustrialov, Nikolai Vassil’evich. 1916. K voprosu o russkom imperializme. Zhurnal vneshnei politiki i prava 15: 1–5.
Weslati, Hager. 2014. Kojève’s letter to Stalin. Radical Philosophy 184: 7–18.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing Interests
The author states that there is no conflict of interest.
The author did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work, and there are no conflicts of interest to declare.
The author certifies that he has no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Rutkevich, A.M. Alexandre Kojève: revolution and terror. Stud East Eur Thought 76, 25–39 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09553-x
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09553-x