Kojève, Alexandre (1902–68)

Alexandre Kojève developed an idiosyncratic and widely influential reading of G.W.F. Hegel in a seminar in Paris from 1933 to 1939. Kojève read Hegel as having discovered that truth was the product of history, and that history was the product of the human desire and struggle for recognition. Kojève emphasized that once this desire was satisfied, history, properly so-called, was over. He claimed that for all essential purposes this human desire had been satisfied in the modern period, and thus that we had experienced (and Hegel had come to know) the end of history. The notes from this seminar were published in 1947 and continued to have an important impact on French philosophy throughout the post-war period.