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ON TYRANNY

Introduction

Over the last decade there has been a lively debate about the nature of modernity. Can it be that we have passed from a modern to a post-modern age? And, if we have made this transition, how can we evaluate the history that has led to it? Or is it the case that the transition is marked by our inability to make such evaluations? This new edition of On Tyranny recalls two earlier positions about modernity: those of Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojeve. In their debate about tyranny, and in their correspondence, we see articulated the fundamental alternatives regarding the possibility and the responsibilities of philosophy now.

The debate between them is most unusual. It ranges from comparatively superficial political differences to basic disagreements about first principles. As a rule, when disagreement is this deep and this passionate, there is little serious discussion. Here, the parties' desire to understand the issues is greater than their attachment to their own position. That is one reason why they state their positions so radically. They know perfectly well that, for the most part, it is not sensible to reduce the philosophical or the political alternatives to only two. But the exercise does help to bring the issues into crisp focus.

The advantages in presenting these various related texts together are obvious. The major drawback in doing so is perhaps less immediately apparent: by being made part of a larger whole, Strauss's original On Tyranny becomes difficult to see on its own terms. Yet it is worth the effort. On Tyranny is a close reading of Xenophon's short dialogue between Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, and Simonides, the wise poet, about the burdens of tyranny and about how these burdens might be lightened. Strauss was an exemplary reader. He read with respect and an open mind. Because he read in order to learn, he read critically. But nothing was more alien to him than to use texts as pretexts for displays of his own ingenuity. On Tyranny was his first published full-length analysis of a single classical work, and it remains the most accessible of his close readings. It seems fitting that it should have been devoted to a dialogue. He very reasonably assumes that careful writers choose the form in which they present their thought, and that the difference between a dialogue and a treatise is therefore of philosophic import. Accordingly, he attends as closely to a dialogue's setting, characters, and actions, as he does to its speeches. On Tyranny illustrates how much one's understanding of a dialogue's argument can be enriched by such close attention to its dramatic features. Strauss's way of reading goes directly counter to Hegel's view that the dramatic features of the dialogue are mere embellishments. The difference between the two approaches is vividly illustrated by the contrast between Kojeve's Hegelian reading of Plato, and Strauss's reading of the same dialogues. In discussing these differences Strauss succinctly states his principles of interpretation, and he goes on to comment briefly but interestingly on a number of dialogues which he never discussed in print. This series of letters about Plato -- beginning with Kojeve's letter of 11 April 1957, and ending with Strauss's letter of 11 September 1957 -- might usefully be read in conjunction with Strauss's interpretation of the Hiero. It is altogether one of the high points of this correspondence.

Strauss opens On Tyranny defiantly: modern political science is so lacking in understanding of the most massive political phenomena, that it cannot even recognize the worst tyrannies for what they are.

. . . when we were brought face to face with tyranny -- with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past -- our political science failed to recognize it. (23; 177).

In view of the failure of "our political science," he invites us to reconsider how classical political philosophy or science understood tyranny. The invitation immediately raises the question of how classical thought could possibly do justice to political phenomena so radically different from those of which it had direct experience. The question presupposes the truth of Hegel's claim that "philosophy is its own time grasped in thought." One of the aims of On Tyranny is to challenge that claim. The basic premise of classical political philosophy which Strauss invites us to reconsider is that the fundamental problems -- and in particular the fundamental problems of political life -- are, at least in principle, always and everywhere accessible. Now, "[t]yranny is a danger coeval with political life" (22), and reflection on political life suggests that "society will always try to tyrannize thought" (27). Reflection on tyranny thus leads to reflection on the relation between thought or philosophy and society. Strauss therefore gradually shifts the focus of his inquiry from tyranny proper to the relation between philosophy and society. In his view, the Hiero enacts the classical, Socratic understanding of that relation: Simonides represents the philosophic life, and Hiero the political life. Now, the relation of philosophy and society is as central to the understanding of modern tyranny as it is to the understanding of ancient tyranny. For while modern tyranny owes its distinctive character to ideology and to technology, ideology and technology are products or by-products of the specifically modern understanding of the relationship between philosophy and society (23). Strauss makes himself the spokesman for the classical understanding of this relationship, and Kojeve makes himself the spokesman for the modern understanding of it.

The two fully agree that there is a tension, indeed a conflict, between philosophy and society (195, 205, cp. 27); and they agree that philosophy or wisdom ranks highest in the order of ends, that it is the architectonic end or principle (Introduction ala lecture de Hegel, Paris, Gallimard, 1947, pp. 303, 95, 273-275, 397f; 15 September 1950). They disagree about whether the conflict between philosophy and society can -- and should -- be resolved. In other words, they disagree about the possibility of a fully rational society. The choice is clear: to try as far as possible to elude the conflict between philosophy and society by maintaining as great a distance as possible between them; or to try as far as possible to resolve the conflict between philosophy and society by working for a reconciliation between them. Strauss opts for the first alternative; Kojeve for the second.

For Strauss the conflict between philosophy and society is inevitable because society rests on a shared trust in shared beliefs, and philosophy questions every trust and authority. He sides with Plato against Kojeve's Hegel in holding that philosophy cannot cease to be a quest and become wisdom simply.

Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems. It is impossible to think about these problems without becoming inclined toward a solution, toward one or the other of the very few solutions. Yet as long as there is no wisdom but only quest for wisdom, the evidence of all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems. (196; 16 January 1934, 28 May 1957).

Philosophy is inherently skeptical or "zetetic" (196). It therefore threatens to undermine society's self-confidence and to sap its will. It must therefore take account of society's requirements. But the moment it yields to them, it ceases to be philosophy and becomes dogmatism. It must therefore go its own way. The human problem does not admit of a political solution (182).

Kojeve rejects that conclusion. In his view, the philosopher who finds himself faced by inconsistencies -- "contradictions" -- in the practices and beliefs of his society or of his age, cannot leave it at resolving them "merely" in thought. He must resolve them in deed as well. The only effective way to resolve "contradictions" -- the only effective way to resolve any differences among men or between men and nature -- is by laboring and struggling to change the reality that exhibited them in the first place: to change men's attitudes, beliefs, ways of life, through enlightenment or ideology; and to change their material conditions of life through the mastery and control of nature or technology (178). All significant theoretical disagreements are at the same time practical. It follows that they can also not be resolved by oneself alone, but can only be resolved together, by the combined efforts of each and all. Philosophy is necessarily political, and politics philosophical. Or, as Kojeve puts it, anyone seriously intent on knowing, in the strong sense of the term, will be driven to "verify" his merely "subjective certainties" (152, 163f, 166).

Now, as long as a man is alone in knowing something, he can never be sure that he truly knows it. If, as a consistent atheist, one replaces God (taken as consciousness and will surpassing human consciousness and will) by Society (the State) and History, one must say that whatever is, in fact, outside of the range of social and historical verification is forever relegated to the domain of opinion (doxa). (p. 161).

The only way to "verify" our opinions is to have them "recognized." Recognition "verifies" our "subjective certainty" that what is "for us" is also "for others." It thus establishes an "intersubjective consensus." Recognition is necessarily mutual. There is therefore always also a moral dimension to recognition. At a minimum, recognition is always also recognition of others as free and equal. It follows that philosophical progress is possible only hand in hand with moral and political progress (174f). "History," in the strong sense Kojeve attaches to the term, is, then, the history of successive "verifications" "recognized." "Recognition" makes for "satisfaction." Kojeve prefers to speak of "satisfaction" rather than of "happiness" because, once again, "satisfaction" is a more public, and hence a more "objective" criterion than "happiness," which tends to be private or "subjective." Recognition makes for satisfaction; whether it also makes for happiness is another question entirely (22 June 1946, 8 June 1956; Hegel, e.g Vernunft in der Geschichte, Lasson ed., Meiner, 1930, pp. 70, 78). History in the strong sense of the term, men's millennial labor and struggle to achieve satisfaction through recognition, is, then, the successive actualization and "verification" of harmony among men, and conformity between them and their world. In short, history is the progressive recognition of the proposition that all men are free and equal.

Kojeve argues that, in the final analysis, the quest for mutual recognition can only be satisfied in what he calls the "universal and homogeneous state." Anything short of "homogeneity," that is to say of equality, would leave open the possibility of arbitrary distinctions of class, status, gender. Anything short of "universality" would leave open the possibility of sectarian, religious, or national rivalries, and of continuing civil and foreign wars. In the universal and homogenous state everyone "knows" and lives in the "knowledge" that everyone enjoys equal dignity, and this knowledge is embedded in the state's practices and institutions (e.g., Introduction, 184f). Once all recognize that all are free, there is no further collective dis-satisfaction, hence no further collective seeking or striving, and in particular no further collective labor and struggle for new modes and orders or for a new understanding. Once men are free and universally recognize that they are, history, in the strong sense of the term, is at an end. And in so far as political and philosophical progress go hand in hand, so does their fulfillment. The end of history therefore also marks the end of philosophy or of the quest for wisdom, and the beginning of the reign of wisdom simply (e.g., Introduction, 435n).

For Kojeve's Hegel, history was the revelation of truth, and this truth was revealed primarily through the various turns taken by the master-slave dialectic. The master-slave dialectic was the motor of history, and the desire for recognition its fuel. Why did the central role which Kojeve assigned to the master-slave dialectic prove so powerful? Kojeve's Hegel was certainly a dramatic pragmatist. Truth and successful action were tied together, and progress was accomplished through labor and bloody battles for recognition. Kojeve claimed that he was able to make sense of the totality of history and of the structure of human desire by looking at them through lenses ground against the texts of Marx and Heidegger. History and desire became understandable when their ends, their goals, became clear. Kojeve claimed to provide this clarity, and he couched his interpretation in the form of a political propaganda which would further the revolution that would confirm the interpretation itself. In the 1930s Kojeve thought that Hegel's philosophy promoted the self-consciousness that is appropriate to the final stage of history, a stage which would be characterized by satisfaction of the fundamental human desire for mutual and equal recognition. Kojeve -- and everybody else -- could also see who the enemies of equality were, and thus the battle lines for the final struggle for recognition were clear. Philosophy and revolution were linked in what would be the culmination of world history.

After the War, perhaps in response to Strauss's sharp criticisms of his views, especially in his letter of 22 August 1948, and perhaps also in response to what he may have perceived as an increasingly congealed political environment, Kojeve abandoned his "heroic Hegelianism," his confidence in the meaning and direction of history. His late work no longer took the form of propaganda aimed at stimulating a revolutionary self- consciousness. It took the form, instead, of a commentary on a history that had already run its course. The change in the place of revolution entailed a change in the form of his philosophy: he shifts from being a dramatic pragmatist to being an ironic culture critic. He continued to believe that the culmination of world history would define the truth of all previous events, and he continued to write of Hegelian philosophy as providing this truth. Instead of situating this philosophy at the onset of the culmination, however, in his late work Kojeve claims that the end of history has already occurred. Once it became clear that revolution was not just about to occur, the only political rhetoric possible for Kojeve's Hegelianism was in the mode of irony. The ironic edge of much of his late work results from his valorization of self-consciousness even when progress is not possible.

The expressions "the end of history" and "the end of philosophy" have become fashionable and hence virtually empty slogans. In our time, Kojeve was the first seriously to think what such expressions might mean.

With a certain rhetorical flourish, he maintained that history "ended" in 1806 with Napoleon's victory over Prussia in the battle of Jena, a victory which opened the rest of Europe and, in the long run, the rest of the world to the principles of the French Revolution.

What has happened since then has been nothing but an extension in space of the universal revolutionary force actualized in France by Robespierre-Napoleon. From the genuinely historical perspective, the two World Wars with their train of small and large revolutions have only had the effect of bringing the backward civilizations of the outlying provinces into line with the (really or virtually) most advanced European historical stages. If the sovietization of Russia and the communization of China are anything more and other than the democratization of Imperial Germany (by way of Hitlerism) or of the accession of Togo to independence, or even of the self-determination of the Papuans, they are so only because the Sino-Soviet actualization of Robespierran Bonapartism compels post-Napoleonic Europe to accelerate the elimination of the numerous more or less anachronistic remainders of its pre-revolutionary past. This process of elimination is already more advanced in the North American extensions of Europe than it is in Europe itself. It might even be said that, from a certain point of view, the United States has already reached the final stage of Marxist "communism," since all the members of a "classless society" can, for all practical purposes, acquire whatever they please, whenever they please, without having to work for it any more than they are inclined to do. (Introduction, 2nd ed., p. 436n; J. H. Nichols Jr. translation, pp. 160f, somewhat altered.)

Clearly, if the Russian and the Chinese Revolutions, the two World Wars, Stalinism and Hiterlism merely confirm -- "verify" -- it, then "the end of history" cannot possibly mean that nothing more happens. It can only mean that nothing radically new can be achieved, nothing comparable in magnitude to the recognition, at all levels of life and over the entire face of the earth, that, in Hegel's phrase, all men are free; or, as Kojeve's phrase "universal and homogeneous state" suggests, that all are free and equal. But that does not by any means entail an end to politics. As Strauss notes, Kojeve holds out no prospect of the state's ever withering away (210).

Kojeve argues that if history is the millennial struggle to achieve freedom and equality, then the end of history also marks the end of "historical man," of man striving and struggling, in short of man as we have so far known him. (19 September 1950, Introduction, 387 n. 1, 434, 64). He does not share Marx's vision of an end of history that opens to "the realm of true freedom," in which men might hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, farm in the evening, and engage in criticism after dinner, without needing to become hunters, fishermen, farmers, or critics (Kapital, III, 48, iii; German Ideology, I A). Nor does he expect that once men have achieved freedom and equality, they will go on and seek to achieve the noble or the good. He envisages, rather, that most men, satisfied with one another's mutual recognition, doing whatever they do without purpose or constraints, and free to acquire and consume to their hearts' content, would do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong because nothing would constrain them to do otherwise. They would not be heroes; but, he appears to think, neither would they be villains. They will be mere "automata" that might assert a remnant of humanity by such utterly formal rituals of pure snobbishness as tea-ceremonies, flower arrangements, or Noh plays. As for the few who remain dissatisfied with their aimless existence in the universal and homogenous state, they will seek wisdom. Since they live in an essentially rational order, they no longer need to change it in order to understand. They can now "merely" contemplate (September 19, 1950; Introduction, 440n; second edition, 436n). "The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk."

"One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it... When philosophy paints its gloomy picture then a form of life has grown old. It cannot be rejuvenated by the gloomy picture, but only understood. Only when the dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings and fly.”
—G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820), "Preface"

It is a constant of Kojeve's thought that the end, so understood, is good and desirable. Kojevian philosophers will therefore do what they can to embed freedom and equality in practices and institutions, or "at least accept and 'justify' such action if someone somewhere engages in it." (Introduction 291, 29 October 1953 i.f.) One cannot help wondering how Kojeve reconciles arguing for universal recognition with "accepting" and "justifying" the worst tyrants of the age. It is true that in "Tyranny and Wisdom" his advice to tyrants is to work for mutual recognition in the universal homogeneous state, in other words for "liberalization" and, at least in the long run, for some form of democracy. He, of course, knew that if his advice were to have reached the tyrant, the tyrant would, at best, have turned a deaf ear to it. But Kojeve also knew that deeds carry more weight than speeches, and regardless of what he may have said, his actions were designed to put as much pressure as he could on the tyrant. He quite rightly thought that the European Economic Community which he was helping to establish, could become an economic power capable of standing up to the Soviet Union, and hence of forcing it to liberalize (19 September 1950). He evidently also came to think of the European Economic Community and of the Soviet Union as the most plausible alternative models for the "universal and homogeneous state," and he spent the last twenty-five years of his life trying to tip the balance in favor of the European model. He did not turn his back on the horrors of the age and, "like a man in a storm, seek shelter behind a wall."

The end of history, as Kojeve understands it, also marks "the end of philosophy." Indeed, he regards the universal and homogeneous state as the goal and fulfillment of history only because he regards it as the necessary condition for the comprehensive, coherent, hence definitive, hence true account; in short, for wisdom (19 September 1950; Introduction, 288f, 291). Wisdom is the architectonic principle. The comprehensive and coherent account is "circular": it explains and resolves the conflicts between "all" alternative, provisional-earlier accounts, at the same time as it accounts for itself. Provisional accounts, that is to say philosophy or philosophies in the strict sense of the term, are inevitably shadowed by skepticism. The comprehensive and coherent account would overcome that skepticism.

Skepticism is one thing; relativism is another thing entirely. Skepticism leaves open the possibility of a definitive account. Relativism categorically denies that possibility. The most typical and influential versions of relativism accept Hegel's argument that, up to "now," being, life, and thought have been through and through historical, but reject his conclusion, that history has "now" ended. They hold that history cannot "end," and that therefore there cannot "ever" be a definitive account. Kojeve and Strauss are at one in categorically rejecting this decapitated Hegelianism (e.g., 19 September 1950, 1 August 1957 i.f.) Kojeve rejects it in the name of the comprehensive and coherent account, and Strauss in the name of skepticism or, as he prefers to call it, zeteticism.

Kojeve does not think that "the end of philosophy" leaves nothing to think about, or that men would cease to think. Rather, as far as we can tell, or, as he says, as far as he can tell, there would henceforth be no occasion for thinking which, in the language of the long note quoted on p. xv makes a difference from "the genuinely historical perspective." Henceforth men think "merely" in order to understand. Henceforth to think is to re-think or to re-collect (erinnern) and to re-construct history, and most particularly the history of philosophy, and re-confirm its end. It is in this spirit that Kojeve thought his later studies in ancient philosophy about which he speaks at such length in his correspondence with Strauss.

***

Strauss rejects Kojeve's reconciliation of philosophy and society root and branch. It is not necessary, it is not desirable, it is not even possible. One aim -- perhaps the main aim -- of his study of the Hiero is to present the alternative to the arguments in support of their reconciliation, and he seizes the opportunity to restate that alternative in his reply to Kojeve's review. In his judgment, that review only confirms that the effort to reconcile philosophy and society is bound to be destructive of both. It thus once again confirms the need to sort out -- to "de-construct" -- their entanglement, and to restore their classical separation.

Strauss grants, indeed he stresses, that the philosophic life, as he envisages it, is essentially a life apart. It is as self-sufficient as is humanly possible. The philosophers' "self-admiration or self-satisfaction does not have to be confirmed by others to be reasonable" (204). He does not protest when Kojeve calls this account of the philosophic life "Epicurean." Nor is he deterred by Kojeve's "verificationist" argument. Subjective certainty is regrettable; it may be inescapable. Philosophers have always tended to cluster in rival sects. But, he adds in a clear allusion to the life-long friendly disagreements between Kojeve and himself, "recognition" among philosophers can also transcend sectarian allegiances. Amicus Plato. However, while "recognition" need not remain restricted to members of the same sect, it cannot be universal. Universal recognition slights or altogether ignores the difference between the competent and the incompetent, or between knowledge and opinion. As a matter of fact, the desire for recognition is not a desire for knowledge at all. The desire for recognition is nothing but vanity by another name: Recognitio recognitiorum (209). Kojeve had sought to ward off this criticism by speaking of "earned recognition" (156). But earned recognition, the recognition we have earned from those who have earned ours, simply cannot be reconciled with the equal and universal recognition Kojeve calls for. "Recognition" can, then, not solve the problem of philosophic isolation. Kojeve's argument for verification by recognition -- that philosophers must change the world as well as themselves in order to bring it and their otherwise merely subjective certainties into harmony -- is therefore without force. So, therefore, is the conclusion that philosophy is necessarily political (207f, 195f, 202f).

More precisely, Strauss fully grants, indeed he stresses that philosophy is inevitably political, if only because philosophers live in political communities. But he denies that philosophy needs to contribute to the improvement of any given political order. It does not need to do so for its own good, and it is not obligated to do so for the common good. For the contradictions in men's beliefs and practices cannot be resolved in deed. What is more, philosophy does not require a just, or even a coherent political order. Philosophy and philosophical education thrive in the most diverse regimes, and they necessarily come into conflict with all regimes. Philosophy will therefore always and everywhere have to protect itself against the suspicion or even the outright accusation of corrupting the young, and of propagating skepticism and atheism. To that end it engages in what Strauss calls "philosophic politics," the effort by philosophers always and everywhere to win their society's tolerance and even approval by persuading it that philosophers cherish what it cherishes and abhor what it abhors (205f). Whereas Kojeve assigns the task of mediating between philosophy and the political community to intellectuals who try to bring philosophy to the community and to enlighten it (173), Strauss assigns the task of mediating between them to rhetoricians who, like Prospero's art, try to protect philosophy and the community from one another (205f):

I do not believe in the possibility of a conversation of Socrates with the people (it is not clear to me what you think about this); the relation of the philosopher to the people is mediated by a certain kind of rhetoricians who arouse fear of punishment after death; the philosophers can guide these rhetoricians but cannot do their work (this is the meaning of the Gorgias). (22 April 1957)

For Strauss it is primarily the manner of philosophy that is political. For Kojeve it is just as much its matter.

Kojeve's argument stands or falls with his claim that the reconciliation of philosophy and society makes it possible to put an end to philosophy as quest, and provides the conditions for wisdom understood as the definitive, comprehensive, and coherent account. Such an account would, in Kojeve's terse formula, deduce everything we (can) say from the mere fact that we speak (29 October 1953). He evidently does not think it necessary -- or possible -- also to deduce "the fact that we speak." Yet wisdom as he conceives of it, the comprehensive and coherent, i.e. "circular" account, would require him to deduce it: man is not simply self-caused. The comprehensive and coherent account would therefore require a deductive account of man, hence of living beings, hence of nature. Hegel attempted such a deduction. Kojeve consistently denies that such a deduction or, indeed, any discursive account of nature is possible (Introduction 166-168, 378). The question therefore arises whether his account can, even if only in principle, be comprehensive and coherent. The same question arises in an only slightly different guise as soon as one pauses to reflect on Kojeve's claim that the reconciliation between philosophy and society required for his comprehensive and coherent account presupposes the mastery and control of nature; and thus presupposes that nature yields to man's will and reason (Introduction, 301). In other words, as Strauss points out, it presupposes an anthropocentric teleology or providence. If one rejects that presupposition, as Kojeve explicitly does and as Strauss does tacitly, then philosophy cannot overcome skepticism. "Nature" places limits on our capacity to give a comprehensive account. Strauss therefore calls into question the claim that philosophy and society are or can be fully reconciled. The problem of nature can no more be set aside, than it can be disposed of by "recognition" (28 May 1957, 279; cp. 22 August 1948, 237; see also Natural Right and History, p. 173 n. 9).

As for the moral dimension of "recognition," Strauss rejects out of hand the proposition that people can or should be satisfied with everyone's recognition of everyone's equal freedom of opportunity and dignity. (207f, 209.) He frequently leaves the reader with the distinct impression that, in his view, freedom and equality are not so much goals as they are concessions to weakness and passion. He challenges Kojeve to show how the citizens of his universal and homogeneous end-state differ from Nietzsche's "last men." (208; 22 August 1948, 239; 11 Sept. 1957,291; see Thus Spake Zarathustra, I, 3-5.) The last men are self-absorbed and self-satisfied. They know neither wonder nor awe, neither fear nor shame. Their souls are atrophied. They are utterly repugnant. The mere fact that we cannot help recoiling from them clearly shows that we aspire to more than the satisfaction of being recognized as free and equal. In particular, a political society that does not allow adequate scope for the soul's aspiration to greatness might succeed in destroying or subjugating man's humanity for a time, but it is most likely to lead to its own destruction in the long run. When souls driven by great ambition are denied scope to seek what is noble and beautiful, they will become bent on destruction. If they cannot be heroes, they will become villains. With these few terse references to the soul, Strauss returns to the problem of nature, and most specifically to the problem of human nature: any adequate ethics and politics has to take the nature of the soul into account. Kojeve grants that if there is a human nature, Strauss is right. But he rejects human nature as a standard, and he most particularly rejects it as the standard for morals or politics:

the question arises whether there is not a contradiction between speaking about "ethics" and "ought" on the one hand, and about conforming to a "given" or "innate" human nature on the other. For animals, which unquestionably have such a nature, are not morally "good" or "evil," but at most healthy or sick, and wild or trained. One might therefore conclude that it is precisely ancient anthropology that would lead to mass-training and eugenics. (29 October 1953).

For once Kojeve's language takes on a very sharp edge: Massendressur or mass-training, and Volkshygiene or eugenics, inevitably call to mind Nazi language and practice. Still, regardless of what one thinks of such charges of "biologism," the problem is not resolved by ignoring nature, or by invoking Geist or esprit. For Kojeve the struggles and bloody battles by which Geist conquers nature are not just figures of speech. Earlier in the same letter, he had defended Stalin's and Mao's collectivizations. The term he chose, Kollektivierungsaktion, clearly acknowledges the ruthless brutality of these collectivizations. He appears to have shared Hegel's chilling judgment that "the wounds of the Spirit heal without scars." (In late 1999, unconfirmed press reports alleged that Kojeve had been involved in some unspecified way with the Soviet secret services.)

ALEXANDRE KOJČVE, KGB SPY?

KOJEVE, Alexandre (1902-1968). Born in Russia and educated in Berlin Kojeve gave his influential lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes from 1933-1939 in Paris, which were collected and edited by the poet Raymond Quesneau as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947). After the Second World War Kojeve worked in the French ministry of Economic Affairs as one of the chief planners of the Common Market.

Ideas have consequences. We suppose that is one lesson of the recent revelation by the French secret service that the Russian-born French philosopher and civil servant Alexandre Kojčve was a Soviet agent for some thirty years. It would be difficult to overstate Kojčve's eminence in the pantheon of twentieth-century French intellectuals. Daniel Johnson, who reported the story in the London Daily Telegraph, noted that "Kojčve's subterranean influence is ubiquitous. His ideas echo around our political arena. Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history' is recycled Kojčve. So is Tony Blair's vision of a post-conservative, post-national, post-political, post-historical Europe."
 

The Daily Telegraph London, 10/02/1999, Daniel Johnson

Comment: Europe's greatest traitor

UNNOTICED here in Britain, a new spy scandal has surfaced in France. After receiving a dossier from the KGB, the French secret service has confirmed that, for some 30 years, the philosopher and senior official Alexandre Kojeve was a Soviet agent. Should we care about a spy who died in 1968, of whom even French intellectuals have scarcely heard, much less read? Yes, we should. Kojeve's subterranean influence is ubiquitous. His ideas echo around our political arena. Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" is recycled Kojeve. So is Tony Blair's vision of a post-conservative, post-national, post-political, post- historical Europe. So who was Kojeve?

He was born, in 1902, Alexander Kochevnikoff and grew up in a fashionable quarter of Moscow, the Arbat. After the Bolshevik revolution, this bourgeois youth was arrested for black marketeering in soap. Other boys were shot; not Kojeve. Was he already "turned" at the age of 16? By his own testimony: "I was a Communist; there was no reason to flee Russia."

But he did leave, voluntarily, in 1920: first to Poland, then to Germany. He studied philosophy in Heidelberg and Berlin, where he discovered Hegel. There, too, he found his uncle, Wassily Kandinsky, then teaching at the Bauhaus, with whom he struck up a lifelong friendship. In 1926, he moved to Paris, changed his name and acquired French citizenship. In 1933, he began his celebrated Hegel seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, which continued until 1939. Here the French love affair with German philosophy, known today as "post-modernism", began. Its participants included Andre Breton, Georges Bataille, Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eric Weil, Jacques Lacan and Raymond Queneau. Yet even this company of "superintellectuals", as Aron recalled, "did not resist the magician". Kojeve's method was Talmudic: they read one book, Hegel's Phenomenology, line by line. His close reading of this arcane text allowed him to elucidate world history. His lectures were published, as Introduction a la Lecture de Hegel, in 1947, but though a reader of genius, he was a rebarbative writer.

Kojeve's reading of Hegel had given him his big idea. When the Swabian schoolmaster wrote the Phenomenology in 1807, just after Napoleon's victory at Jena, history came to an end. Though the emperor isn't actually mentioned by name in Hegel's book, he is the key to Kojeve. Hegel is the evangelist of the Napoleonic messiah: "It is the reality of Napoleon revealed by Hegel who is the real and living God, appearing to mankind in the world which he has created so that it can recognise itself. And it is this revelation by Hegel that transforms the myth of Christian faith into absolute knowledge." Kojeve saw himself as the custodian of this absolute knowledge, and the cleverest men in France believed him. The French revolution marked the moment when the dialectical opposition of master and slave had been resolved once and for all: the human desire for equal recognition had been realised. With Napoleon's extension of the ideas of 1789 across the globe, the era of universal empire had dawned. Class conflict, world wars and revolutions were leading to an intermediate phase of continental empires. American culture foreshadowed the homogenised, "post- historical" humanity of the future.

In this endgame of history, however, there was still one man of destiny whom Kojeve revered: Joseph Stalin. Throughout the Terror, Kojeve remained a "strict Stalinist". To Raymond Aron he privately conceded the horrors of Soviet Russia, remarking that only "imbeciles" could be unaware of it. And yet when Stalin died, Kojeve was devastated "as if he had lost a father". Aron explained Kojeve's loyalty to Stalin as residual Russian patriotism, assuming that it did not affect his "unshakeable loyalty" to France. Even the least gullible of French intellectuals was deceived.

Kojeve's role in the war is obscure. His biographer, Dominique Auffret, says he was active in the Resistance in Marseilles, where he was arrested by a Tartar unit serving in the Wehrmacht. Deploying his eloquence and his Russian, Kojeve apparently almost persuaded the Tartars to desert, but was denounced and brought before the German commandant. This officer turned out to be the former director of a Munich gallery which Kojeve knew well. Again the philosopher was saved by his gift of the gab. Auffret relies on anecdote; it stretches credulity that Kojeve could escape the firing squad yet again, bamboozling the Nazis as well as the Soviets, without collaborating. Kojeve certainly gave serious thought to what would happen if the Germans won the war. He wrote a Note on Authority, arguing that it would be justifiable to collaborate with a victorious Third Reich in order to prepare for a post-Nazi Europe, dominated by a new, French- led "Latin empire".

This readiness to accommodate reappears in the correspondence he conducted with Leo Strauss, a German Jew who emigrated to Chicago and became the most influential political philosopher in America. Strauss admired Kojeve, but they disagreed about Xenophon's Hiero, a dialogue between a philosopher-poet and a tyrant. Kojeve saw his universal empire foreshadowed by that of Alexander the Great, whose mentor had been Aristotle himself. It would, he wrote, be "unreasonable if the philosopher were in any way whatsoever to criticise the concrete political measures taken by the statesman, regardless of whether or not he is a tyrant, especially when he takes them so that the very ideal advocated by the philosopher might be actualised at some future time".

After 1945, Kojeve decided that he "wanted to know how [history] happened". In France that means becoming a mandarin. In 1948, he was given a senior post in the department of foreign economic relations by one of his pupils, Robert Marjolin, and for the next 20 years he enjoyed the reputation of an extraordinary eminence grise. Formidable at international meetings, he talked the Americans out of their objections to the fledgling European Economic Community, which he helped to shape and which was the fulfilment of his hopes for a Latin Empire. Rising younger stars, such as the later president Giscard d'Estaing and prime minister Raymond Barre, fell under his spell. This guru of the Left was more than happy to serve under de Gaulle (another benign tyrant) and it was with his encouragement that the General twice said "Non!" to British EEC membership, turned his back on Nato and flirted with Krushchev. He taught a generation of French leaders to put the "Anglo-Saxons" in their place, hoping that a resurgent Europe and Japan would challenge American hegemony.

The French do not respect their intellectual leaders; they revere them. Aron declared that Kojeve was "more intelligent than Sartre". Barre said that he had "a superior, encyclopedic intelligence, such as probably no longer exists". Yet this miraculous mandarin turns out to have been a malevolent mole. Nobody of this eminence has ever been exposed as a traitor on this scale before. His sex life was mysterious and may explain much. Until the French release his KGB dossier, we can only guess at the damage he must have done. There were few secrets in France to which he did not have access through his pupils and proteges. Some of them are still alive and no doubt nervous. Even in the land of trahison des clercs, Kojeve must take pride of place. He will have his apologists. Le Monde, which exposed him, has yet to condemn him. But the Gaullists have been silent too: he was, after all, the General's confidante. The strange case of Kojeve reveals much about the present as well as the past. If, as Aron quipped, he was Stalin's conscience, he was also France's -- and Europe's -- evil genius.

In intellectual and cultural terms, Kojčve's influence is even more extensive. Born Alexander Kochevnikoff in Moscow in 1902, Kojčve left Russia in 1920, going first to Poland and then to Germany, where he encountered two life-changing personalities: his uncle Wassily Kandinsky, who became a close friend, and the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, which seduced him utterly. In 1926, Kojčve moved to Paris, changed his name, and became a French citizen. In 1933, he embarked on what is probably the most famous philosophical seminar of the century: his Marxist-inspired, line-by-line dissection of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. His students included André Breton, Georges Bataille, Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eric Weil, Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Queneau: the good, the bad, and the ugly of twentieth-century French intellectual life. Among Kojčve's later admirers was Allan Bloom, who described him as "the most brilliant man I ever met." Aron thought him "more intelligent than Sartre."

Recalling Kojčve's seminar in his Mémoires (1983), Aron wrote that "the subject was both world history and the Phenomenology. The latter shed light on the former. Everything took on meaning. Even those who were suspicious of historical providence . did not resist the magician: at the moment, the intelligibility he conferred on time and events was enough of a proof." It is difficult for the uninitiated-namely, anyone who did not come under the spell of Kojčve's personality-to understand his influence. The printed version of his lectures -Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1968) -is almost comical in its fuzzy megalomania. (Though in this, it has to be admitted, itclosely resembles the teachings of Hegel himself.) The book is full of statements like this: "there is History because there is Philosophy and in order that there may be Philosophy."

Although like Hegel he professed to believe that history -- or at any rate History  -- came to an end with the Phenomenology, in 1945 Kojčve nevertheless decided to join the Ministry of Economy and Finance because, Aron reports, he "wanted to know how it [history] happened. . Like Plato, he wanted to advise a tyrant, in the shadows exercise influence over the visible actors." For more than twenty years, Kojčve (who died in 1968) succeeded in just that. He was by all accounts a brilliant negotiator. Dreaming of a resurgent Latin Empire, he was instrumental behind the scenes in the formation of the European Economic Community and encouraged de Gaulle to block British membership. If nothing else, Kojčve was a living testimony to the mesmerizing power of personality. Even Aron was taken in by Kojčve. Although he noted that in 1938-1939, Kojčve referred to himself as a "strict Stalinist," Aron believed that Kojčve later abandoned his Stalinism for the sake of serving France. "Did there," Aron asks, "remain in him a kind of Russian patriotism, hidden and rationalized? I don't doubt it, although there is no question that he served the French nation, freely chosen, with unshakable loyalty."

It turns out, though, that Kojčve was unshakably loyal only to the Hegelian ideal of the World Historical Personality. The young Hegel idolized Napoleon when he was on his way up, referring to him in 1806 as diese Weltseele -- "this world soul." Stalin was Kojčve's Napoleon: a tyrant through whom the forces of history seemed to converge. The French government has not yet released Kojčve's dossier, so it is not clear how much damage he did in his decades of espionage. He was the confidante of de Gaulle and Giscard d'Estaing, and doubtless had access to numerous French secrets. As Mr. Johnson points out, this "miraculous mandarin turns out to have been a malevolent mole. Nobody of his eminence has ever been exposed as a traitor on this scale before." The French, though they have exposed Kojčve, have yet to condemn him. Perhaps that is a sign of the lingering influence of his ideas. If it is true that we are at the dawn of the "post-historical" era, then working as a spy for the greatest tyranny of the twentieth century might be able to be dialectically interpreted as a "progressive" gesture. Then, too, many of the people Kojčve worked with are still alive. Honest condemnation might be embarrassing or worse. And after all, Kojčve was universally admired for his beguiling brilliance. For our part, the saga of Alexandre Kojčve's treachery reminds us of Walter Bagehot's comment on Ruskin's harebrained economic ideas: "In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius." Bagehot might have added: In the faculty of perpetrating evil, common sense is no match for the Hegelian dialectic.

-- The New Criterion Vol. 18, No. 3, November 1999

Alexandre Kojeve: Moscow's Mandarin Marxist Mole in France

by Keith Patchen

Who was Alexandre Vladimirovitch Kojevnikov? To understand Kojev-nikov, who changed his nationality from Russian to French and his name from Alexander Kojevnikov to Alexandre Kojčve, one must imagine an agent of influence for the Russian Intelligence Service -- the K.G.B. -- working at the centre of Europe and France's economic and international economic policy. One must also imagine a distinguished philosopher who influenced a generation of intellectuals and leading politicians in France and later throughout the West by his writings, disciples and students.

Complex and sophisticated and strategic K.G.B. influence and penetration operations require informed and intelligent appreciation as they are prima facie unimaginable in scope and ambition. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the identification of Kojčve as an agent of influence would have invited ridicule and disbelief. For this reason, exposure of Kojčve's espionage career did not occur until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the nightmare of all Soviet spies -- the archival revelations of a key defector.

Daniel Johnson, the English journalist who first reported Kojčve's role as a Soviet agent to English readers in 1999 summarised his influence:

"Kojčve's subterranean influence is ubiquitous. His ideas echo around our political arena. Francis Fukuyama's ‘end of history’ is recycled Kojčve. So is Tony Blair's vision of a post-conservative, post-national, post-political, post-historical Europe. This miraculous mandarin turns out to be a malevolent mole. Nobody of this eminence has been exposed as a traitor on this level before."

Background

Kojčve‘s thirty-year career as a Soviet agent surfaced in 1999 when Le Monde cited a three-page French security service (D.S.T.) dossier, "L’Espionage de l’Est et de la Gauche" (Eastern Bloc espionage and the Left) which identified Kojčve as having worked for the Soviets for thirty years -- "aurait travaillé trente ans pour les Sovietiques". Kojčve would have played an important role in the networks of Charles Hernu and the K.G.B.: "Les deux hommes avaient partagé [du] U.N. bureau au Centre du Commerce Extérieur."

Charles Hernu was Kojčve’s colleague at the French Ministry of Economic Affairs during the 1960s and became Minister for Defence in the government of François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1985. Hernu's role as a Soviet agent had been revealed in the French newspaper L’Express in 1996.

Documentation passed to the French service from an Eastern European intelligence service disclosed that Hernu had passed his first report to the Third Secretary of the Bulgarian Embassy on 16 March 1953. Hernu's product was routinely forwarded to the K.G.B. in Moscow.

In 1999 former K.G.B. archivist and defector Vasily Mitrokhin, who had unique access to operational records at K.G.B. headquarters from 1972 to 1984, provided independent collateral for the identification of Kojčve as Soviet agent. Mitrokhin passed Kojčve's identity and role to the British services and subsequently to the French intelligence services, as part of his extensive debriefing.

Kojčve's biographer, Dominique Auffret, described the identification of Kojčve as "inevitable" and said that it would have "befitted the astonishing person that he was". She quoted a D.S.T. source as stating that the "great interpreter of Hegel had been clearly identified as an agent of the K.G.B. (by the D.S.T.) which had been verified by the K.G.B."

The choice of Le Monde as a media outlet for the identification of Kojčve's espionage role is significant. Le Monde, code-named "Vestnik" ["messenger"] by the K.G.B., had long been publicly identified with radical anti-American causes and was itself the target of Soviet penetration. Further, the choice of Le Monde would have deflected predictable criticism that right-wing conservatives were targeting Kojčve.

Kojčve's masterly tradecraft can only be deduced but must have been facilitated by his official visits to Moscow and Eastern Europe. He visited Moscow in October 1957, and revisited in 1967 where he met his long-time friend, Olivier Wormser, the French ambassador in Moscow. Kojčve also visited Czechoslovakia, the Middle East, Cuba, Africa and Japan, privately and as a member of official delegations.

Kojčve was an inveterate traveller and free from travel restrictions routinely applied to Western visitors to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Thus, he would have been well placed to make low-risk contact with Soviet intelligence officers; most likely working for the K.G.B.'s First Chief Directorate which conducted foreign intelligence operations.

The form of Kojčve's contacts and communications with the K.G.B. remains unknown. He may have been under the direction of a Soviet illegal (Soviet intelligence officers working under non-official cover); he may have had "en clair" contact through official functions at which he passed secrets, papers or briefing notes to his case officers.

Kojčve may have met Soviet officials as part of his official duties or during his "official" travels to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; he may have taken advantage of high-speed communications between agents and Moscow in the form of high-speed "burst transmissions" of information which took less than a second from transmitters which could not be easily located. Kojčve's true identity would have been fiercely protected and known only to selected members of the Soviet Politburo, the Chairman of the K.G.B. and the Head of the First Chief Directorate and his cryptonyms constantly revised.

Paris had been the focus of Russian and Soviet intelligence operations targeted against émigré, revolutionary and conspiratorial groups operating throughout Western and Central Europe, since the opening of the Tsarist Okhrana's Foreign Bureau in Paris in 1883.

During the Cold War, the Paris K.G.B. residency typically ran more agents -- generally over fifty high-level agents -- than in any other country in Europe. Soviet penetration of French elites was facilitated by French revolutionary traditions which falsely identified the Russian revolution as a linear descendant of the French revolution, a disinformation theme which was promoted vigorously, the penetration of government by the Russian intelligence services in the Popular Front period, the largely mythical leadership of communists in the wartime resistance movement and the presence of communist ministers in the French government until 1947. The French Communist Party (P.C.F.) was the largest and most slavishly pro-Stalinist communist party in Western Europe. As an émigré intellectual, Kojčve enjoyed celebrity-cult status.

Kojčve also conspired in a benign operational environment. Russian and Eastern Bloc intelligence officers were free from travel restrictions in France. The French intelligence services were highly compromised and penetrated by the K.G.B., particularly in Kojčve’s greatest period of influence, during the Fourth republic (1946-1958).

Soviet influence, disinformation and active measures operations, and the recruitment of intellectuals and academics and the Russian émigré community, had been prevalent in France for decades. To further appreciate the environment in which Kojčve was recruited and operated, the prize-winning novel The Set Up by Vladimir Volkoff and Stephen Koch's historical study of cultural and intellectual treason in inter-war Europe and America, Double Lives, are indispensable reading.

Kojčve's Early Life in Russia and Germany

Kojčve was born Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov in Moscow, 11 May 1902. His childhood was spent in Moscow's fashionable Arbat district. His family were leading figures in the Russian intelligentsia. After the revolution his distinguished and wealthy family lost their fortune. The Soviet secret police, the Cheka, arrested him at the age of sixteen, for black-marketeering. He received a death sentence and whilst the other youthful offenders were shot, he was not. Family friends had intervened. Critical and life-saving interventions through friends and contacts were a theme of his life.

In 1920 he left Russia and travelled clandestinely, first to Poland where he was arrested as a suspected Bolshevik agitator for which he spent ten months in gaol. He later stated: "I was a communist; there was no need to flee Russia." In his own words he was a communist at the age of twenty. This event has been interpreted as part of his "legend" but like many events in Kojčve's life is shrouded in ambiguity.

In Berlin in 1921 he began studying Tibetan, Chinese and Sanskrit. He also studied philosophy in Berlin and at the University of Heidelberg, where he commenced studying Russian literature. In that year, he was awarded a doctoral dissertation titled Die Religiose Philosophie Wladimir Solowjeffs (the religious Philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev) completed under the supervision of the famed German philosopher Karl Jaspers.

Soloviev (1853-1900) was a Russian religious mystic, literary critic and political commentator who sought to synthesise Eastern and Western philosophy. He was an important inspirational source for Kojčve, who became a Sinologist in the 1920s and had a life-long interest in Oriental languages and philosophy.

In 1926, he moved to Paris, changed his name to Alexandre Kojčve and acquired French citizenship. Kojčve was aware through his cousin Koyre that there was little systematic study of Hegel in France. He elected to take his cousin's role, a decision facilitated by his cousin's timely departure for teaching and study in Egypt.

In 1938, the Soviet N.K.V.D., later to become the K.G.B., recruited Kojčve. At this time, Soviet intelligence services were recruiting and developing long-term agents for the looming war but the precise circumstances of Kojčve's recruitment are unclear: he may have been compromised (he allegedly had a mysterious sexual life); he may have been induced by financial reward; he may have wanted to support the "great Soviet experiment" or romantically identified with the Russian motherland.

A dominant theme in Kojčve's life is personal survival framed in elegance, expensive apartments, mysteriously funded scholarship and study, and good living which required considerable financial support. At some stage in his development as a Soviet agent, Kojčve would have accepted financial payment from the Soviets, if only as demanded to ensure his compliance. Kojčve would have required substantial operational funds to penetrate the French elite structure.

As a strategic Soviet agent of influence Kojčve created an informal personal intelligence service. He was a formidable net worker. He "influenced" and recruited many of his students for operational support and cover. Many later mistakenly vouched for his integrity. Some regarded him as a "Russian patriot", others regarded him as a "loyal son of France". However, Kojčve was a loyal son of the Soviet Union who warmly referred to Stalin as "father". On hearing of Stalin’s death, Kojčve cried.

Kojčve's Influence on French Intellectuals

Kojčve's intellectual ascendancy in France was facilitated by noted German and particularly Russian intellectual émigrés who lived and studied in France including Bernard Groethuysen, a Marxist who stimulated André Gide's interest in the "Soviet experiment", Nikolai Berdayev and Léon Chestov.

However, Kojčve's celebrated small-group Seminars on Hegel held each Monday from January 1933 to May 1939 at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes established him as a radical and new interpreter of Hegel for a new generation of French intellectuals including André Breton, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alexander Koyre, Pierre Klossowski, Eric Weil, famed psychoanalytical theorist Jacques Lacan, and noted conservative sociologist Raymond Aron.

Kojčve's method of explication has been described as "Talmudic" and consisted of six years of line-by-line reading of Hegel's classic, "Phenomenology of the Spirit." Kojčve, typically referred to his reading as "under the line."

Kojčve introduced Hegel to a generation of intellectuals influenced by the prevailing intellectual traditions of Cartesian-rationalism, Bergsonian neo-vitalism, neo-Kantianism and Catholicism. He faced a formidable task and succeeded. Students and colleagues described him as a "enchanter", a spellbinder and a magician and a "magical" weaver of concepts. Above all, Kojčve was a recruiter. Many of his students provided him with access to French bureaucratic elites; whether they were witting or unwitting access agents‚ remains controversial.

In his lectures Kojčve stressed Hegel's belief in the role of Reason in shaping politics and history. The belief that "Man makes history" seemingly provided an escape from the nightmare of history, from Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and death of God, Kierkegaard's sense of dread, Vilfredo Pareto's repetitive "circulation of elites," Robert Michels’ "iron law of oligarchy", which ensured control of democratic organisation by permanent office holders, and from Weber's iron cage of bureaucratic rationalisation and disenchantment of the world and Durkheim's cold modern wasteland of anomie.

French sociological tradition, primarily of a conservative orientation, had posited society as "external to the individual". According to Kojčve's dramatic and existential reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind infused with Heidegger and Husserl, man no longer existed "outside history", but inside history, not as a spectator but as an actor engaged in the superior ontological state of Being rather than being.

Kojčve and "The End of History"

According to Kojčve, knowledge was derived through action. The inversion of the Cartesian maxim -- "I think, therefore I am" -- to "I act, therefore I am" underlines his belief in fascist voluntarism and "triumph of the will" and a Nietschean will to power.

Kojčve's long professional and personal relationship with Carl Schmitt, the Nazis’ most brilliant theorist, demands further study. Kojčve lectured on colonialism and capitalism in Berlin at Schmitt’s invitation and engaged in a long post-war correspondence with him. Kojčve never expressed criticism of Schmitt, the father of decisionalism, Nazi jurisprudence and the Friend-Foe conception of politics. Kojčve had a personal and political affinity with Schmitt and the pro-Nazi Martin Heidegger.

Violence was central to Kojčve’s ontology. Underneath the laboured phrases of Hegelianism and Marxism he advocated a terrorist conception of history. Indeed, Kojčve was the most brilliant theorist of terrorism in the twentieth century; his philosophical anthropology centred on conflict: the "bloody battle" or struggle of desire for recognition by the "other."

According to Kojčve, desire, the awareness of lack in the subject, propelled man into the drama of history. Recognition of desire was impossible without a struggle to the death between men. Desire compels recognition by the Other which requires negation of the desired object. In Kojčve's interpretation, the negation of the desired object was a philosophical rationalisation for class warfare, terrorism and mass murder -- in the name of history. To Kojčve the Other -- who opposed the desire of the subject and human progress and history -- had no right to exist. The struggle to the death between master and slave was the source of human progress. The history of class struggle was reframed as the history of the struggle for recognition and dominance. The slave overcame the dread of death posited by Heidegger, who was an early and lasting influence on Kojčve, by a commitment to revolutionary violence.

Kojčve the Father of Postmodernism.

According to Kojčve, "the end of history" or "absolute knowledge" and self-consciousness could be achieved only through the end of history or the abolition of all master or dominant narratives of the Enlightenment, Christianity and the West.

In this context Kojčve stimulated the development of post-modernism. Hegel's "cunning of reason" and Max Weber's unintended consequences of action -- became in the post-modern lexicon, irony. As the Puritans’ sense of religious vocation had the unintended consequence of forming the spirit of capitalism, the resolution of the struggle for freedom and recognition had ironically created the one-dimensional modern universal and homogenous state. Philosophy would cease. All life would become a matter of administration. Man would be locked not in Max Weber's iron cage of rationality but in the cage of irony.

The diabolical dyad -- Being and Time -- would cease to exist as there would be no more contradictions in existence, since the desire for recognition would be satisfied by the "end of history" and the analgesic and amnesic effect of "the American style of life", or the satisfaction of "animal (non-human) pleasures". Irony would be victorious in that the struggle for freedom and recognition would result in conspicuous and compulsive consumption and mediocrity in all of its lack of splendour.

Kojčve's Defence of Tyranny

Kojčve admired the ruthlessness of the "strong men of history" that is, totalitarian mass murderers. He inquired of his correspondent, political philosopher Leo Strauss, whether Torquemeda and Dzerzhinsky -- founders of the Inquisition and the K.G.B. respectively -- suffered from bad conscience. Like Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders he believed that those who did not accept the "universalisation of desire" in the "post State" or "rational tyranny" were "sick" and "should be locked up". Kojčve valorised oppression.

Many intellectuals have a Caesaristic identification with authoritarian and totalitarian leaders. Kojčve revered Napoleon and was intrigued by Hitler. Above all, Kojčve revered Stalin and claimed he was "Stalin's conscience", a particularly bizarre form of identification.

Although Kojčve privately informed Raymond Aron that only an imbecile "could not be unaware of the great terror launched by Stalin", he was reportedly "devastated as if he had lost a father" by Stalin's death in 1953.

Prior to Stalin's death, Kojčve had written a letter to Stalin's French biographer, Boris Souvarine, proposing to philosophically underwrite Stalinism, a project in which he was largely successful. As George Steiner has noted, Kojčve's Stalinism was "pivotal -- almost unique -- in any serious philosophy".

To Kojčve, the victors write history. Stalin was a victor in Kojčve's judgment and according to Kojčve: "Sin will be pardoned. How? Through its success."

According to Kojčve's terroristic conception of history "revolutionary history, world historical figures" that is, great leaders or great tyrants, are absolved of crimes against humanity. They and their "totalitarian parties should alone decide who should live or die". Terror is a triumph of the will.

Kojčve's support for tyrants was clearly expressed in a letter he wrote to his friend the political philosopher Leo Strauss: "It would be unreasonable if the philosopher were in any way whatsoever to criticise the concrete political measures taken by the statesman, regardless of whether or not he is a tyrant, especially when the ideal advocated by the philosopher may be achieved at some future time." [Emphasis added].

Kojčve during World War II

Kojčve's activities during the Second World War are obscured in legend, partly self-created legend and partly perhaps suggested by the Russian intelligence service. The "resistance" period in his life remains most controversial. Whatever the truth, Kojčve again narrowly escaped a firing squad and was again saved though the intervention of his personal contacts. Some critics claim that he collaborated with the Nazis at this time and that his identification with the aggressor, in this case, the Nazis, was so strong that he believed collaboration with a victorious Third Reich was justified, if it meant the survival of European/Latin supremacy in a French-led Latin Empire. How Kojčve's plan accorded with the Nazis’ geopolitical plans for global racial domination is unclear but Kojčve was a master of dialectical thinking defined by the Spanish writer George Semprun as‚ the art of always landing on one's feet.

Kojčve in the Post War Period

In 1946 Kojčve wrote that all interpretations of Hegel were "programmes for work and struggle and had the significance of political propaganda". Accordingly, after the Second World War, in the words of his friend, Raymond Aron, he "decided that he wanted to know how history happened. Like Plato he wanted to advise a tyrant, in the shadows exercise influence over the visible actors."

Such a task involved his penetration of the French government at the highest levels. A formidable net worker and recruiter with a charismatic and dazzling personality, Kojčve was appointed in 1948 to a senior post in the Centre National du Commerce Extérieur of the French Ministry of Economic Affairs. This career move was typically facilitated by a former pupil, Robert Marjolin.

In 1950, Kojčve wrote that the role of the philosopher in relation to the government was that of the adviser to the ruler. Philosophers such as Kojčve should guide politics, as they were ideally placed to serve the State or government on the basis of their dialectical skills, their liberation from prejudices which permit a greater appreciation of historical reality and their capacity for holistic thinking. Kojčve's views were not original and his conception of the role of the intelligentsia had been foreshadowed by Max Scheler and particularly Karl Mannheim in Ideology and Utopia (1922).

Although he claimed to love philosophy and regarded himself as a "sage", Kojčve sought influence and power as it enabled him to serve the interests of his masters in Moscow Centre. As he wrote in 1950: "To want to influence the government is to want to influence the government in general. It is to want to determine or co-determine its policy as such." Rarely has the role of the Soviet agent of influence been so vividly defined.

Kojčve remained an influential policy adviser and negotiator for the French government for thirty years, playing a significant role in creating France's and Europe's post-war economic institutions. A masterful persuader and negotiator, he was remarkably committed to bureaucracy, which he described as a "superior game" to philosophy.

Kojčve dazzled Prime Minister Raymond Barré and the young Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. His influence may have peaked with his relationship with President Charles de Gaulle. He encouraged, through his network of contacts, De Gaulle's opposition to British E.E.C. membership, and his rebuilding of Franco-Russian relations with Khrushchev. De Gaulle looked to French leadership, as did Kojčve, to lead a resurgent Europe in opposition to the looming global dominance of the United States.

Kojčve was strategically placed to promote anti-American policies in the name of French national interests, Gaullism or European interests; he was an architect of G.A.T.T. (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and the European Union. He was also strategic adviser to Bernard Clappier. During this period he was Governor for the Bank of France and his old friend, Oliver Wormser, was one-time French ambassador to the Soviet Union.

In 1966, de Gaulle withdrew France from N.A.T.O.'s integrated command structure and made a triumphal state visit to the Soviet Union. Kojčve was strategically-placed to influence, both personally and through his networks of influence, Soviet "active measures" (influence) operations in France; to destabilise Franco-U.S. relations; to encourage Franco-Russian rapprochement; and to distance France from N.A.T.O.

As Constantine Melnik, security adviser to the First Prime Minister of the Fourth Republic, noted: "More than any other political movement, Gaullism was swarming with agents of influence of the obliging K.G.B., whom we never succeeded in keeping away from de Gaulle."

Anti-Americanism in the name of Europe and French "high culture" appear to have been Kojčve’s primary motivation in his political-administrative work in the highest circles of French government. French critics have described him as the "father of European anti-Americanism".

As early as the 1950s he wrote to Leo Strauss that a world socialist state might be realised through the gradual expansion of the European integration across the globe. As a "European" and "Russian", Kojčve regarded the United States as a threat to "high culture" and viewed a United Europe led by France and Germany as the ideal bulwark against the "Americanisation" of the world.

1968: Endgame

1968 was a turning point in Western history. In an explosive mix of generational resentment, nihilism and unearned affluence centring on alleged opposition to the Communist-inspired war in Vietnam, radical students launched their attacks on the softest of all targets -- the centre for the study of self-hatred -- the modern university.

Kojčve, the pioneer of the "long march through the institutions" therefore cast a cold eye on the student riots which erupted in France in May 1968. He coolly remarked to Raymond Aron that as there were no deaths during the riots it was not a meaningful event.

The Soviet agent who practised deception as an art form was a confirmed technocratic elitist who believed in rule from the centre and detested the visible intrusion of "the masses ", "the people" and "the politics of the street".

Kojčve objected to the jejune leftists’ direct action and street demonstrations as they contravened the core concept in the Soviet lexicon: control.

***

On 4 June 1968, Kojčve died of a heart attack whilst attending an E.E.C. meeting in Brussels. In Paris his apartment was reportedly mysteriously ransacked and his papers removed.

In Brussels one minute's silence was observed for Kojčve: the Zelig-like, philosopher-ruler, world traveller, enigmatic linguistic polymath, intellectual, master bureaucrat, philosopher Prince, correspondent of Leo Strauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Schmitt, Karl Lowith, Karl Jaspers and Kandinsky, scholar, academic, technocrat, superlative negotiator, confidante of French presidents, libertine, student of physics and chemistry, dandy, sinologist, student of Indian, Chinese and Japanese languages, student of Islam, mathematics and physics, confrere of Europe's leading intellectuals and civil servants, holder of the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, the father of post-modernism, and Soviet agent.

Select Bibliography:

The literature on this topic is vast. The references listed below are the principal sources:

Kojčve's role as a Soviet agent: "Europe's Greatest Traitor", Daily Telegraph (London), 2 October 1990.

Kojčve's biography: D. Auffret, Alexandre Kojčve: La Philosophie l’état, la fin de histoire, Paris, Grasset 1990.

"La D.S.T. avait identifié plusieurs agents du K.G.B. parmi lesquels le philosophe Alexandre Kojčve", Le Monde, 19 September 1999.

"Le K.G.B. avait tissé ŕ l’U.N. vaste reseau d’influence en France", Le Monde, 16 September 1999.

M. Price, "The Spy Who loved Hegel", Lingua Franca, Volume 10 (2), March 2000.

Vladimir Solovyov: "Christian Politics: Vladimir Solovyov's Social Gospel Theology", Modern Greek Studies Yearbook, Vol 10/11.

F. Fukayama, "The End of History and the Last Man", New York, 1992, which derived from his "The End of History?" The National Interest, Summer, 1989.

A. Kojčve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Raymond Queneau, Ed. Allan Bloom, Basic Books, N.Y., 1969.

A. Kojčve, Les Temps Modernes, 7 October 1948.

"Hegel, Marx and Christianisme Critique" (1946), cited in M. Roth, The Ironist's Cage: Memory Trauma and the Constructions of History, N.Y. 1995.

Vladimir Volkoff, The Set Up ["Le Montage"], London, 1985.

Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Spies and Secrets in the Secret War of Ideas Against the West, N.Y., 1994.

Soviet active measures are examined in C. Andrew and V. Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, London, 2000, pages 600-623.

The author has drawn on: A. Neal, "The Promise and Practice of Deconstruction", Canadian Journal of History, 1995.

M. Lill, "The End of Philosophy: How a Russian émigré brought Hegel to the French", Times Literary Supplement, 5 April 1991.

The Kojčve-Strauss correspondence centring on the interpretation of Hegel is documented in V. Gourevitch and M. S. Roth (eds.) Leo Strauss, "On Tyranny", N.Y., 1991.

The Spy Who Loved Hegel

By Matthew Price

WAS ALLAN BLOOM'S FAVORITE STALINIST A KGB AGENT? Concerned Hegelians want to know, ever since Le Monde published allegations in September that the philosopher Alexandre Kojčve spied for the Soviet Union for the last thirty years of his life.

Le Monde cited a three-page memo that France's counterespionage service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), had compiled in 1982-83 under the title "L'espionnage de l'Est et la gauche" (Eastern-bloc espionage and the left). If the DST memo was accurate, the newspaper wrote, Kojčve "would have played an important role in the networks of Charles Hernu and of the KGB."

This didn't quite constitute proof against the philosopher, whose famous seminar on Hegel inspired a generation of radical French intellectuals. Although Kojčve wasn't alive to defend himself, a living politician also tarred by the DST memo called it "a tissue of stupidities." Neither Le Monde nor DST released the memo to the public.

STILL, IT SOUNDED BAD. Charles Hernu, the alleged ringleader, was Kojčve's office mate at the French Ministry of Economic Affairs during the 1960s. In 1996 L'Express claimed that Hernu had spied for the Romanian, Bulgarian, and Soviet secret services during the 1950s and 1960s. Later, two Romanian spymasters claimed the KGB made the whole thing up, but the mauvaise odeur around Hernu, who served as François Mitterrand's minister of defense, still hasn't dissipated.

Did the KGB fabricate a file on Kojčve, too? After the article in Le Monde, Kojčve's defenders lambasted the paper's sketchy evidence and seemingly McCarthyite tactics. Others, however, judged the new evidence substantial enough to convict. Britain's right-wing Daily Telegraph proclaimed with melodramatic alliteration that "this miraculous mandarin turns out to have been a malevolent mole." In the United States, The New Criterion used the occasion to take a swipe at Kojčve's seminal interpretations of Hegel, calling them "almost comical in their fuzzy megalomania."

And yet it's odd that the conservative press should rejoice at Kojčve's fall from grace. He isn't quite their enemy, even if he did once call himself "Stalin's conscience." Leo Strauss, guru to a generation of American conservative political philosophers, admired Kojčve, and the two men corresponded for years. Allan Bloom called Kojčve's Introduction á la lecture de Hegel (1947) "one of the few important philosophical books of the twentieth century." And Kojčve provided the title idea of Francis Fukuyama's essay "The End of History?" -- namely, that history had a direction and a conclusion, which Fukuyama located in the triumph of Western democracies in the Cold War.

Could a Left Hegelian admired by so many Right Hegelians have been working for Moscow?

BORN ALEXANDRE VLADIMIROVITCH KOJČVNIKOV in 1902 to a wealthy Moscow family, Kojčve grew up among the leading lights of the Russian intelligentsia. His uncle was the painter Wassily Kandinsky. But his family's fortunes soured with the revolution: Thrust into poverty, the young Kojčve was arrested and condemned to execution in 1917 for selling soap on the black market. With Dostoyevskian timing, family friends intervened to spare him from the firing squad at the last minute. Kojčve left prison a committed communist. But he nonetheless foresaw, he later told an interviewer, that the Bolshevik seizure of power would usher in "thirty terrible years."

In 1920, he fled to Poland, where he was again arrested, this time because Polish authorities suspected him of being a Bolshevik infiltrator. After a short stint in prison, he ended up at the University of Heidelberg, where he completed a dissertation under the supervision of Karl Jaspers. After graduation, Kojčve moved to Paris to teach.

It was in Paris that Kojčve secured his fame. In 1933, at L'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, he held a seminar on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that attracted a Who's Who of twentieth-century French thinkers: surrealist André Breton, philosopher Georges Bataille, phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, sociologist Raymond Aron, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and experimental novelist Raymond Queneau. Bataille was so thrilled by Kojčve's lectures that he experienced the abject: The seminar left him "broken, crushed, killed ten times over, suffocated and nailed down." Aron thought Kojčve one of the most superior minds he had known -- "smarter than Sartre," he said.

Kojčve read Hegel idiosyncratically -- as if Marx hadn't needed to stand Hegel on his feet because he'd been a materialist all along. In Hegel's parable of the struggle between master and slave for mutual recognition, for example, Kojčve already saw the Marxist struggle between the classes. Hegel had once described Napoleon as the world-spirit on horseback, and Kojčve -- excited by some Hegel juvenilia unearthed in the 1930s by Alexandre Koyré -- decided that Hegel believed Napoleon was actually bringing history to an end. Whether or not Hegel believed in the end of history as a datable event, Kojčve certainly did. Only in Kojčve's opinion, it was Stalin, the red Napoleon, who would finish history off.

That doesn't mean Kojčve was a doctrinaire Stalinist. "You have to allow for the fact that in his generation someone like him could simultaneously admire not so much Stalin the man as Stalin the vehicle of historical progress and be admired and listened to by people who despised Stalin," says NYU's Tony Judt, author of Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956.

Indeed, some of Kojčve's greatest fans were French leftists put off by the crudeness of Stalinism. Hence the chagrin at the espionage charge among those on the left who still revere Kojčve. "If it turns out that Kojčve is a polluted source," says Judt, "then another leg is kicked out from underneath the rather unstable stool of noncommunist Marxist thought."

AFTER WORLD WAR II, Kojčve was canny enough to realize that the world spirit was moving west. After a recalibration, he decided that it was indeed Napoleon, not Stalin, who had brought history to an end. (Just before his death he said, "The Chinese Revolution is nothing but the introduction of the Napoleonic Code into China.") All that was left to do was work out the details of the universal state. In 1948 Kojčve took a job at the Centre National du Commerce Extérieur of the French Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Kojčve played a significant role in creating Europe's postwar institutions. He helped lay the foundations for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the European Union. For an erstwhile leftist intellectual, he was remarkably happy in his pro-capitalist desk job. Though he continued to write articles and even books, he called bureaucracy a "superior game" to philosophy, and when a customs scheme of his was accepted, he was overjoyed.

He was reportedly grief stricken on hearing of Stalin's death in 1953, which confounded his colleagues at the ministry. Fukuyama, however, feels that any affection Kojčve expressed for Stalin must have been complex, if not ironic. "For all of his professions of belief in Stalinism, that wasn't the core of what he was about," says Fukuyama. "In fact, he felt building the European Community did constitute the end of history."

Others are less charitable about the contradictions in Kojčve's character. Shadia Drury, a political scientist at the University of Calgary and author of Alexandre Kojčve: The Roots of Postmodern Politics, calls him a "historical determinist" -- that is, a historical opportunist. "If he thought Stalin was going to be the end of history, he was on Stalin's side," says Drury. "Once he thought it was the Americans, he was on the Americans' side." Indeed, in 1940 Kojčve wrote an essay about the possibility of a Nazi victory in Europe, arguing that collaboration with the victorious Germans would be acceptable if it meant the economic supremacy of Europe.

COULD THIS COMPLEX THINKER have been a Soviet spy? Drury guesses that if Kojčve did spy, he would only have done so between 1945 and 1948 -- before he figured out that Stalin was going to be history's loser.

University of Rennes professor Edmond Ortigues doubts Kojčve could have been a communist spy, citing his correspondence with the fiercely anticommunist mother he left behind in Moscow. "How can one believe that Kojčve was able to trick his mother to the point of playing a double game with her for thirty long years?" Ortigues asks. Unfortunately, although Kojčve himself told Ortigues about this correspondence with his mother, Ortigues never read the letters they exchanged, nor does he know if they still exist.

Even if the allegations against Kojčve are true, argues Dominique Auffret, Kojčve's French biographer, they may not be as straightforward as they at first appear. Auffret notes that the DST distinguished among several categories: "traitor, a gent of influence, simple contact, spy, or simple political sympathizer." Auffret calls for the release of the material so that "it might be made the object of scientific criticism."

Perhaps Kojčve considered spying another aspect of the "superior game" he was playing at the ministry. Indeed, Auffret entertains just such a notion: One must consider, he says, "the hypothesis that Kojčve sought to use the KGB for his own ends, and perhaps in perfect agreement with the French government." Or perhaps communism and the west didn't seem so far apart to Kojčve. After all, he once declared Henry Ford to be "the only great authentic Marxist of the twentieth century."

Matthew Price is LF's editorial researcher. His article "Who Owns Arthur Koestler?" appeared in the September 1999 issue.

On Tyranny is dedicated to the effort to restore classical political philosophy. The reader may therefore be somewhat startled to find Strauss assert that

[i]t would not be difficult to show that ... liberal or constitutional democracy comes closer to what the classics demanded than any alternative that is viable in our age. (194).

He does not say what alternatives to liberal or constitutional democracy he considers viable in our age. Nor does he show the affinity between the political orders which the classics favored -- or even those which they found merely acceptable -- and modern liberal democracy. Aristotle's mixed regime is sometimes said to come close to our liberal democracy. But no one ever derived modern liberal democracy from Aristotle's principles (cp. e.g. Politics III, ix, 8). It may, of course, seem that, to paraphrase a remark of Strauss's about the relation between natural right and divine revelation, once the idea of liberal democracy has emerged and become a matter of course, it can easily be accommodated to classical political philosophy. But to judge by the efforts of thoughtful and patriotic scholars who have tried to reconcile classical political philosophy with modern liberal democracy, all such attempts end either in admissions of failure, or in concessions to the moderns -- regarding, for example, natural rights, commercial republicanism, or technology -- which Strauss consistently refused to make (205; 223, 190, 22, 207). His suggestion that liberal democracy be justified in terms of the classics is, therefore, perhaps best understood as a suggestion for a radical revision of our conception of liberal democracy.

***

The correspondence confirms what attentive readers had noticed long ago, that although Heidegger is never mentioned in the published debate, he is present throughout it. It is not surprising that he should be. Both Strauss and Kojeve had been deeply impressed by him in their formative years. And besides, how could they, how could anyone reflect on the relations between tyranny and philosophy during the years when the full horror of Nazism was being uncovered, without being constantly mindful of the only significant thinker who joined the Nazis and, what is more, who did so in the name of his teaching? Perhaps no major thinker in the history of philosophy ever so compromised the good name of philosophy or so radically challenged in deed the Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue, and its correlate, that the soul insensibly conforms to the objects to which it attends. He would seem to be the target of the concluding lines in Strauss's original "Restatement:" et humiliter serviebant et superbe dominabantur -- "either humbly slavish, or ruling haughtily" -- a slight paraphrase of what Livy says about the nature of the mob as he recounts how it behaved during and immediately after the tyranny of another, later Hiero of Syracuse (XXIV, xxv, 8). We can only speculate about Strauss's reasons for omitting this passage from the subsequently published English versions of this text. It seems plausible that by the time he did so, he had decided to speak out about Heidegger explicitly and at length, and that he wished his public comments to be suitably modulated. But there is no reason at all to doubt that reflection on Heidegger's political career only confirmed him -- as well as Kojeve -- in the conviction that the thinking of what is first in itself or of Being has to remain continuous with what is first for us, the political life.

The dialogue between Strauss and Kojeve does not end in reconciliation. Both are willing to accept the full consequences of their respective positions. At the same time, precisely because it does not end in reconciliation, their dialogue helps us to see more clearly the temptations and the risks of the most basic alternatives before us.

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