Master and slave together

Kojève’s announcement, in the face of a looming disaster, was that the ideological conflicts of his age were a mirage. It followed that there could be no serious debate, and no real conflict, over the proper organization of political life. History was over because the final truth about human life had at last been discovered-in the thought of Hegel, the subject of Kojève’s seminar.

Kojève called himself a god and made a radical reading of Christianity, but he claimed to be a philosopher, not a prophet. He did not mean that the apocalypse was at hand, that wars and violence had ceased, that human beings would no longer love, mate, and play. In the autumn of 1933, ­Alexandre Kojève announced to his class that history was over.