Kojève, Alexandre (1902—68) Russian philosopher and political theorist. The nephew of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, Kojève had a privileged upbringing in pre-revolutionary Russia. In 1918 he was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks for small-time black market activities. He was duly released, but because he was unable to further his studies under the new regime, he fled to Poland. From there he moved to Heidelberg in Germany, where he studied with Husserl, Edmund, and Jaspers, Karl. He started reading genre then, but would later claim that he could not (at that point) make head or tail of it. He soon moved on again, this time to Paris, where he was to spend the rest of his life. There he met his countryman Alexandre Koyré, whose lectures he attended along with Bataille, Georges. In 1933, at Koyré’s invitation, Kojève commenced lecturing on Hegel’s religious philosophy at École Pratique des Hautes Études. Among the regular attendees was psychoanalysis Lacan, Jacques, Surrealism Raymond Queneau (who would later edit the lectures and publish them) and Breton, André, and the philosophers Merleau-Ponty, Maurice and Eric Weil. Accordingly it is generally said that Kojève taught the French how to read Hegel. Influenced by his friend and mentor Koyré, Kojève emphasized the importance of Napoleon’s victory at Jena to Hegel, claiming this episode was the embodiment of Hegel’s thesis concerning the ‘end of history’ in which the dialectic of master and slave is finally transcended. He later corrected this claim by saying Hegel was premature in his pronouncement by a century and that it was in fact Stalin who most perfectly realized this thesis, only to renounce it a few years later and revert to his original position. For Kojève the end of history arrives with the advent of the universal and the homogenous. Initially he thought this was realized in communism, but he subsequently changed his mind and saw that it is actualized fully in the abundance of American-style capitalism. Kojève’s most famous work was Introduction à la ‘Phenoménologie de l’esprit’ (1947), translated as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1980). After the war, at the invitation of one of his former students Robert Marjolin he joined the Ministry of Finance and worked as an adviser in the international trade section, though he continued to write as well and engaged in a famous debate with the American conservative philosopher Strauss, Leo. See also Fukuyama, Francis. Further Reading: D. Auffret Alexandre Kojéve (1990).