A Note on Kojève's Phenomenology of Right

LEXANDRE KOJEVE is best known as one of the great-and probably the most outrageous-interpreters of Hegel in our century. His Introduction ai la Lecture de Hegel is a work of striking philosophic originality, barely disguised as a commentary on the Phenomenology of Spirit. The recent publication of his Esquisse d'une phenome'nologie du droit is the fifth volume of his works to appear since the Hegel book, and the only one not to be a study in the history of philosophy. ' The manuscript dates from 1943, and although Kojeve did not choose to publish it during his lifetime, it seems to have been regarded by its author as a finished product. In all his work, Kojeve was concerned with making sense of the progress of human institutions and practices without recourse to an atemporal criterion of judgment (e.g., an unchanging nature of things or God). He recognized the need for some transhistorical standard, and argued that Hegel had identified this criterion as the end of history. This end was not as it was for Kant a horizon that retreated as one approached it, but a realizable goal for human action. By the end of the 1940s, Kojeve spoke as if this goal had already been achieved by the developed countries, and thus he referred to a post-historical world in which there was literally nothing left to be done. This world, though, turned out not to be the Reich der Freiheit that he and his fellow leftHegelians had expected, but an iron cage filled with hollow men. The end of history seemed to be the final ruse of reason. The Esquisse, however, was written by a philosopher who thought he could glimpse the goal of history at the limits of his own time, and who wanted to make sense of right in light of the incipient actualization of this goal. He did so in three stages: defining the of right; showing its origin and historical development; sketching the final realization of the essence of right in a system

Epistemology · Hegelianism · Nothing · Originality · Phenomenology (philosophy · Political science · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

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