Kojève, Kant, and paganism

The Hegel lectures occupy a prominent place in Kojève’s corpus between the apparent eclecticism of his early work, and the thematic unity underlying his political-legal writings of the middle period. On the other hand, the posthumously published volumes on Kant and ancient philosophy are still little studied and poorly understood. This paper puts forward an alternative interpretation by shifting the fulcrum of the corpus from the Lectures to the systematic concept of objective reality. Not only does the traceability of the latter, from the early to the later writings, reveal a sustained conversation with Kant; it moreover highlights a peculiar position that overrides epistemologizing and ontologizing trends in Kantianism. This reading is brought to bear on the nature and scope of Kojève’s Hegelianism and on the vexed question of his end of history thesis.