Alexandre Kojève believed history had ended—and then went to work for the French state. Philosopher of the master/slave dialectic, confidant of Leo Strauss, sometime Stalinist, Resistance member, architect of the postwar European order, weekend metaphysician, and likely KGB informant, Kojève led a life that reads like a philosophical roman noir. In The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève, Marco Filoni, an associate professor of political philosophy at Link Campus University, Rome, reconstructs this remarkable career with clarity and admiration—though not always with the critical distance that Kojève’s more extravagant claims demand.
Filoni’s book is part of a growing body of work dedicated to understanding a thinker who blurred the lines between philosophy, politics, and power. More than three decades after Francis Fukuyama famously drew on Kojève to proclaim “the end of history” in the twilight of the Cold War, Kojève’s ideas continue to provoke. In recent years, a steady stream of his unpublished writings has emerged from the archives, including his World War II works and early essays on atheism, metaphysics, and
