Fall 2017 JPI

to build the European Economic Community, actively contributed to the functionalist European
project that emerged in postwar Europe, establishing a form of doux commerce through free-trade zones
and embedded liberalism. Besides his career as a statesman in Europe, Kojeve’s political interests also
extended abroad: Kojeve had showed his trust in the Soviets - allegedly having worked as a spy for
the USSR - and he had also expressed his admiration for post-Fordist United States 7 .
Even if his political career seems antithetical to his idea of history ending, Kojeve never altered
his thinking. What he saw as an end, was the conviction that “no new political order can emerge that
is both fundamentally different and rational;” yet the possibility for fundamental contingencies
remains for Kojeve, who further saw his own “practical activity as administration of the details of the
end of history.” 8
The remarkable thirty years of prosperity that followed the defeat of the Nazi regime was an
era of peace and economic growth for the liberal European community. But with the advent of decolonization
and the economic crises of the '70s, the disillusioned next generation of Europeans had
little respect for capitalist values. Similarly, post-structuralist thought that emerged in the context of
civil rights movements in Europe and America, had little respect for Kojeve's generation. Interestingly,
the fundamental break that occurred in continental philosophy with the rise of post-structuralist
theorists, did not take the form of hatred for Kojeve or his contemporaries, but instead for Hegel; as
in Kojeve's reading of Hegel’s history as a history of man.
Deconstruction, the era's philosophical credo, developed mainly by Derrida, Deleuze and
Foucault, attacked the notion of a historical subject, questioning not only the idea of history but also
the wholeness of the human subject itself. For post-structuralists, the idea that human consciousness,
in the state of absolute truth, is able to identify itself in the “other” was preposterous. They believed
instead in a radical “other” that was by no means fully comprehensible. Except for Foucault, who
mainly drew his influence from Nietzsche, French intellectuals of the time “were seduced by an
altogether darker strain in German thought.” 9 Heidegger and Schmitt became the new main influences
of French theorists. This new philosophical alignment was inherently problematic. Schmitt and
Heidegger were relevant to post-structuralist thought because of their critique of progress and their
notion of a “temporal being,” but it was these same philosophers that had inspired and collaborated
with the Nazi regime. Nevertheless, these associations were silenced in an urgent need for an anticapitalist
philosophical support.
This silencing led to another effect. Post-structuralist libertarian values were successfully
institutionalized in Great Britain and the US. Parallel to the rise of neo-liberalism in the Anglo-Saxon
world was the emergence of a theoretical capital that justified the emerging self-realizing individual.
Following the silencing of the affiliations of the specific branch of German philosophy that influenced
post-structuralism, came a mutation of Marxist critique, that was conveniently “relieved of its
embarrassingly atavistic attachment to economic categories and political institutions.” 10 As Tony Judt
shows in the second part of Postwar where he examines the discontents of postwar prosperity, by 1970
the Left was starting to emulate the radical Right that had been discredited in 1945 and a “180-year
cycle of ideological politics in Europe was drawing to a close.” 11
7James H. Nichols, Alexandre Kojeve: Wisdom at the End of History (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 135.
8 Ibid, 136-137
9 Tony Judt, Postwar (London: Penguin, 2006), 480.
10 Ibid, 479 - 483
11 Ibid, 449
JPI Fall 2017, pg. 38