Eighty Years Ago, Alexandre Kojève Predicted the End of History and a State Devoted to Art and Love

Alexandre Kojève supported the Vichy government, joined the French Resistance, worked for the KGB and imagined a European Union under papal leadership. The philosopher brought together contradictions that seemed impossible to reconcile.

Eight decades ago, Kojève predicted the end of history in an administrative apocalypse. He did not imagine a world consumed by fire, but one transformed into a gigantic nursery. Capitalist consumer society, he believed, would take on communist features. Government would become administration, wars would disappear and eternal peace would prevail.

A universal state would guarantee material prosperity, leaving no strategic decisions to make. Kojève saw no tragedy in the elimination of political possibilities. He embraced a dialectical synthesis of opposing forces, shaped in theological terms but without God.

Kojève established his reputation in the 1930s as an exceptionally unconventional interpreter of Hegel. On Monday afternoons at Paris’s École Pratique des Hautes Études, he lectured before leading figures of the French intellectual world. Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, Michel Leiris and, at times, André Breton came to hear his improvisations on desire and recognition, work and death. Kojève spoke fluent French in a deep voice, marked by a strong Russian accent.

The lectures later became famous not through an edition prepared by Kojève, but through the work of poet Raymond Queneau, which Kojève reviewed. In a concluding footnote, he argued that after the end of history people would lose all freedom to act, but could retain everything pleasant: art, love and play. In 1946, with Europe in ruins, the strange vision could offer a measure of consolation. Kojève revised it in 1959 when a new edition of his Hegel lectures appeared, questioning whether humanity’s descent into an animal state would also reduce art to something like a bird building its nest.