Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy by TrevorWilson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2025. ix + 198 pp. $100.00. ISBN 978‐0‐8101‐4780‐5

The book is a study not only of Alexandre Kojève’s philosophical development and its sources but also of his remarkable influence on twentieth-century intellectual history. Born in Moscow in 1902 as Aleksandr Kozhevnikov, he left Russia in 1920, moved to France in 1926, and there sought to transcend his Russian roots through European philosophy; “Kojève” symbolizes his new self-identity. He is best known for his interpretation of Hegel, advanced in his seminars at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris from 1933 to 1939. His understanding of Hegel turns on the famous master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which he read as centralizing the human desire for recognition, for prestige, and even for superiority. According to Kojève, the struggle for recognition, together with the Marxian emphasis on labor as humanization, drives the historical process. History ends with the satisfaction of desire and the achievement of full humanization through labor. By the time of his death in 1968, Kojève had satisfied his own desire for recognition; he had become an influential European thinker. In 1989 his fame spread beyond philosophical circles when the political philosopher and US State Department official Francis Fukuyama published a widely read essay, “The End of History?,” which inserted Kojève’s ideas into Cold War cultural politics. While Wilson refrains from explicit judgments about his subject, it is clear that Kojève’s ideas are not innocuous. They involve not only the “end of history” but also the “end of man” and constitute another example of the degeneration of atheistic humanism into nihilism and the celebration of violence. Wilson’s book is a rich and complex history that weaves together several different contexts: Hegelianism in its Russian and European legacies, Russian philosophical and religious thought from the 1830s to the 1930s, Russian émigré culture in interwar Europe, French thought of the interwar and postwar periods, and Cold War politics and ideologies. Wilson handles all these contexts expertly and deftly. One of his main tasks is to show how Russian philosophy was transformed by the experience of revolution and emigration, taking Kojève as perhaps the most emblematic example of this transformation. The book’s titular phrase, “the specters of Russian philosophy,” identifies Wilson’s main theme: how Russian philosophy loomed over and haunted Kojève’s lifelong project to construct a secular, universal philosophical synthesis. This synthesis took the form of Kojève’s mature philosophical atheism and Hegelianism, but it harkened back to both Russian left-wing Hegelianism and Russian religious philosophy. Hegel had a decisive role in nineteenth-century Russian thought and, through Marxism, in Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution. Wilson knows this philosophical history well. Beginning in the 1840s, left-wing Hegelianism (Ludwig Feuerbach in particular) formed the ideology of the Westernizers (Bakunin, Belinsky, Herzen). By the 1860s it had devolved into the materialism, atheism, and nihilism of the revolutionary intelligentsia. By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, this worldview came under withering critique by Vladimir Soloviev and other Russian idealists and religious philosophers, but this did not prevent the Bolsheviks from adopting it and imposing it on the country after they took power. Kojève saw his task as overcoming the dichotomy between Russian atheistic and religious philosophies, though he regarded an atheistic anthropological approach as the only legitimate philosophical one. In many respects Kojève was a typical Feuerbachian left-wing Hegelian, but he attempted to take account of Soloviev and the main ideas of Russian religious thought. In 1920 he emigrated from Russia to Germany. In Heidelberg he wrote his master’s thesis on Soloviev under Karl Jaspers. Wilson shows for the first time in detail how Kojève, in his essay Atheism (written in Russian in 1930 but not published until 1998), developed an atheistic philosophical anthropology out of his critique of Soloviev’s ideas of the absolute, Godmanhood, and Sophia (divine wisdom). To put it somewhat more bluntly than Wilson does, Kojève’s critique is facile and amounts to alleging that Soloviev’s theological ideas are contradictory, therefore the solution is atheism. But Kojève has in mind a Feuerbachian atheism or “anthropotheism” that attributes a divine-like status to humanity, once humanity is liberated from the oppressive structures of theistic religion. He maintains that humanity’s acceptance of its finite existence (there is no God and thus no human fulfillment in the divine) is true Wisdom, realized at the end of history. Kojève had an important role in the twentieth-century revival of Hegelianism in European philosophy. The history of Hegelianism is as difficult as it sounds and Wilson presents it masterfully. Hegel’s early works were theological and emphasized that spiritual love was the only way to unify self and other, man and God. Kojève knew these works, together with Russian works on the metaphysics of love which made the same point, but in his Paris seminars he argued that Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, moved from theology to logic (or dialectic) and replaced desire as love with the desire for recognition. Thanks to Kojève, the Feuerbachian (“left-wing”) interpretation of Hegel was restored to ascendency and theological (“right-wing”) interpretations were demoted. Building on the conclusions he reached in Atheism but now authorizing them with his Hegel interpretation, he claimed that the satisfaction of the desire for recognition marks the end of history and the coming of the satisfied Citizen and Sage. Wisdom and understanding replace desire and struggle. Kojève identified this final state of satisfaction and understanding with the Soviet Union under Stalin. Trevor Wilson has written a highly perceptive and informed study which situates Kojève in multiple complex historical contexts. It is an important and original contribution to the study of Russian thought. Wilson characterizes Kojève’s anthropology as negative because in it humanity freely embraces its mortal finitude and recognizes nothing apart from itself. This leads ultimately to its own self-destruction. Wilson quotes Michel Foucault from The Order of Things (1966) to make this point: “in our day…it is not so much the absence or the death of God that is affirmed as the end of man” (p. 40). Though Wilson does not explicitly say so, it is a dark vision.