Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography

by Boris Groys

Unravelleing the mystery of philsopher Alexandre Kojève

Boris Groys's new book is an intellectual biography of the fascinating and mysterious figure of Alexandre Kojève, discussing his involvement with Hegel’s dialectics, his idea of communism and his vision of a universal empire as the end of history. Kojève proclaimed himself to be a Stalinist and at the same time was one of the creators of the European Union. His anthropology that describes humans as always negating their nature and their identity, and always desiring to be different from what they are, is highly political. It explains why humans can never be fully satisfied by a political system based on their allegedly “natural” rights.

Genres: Philosophy

176 pages, Paperback

Published November 11, 2025

About the author

Boris Efimovich Groys (born 19 March 1947) is an art critic, media theorist, and philosopher. He is currently a Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and Senior Research Fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. He has been a professor of Aesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and an internationally acclaimed Professor at a number of universities in the United States and Europe, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California and the Courtauld Institute of Art London.

Reviews

[frecklereads · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as an article because I sadly cannot find the full book anywhere as an e-book.

What little I read was perfect to capture the general idea and this is a concept he has proposed that is very interesting regarding human nature. definetly something one can expand on for themselves.

[Martin]

Not sure what the academic consensus would be but I, as someone who hasn't yet read Kojeve, found this to be a clearly explicated outline of Kojeve's series of beliefs, influences, and evolution as a thinker. And having seen Kojeve bandied about online for quite some time, and having read Fukuyama's End of History, this felt like the right level of depth and understanding of the architecture of this particular kind of Hegelian-ish thinking for me, within its particular historical or biographical contexts.