The works of the man who taught Paris to read Hegel and then spent twenty-three years administering the end of history.
The problem this bibliography solves
Kojève’s reputation outran his bibliography. In his lifetime he published one book of consequence, the Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (1947) — and he did not write it in the ordinary sense: Raymond Queneau assembled it from students’ notes and Kojève’s own lecture texts. He also issued the first volume of a history of pagan philosophy, a handful of reviews and polemics, and a celebrated exchange with Leo Strauss. Almost everything else appeared after his death on 4 June 1968: the Kant book, the ontology, the theory of right, the treatise on authority, the atheism manuscript, and, as late as 2025, the Stalinist Sophia.
Three dates are therefore routinely confused in writing about him: the date of composition, the date of first publication, and the date of translation. Many of these texts were written in one language, printed decades later in a second, and translated into a third. Standard reference sources, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy among them, carry datings that collapse the three — a 1931 date for the 1926 Solovyov thesis, a 1991 date for the 1990 Le Concept, le Temps et le Discours — and the errors have spread into the secondary literature.
This bibliography keeps the three dates separate and arranges the works by era of composition, because Kojève’s thought is best read as a sequence of situations: Russian émigré, Paris seminarian, wartime manuscript-writer, Gaullist-era trade negotiator. Each entry gives composition, first publication and principal translation; a synopsis; a Standing assessment; and a rating. Items marked † carry a detail not confirmed against a primary catalogue at the time of writing.
The analysis built on this record — Kojève against Fukuyama, Deneen and Gray, and against the present crisis of the liberal order — runs separately as The Last Man Gets Bored.
I. Formation: Moscow, Heidelberg, Berlin (1920–1931)
1. Die religiöse Philosophie Wladimir Solowjews
- Composed: 1924–1925; final typescript dated 1925 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fonds Kojève)
- Defended: Heidelberg, 1926, under Karl Jaspers
- First printed: excerpt as “Die Geschichtsphilosophie Wladimir Solowjews,” Der russische Gedanke (Bonn), 1930
- French reworking: “La métaphysique religieuse de Vladimir Soloviev,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses, 1934–1935 (two instalments)
- English: The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov, trans. Ilya Merlin and Mikhail Pozdniakov (Palgrave Pivot, 2018)
The doctoral thesis on Russia’s great theorist of “Godmanhood” (Bogochelovechestvo), of Sophia, and of a universal theocratic end of history. Kojève reconstructs Solovyov’s attempt to reconcile Orthodox mysticism with German idealism, and marks where the synthesis breaks.
Standing. Long dismissed as juvenilia, now read as the matrix of everything that followed. The “universal and homogeneous state” is Solovyov’s divine-human eschaton with God removed; the self-divinization of man is Godmanhood inverted. The special issue of Studies in East European Thought on Kojève and Russian philosophy (vol. 76, no. 1, March 2024; several articles online in 2023) settles the point. The common dating to 1931 confuses the defence (1926) and the excerpt’s printing (1930) with the composition of Atheism.
Rating: ★★★★☆ — indispensable for the Russian genealogy; not an entry point.
2. Atheism (Ateizm)
- Composed: 1931, in Russian; unfinished
- First published: L’Athéisme, trans. Nina Ivanoff, ed. Laurent Bibard (Gallimard, Bibliothèque de philosophie, 1998)
- English: Atheism, trans. Jeff Love (Columbia University Press, 2018)
A phenomenological treatise on finitude: being-in-the-world, death, suicide, and the impossibility of any standpoint outside the given. The theist, Kojève argues, posits a “something” beyond the world that the atheist recognises as nothing.
Standing. Written four years after Being and Time and before the Hegel seminar, it shows Kojève arriving at Heidegger’s finitude before he arrived at Hegel’s history. It is the strongest single argument against reading him as a mere commentator. Unfinished, and not to be taken for his mature position.
Rating: ★★★★☆ — essential for the philosophical, as against the political, Kojève.
II. The Paris Seminar (1932–1939)
3. “Les peintures concrètes de Kandinsky” †
- Composed: 1936
- First published: posthumously, in a French periodical†
- English: in Lisa Florman, Concerning the Spiritual — and the Concrete — in Kandinsky’s Art (Stanford University Press, 2014); also Kandinsky: Incarnating Beauty, intro. Boris Groys (David Zwirner Books, 2022)
An essay on the “concrete” — not “abstract” — paintings of his uncle, Wassily Kandinsky. Non-representational art, Kojève argues, creates beauty rather than copying it; each canvas is a universe as real as nature.
Standing. A small, luminous text, and the only place Kojève treats art as a site of creation rather than post-historical play. Read it against the 1962 “snobbery” note, where post-historical art becomes empty form.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
4. Identité et réalité dans le « Dictionnaire » de Pierre Bayle
- Composed: from a course given 12 November 1936 – 24 May 1937
- First published: Gallimard, 2010, ed. Marco Filoni
- English: none
A study of Bayle’s scepticism and tolerance, intended for a socialist publishing series, written with the confessional wars as an explicit analogy to the fascist–communist confrontation of the 1930s. What the Protestant–Catholic opposition was for Bayle, Kojève told Strauss, the fascism–communism opposition was for the present.
Standing. The earliest extended evidence of Kojève thinking about political coexistence among incompatible worldviews — a precursor, read now, to the modus-vivendi problem John Gray would later press against the universalists.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
5. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel
- Composed: lectures at the École pratique des hautes études, 1933–1939, taking over Alexandre Koyré’s seminar
- First published: Gallimard, 1947, ed. Raymond Queneau
- Second edition: Gallimard, 1962, with the “Note to the Second Edition” (written 1959) on Japanese “snobbery” and the “Japanization” of the West
- English: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Basic Books, 1969; paperback Cornell University Press, 1980). Abridged — roughly a third of the French.
The line-by-line seminar on the Phenomenology of Spirit, built around desire, the struggle for recognition, the master–slave dialectic, labour, death and the end of history. Its auditors — Queneau, Bataille, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Aron, Breton, Corbin, Weil, Fessard, Klossowski — were the generation that made postwar French thought.
Standing. One of the most influential philosophy books of the century in France, and the hidden source of Lacan, Bataille and, by way of Bloom, Fukuyama. It is unreliable as a guide to Hegel and means to be; Kojève said openly that he was doing philosophical propaganda through Hegel. Anglophone readers should know that the Bloom edition omits most of the lectures, including much of the treatment of Christianity and of “Absolute Knowledge.” Anyone citing “Kojève on Hegel” from the English alone is citing a selection made by a Straussian editor.
Rating: ★★★★★ — the starting point. Read the long footnote on the end of history and its 1962 addendum.
6. “Immanence et transcendance”
- Composed: 1939
- English: “Immanence and Transcendence,” trans. and intro. Isabel Jacobs and Kyle Moore, Continental Philosophy Review 58, no. 4 (2025)
A critique of Father Grégoire’s causal proof of God’s existence; atheism as a positive philosophical position rather than a bare denial.
Standing. A short bridge between Atheism (1931) and the close of the Hegel seminar. For specialists, but it confirms that the atheism theme ran through the whole decade.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
III. The War Manuscripts (1940–1945)
7. Sophia, vol. I: Philosophie et phénoménologie
- Composed: November 1940 – June 1941, in Russian, under the Occupation
- First published: Gallimard, April 2025, ed. and trans. Nicolas Rambert
- Companion study: Nicolas Rambert, La conscience de Staline (2025)
- English: none
A vast system placing Hegelian wisdom explicitly “under the sign of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism.”
Standing. The most important posthumous publication since the Esquisse, and still largely unread outside France. It ends the polite fiction that Kojève’s “Stalinism” was only a dinner-table provocation. Any assessment written before 2025 is provisional on this point.
Rating: ★★★★☆ — essential for specialists; the reception has barely begun.
8. La notion de l’autorité
- Composed: 1942
- First published: Gallimard, 2004, ed. François Terré
- English: The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation), trans. Hager Weslati (Verso, 2014)
A typology of four pure forms of authority — Father, Master, Leader and Judge — keyed respectively to scholastic, Hegelian, Aristotelian and Platonic theories, closing on an analysis of Pétain’s authority.
Standing. The best short introduction to Kojève’s political philosophy, and the corrective to the charge that he reduced politics to the struggle for recognition. Authority, for Kojève, is precisely non-coercive obedience. The Vichy chapter is uncomfortable, and is to be read rather than skipped.
Rating: ★★★★☆
9. Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit
- Composed: 1943
- First published: Gallimard, Bibliothèque des idées, 1981 (catalogue date; some Gallimard records give 1982); reissued Tel, 2007
- English: Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, trans. Bryan-Paul Frost and Robert Howse (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000)
A theory of law built on the intervention of an “impartial and disinterested third.” It traces how an aristocratic justice of equality and a bourgeois justice of equivalence combine into a “justice of equity” — the juridical content of the universal and homogeneous state.
Standing. Kojève’s most systematic political work and the institutional middle term between the Hegel lectures and his career as a negotiator. Critics who say he lacked a political economy have not read it. Its weakness is that it treats one historical development of European law as the necessary realisation of freedom.
Rating: ★★★★★
10. “L’Empire latin: Esquisse d’une doctrine de la politique française”
- Composed: dated 27 August 1945; a memorandum circulated in de Gaulle’s circle
- First published: La Règle du jeu 1 (May 1990)
- English: “Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy,” trans. Erik de Vries, Policy Review 126 (August–September 2004), with Robert Howse, “Kojève’s Latin Empire: From the ‘End of History’ to the ‘Epoch of Empires’”
The nation-state is finished; France should lead a Latin, Catholic, Mediterranean bloc with Spain and Italy, a third force between the Anglo-Saxon and Slavo-Soviet empires.
Standing. Remarkably prescient about a world of blocs and civilisational states, and the text that most clearly links Kojève to present-day multipolarity. Its Catholic-imperial framing and its silence on the colonised peoples of the “Latin” sphere are to be prosecuted, not admired.
Rating: ★★★★☆
IV. The Philosopher-Administrator (1946–1968)
11. “Hegel, Marx et le christianisme”
- First published: Critique 3–4 (1946)
- English: “Hegel, Marx and Christianity,” trans. Hilail Gildin, Interpretation 1, no. 1 (1970)
A concise statement of the secularisation thesis: Hegel’s philosophy is a theology made anthropological, and the struggle over Hegel’s legacy is a struggle over whether man takes God’s place.
Standing. The best ten pages for understanding why the end of history takes eschatological form. The 1970 date often given is the translation, not the original.
Rating: ★★★★☆
12. “Tyrannie et sagesse”
- Precursor: “L’action politique des philosophes,” Critique 41–42 (1950)†
- First published (expanded): in Leo Strauss, De la tyrannie (Gallimard, 1954), followed by Strauss’s “Mise au point”
- English: in Strauss, On Tyranny (Free Press of Glencoe, 1963); definitive edition, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, including the Strauss–Kojève correspondence (Free Press, 1991; University of Chicago Press, 2000; corrected and expanded edition, 2013)
- Critical edition of the French: ed. Emmanuel Patard, in Timothy W. Burns and Bryan-Paul Frost, eds., Philosophy, History, and Tyranny: Reexamining the Debate between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève (SUNY Press, 2016)
Kojève’s reply to Strauss on Xenophon’s Hiero: philosophers must act in history, and the universal and homogeneous state reconciles wisdom and power.
Standing. The most consequential debate in twentieth-century political philosophy. Read it in the Gourevitch–Roth edition with the letters, never in excerpt. Strauss’s reply — that the universal state would be the end of philosophy, and a tyranny — has aged better than Kojève’s thesis; Kojève’s question, what philosophy owes to political reality, has aged better than Strauss’s answer.
Rating: ★★★★★
13. Kant
- Composed: c. 1952
- First published: Gallimard, Bibliothèque des idées, 1973
- English: none
Kant as the philosopher who came closest to wisdom and then stopped, because he refused to identify the Concept with Time.
Standing. A specialist text, best read after the Hegel lectures and alongside Le Concept. It matters because it shows Kojève’s project was epistemological and systematic, not only political.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
14. Minor essays and reviews (selection)
- “Les romans de la sagesse,” Critique (1952), on Queneau’s novels as post-historical wisdom†
- “Le dernier monde nouveau,” Critique (1956), on Françoise Sagan†
- “Note on Hegel and Heidegger,” English publication 2022†
- “Structure et histoire de la philosophie,” Philosophie 160 (2024)
- “On Creative Freedom and the Soul’s Fabrication,” Studies in East European Thought 76, no. 1 (2024)
Standing. The Queneau and Sagan reviews are where the theory of post-historical life becomes literary criticism. Short, witty and underused.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
15. “Kolonialismus in europäischer Sicht”
- Delivered: lecture, 16 January 1957, Rhein-Ruhr-Klub, Düsseldorf, at Carl Schmitt’s invitation
- First published: Schmittiana 6 (2001), ed. Piet Tommissen
- English: “Colonialism from a European Perspective,” trans. Erik de Vries, Interpretation 29, no. 1 (Fall 2001), with the Kojève–Schmitt correspondence
Capitalism, Kojève argues, survived by an internal redistribution Marx did not foresee; Europe should now practise a “giving colonialism” that reinvests surplus in the developing world.
Standing. The bridge between the philosophy and the ministry — a theory of trade preference for the Global South, delivered to Schmitt’s circle. Its paternalism is plain; its anticipation of the UNCTAD agenda is real. The 2001 date is the publication; the lecture is from 1957.
Rating: ★★★★☆
16. “Moscou, août 1957” †
- Composed: 1957, after a trip to the USSR; an internal note circulated in the French Ministry of Economy and Finance, not intended for publication
- First published: in French, 1993†
- English: “Moscow: August, 1957,” with Isabel Jacobs, “Introduction to Alexandre Kojève’s ‘Moscow, August 1957,’” Studies in East European Thought 76, no. 1 (2024): 117–122
Soviet Russia as a society of “poor Americans”: the USSR and the US converge, and the true end-of-history question lies elsewhere.
Standing. The administrator testing the philosophy against the facts, and finding the Cold War rivals to be two variants of the same post-history.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
17. “The Emperor Julian and His Art of Writing”
- First published: in Joseph Cropsey, ed., Ancients and Moderns: Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss (Basic Books, 1964); written in English
An exercise in Straussian esoteric reading applied to Julian the Apostate’s satire.
Standing. Part homage and part parody, and an argument that writing between the lines is a political act.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
18. Essai d’une histoire raisonnée de la philosophie païenne
- First published: Gallimard, Bibliothèque des idées. Vol. I, Les Présocratiques (1968 — the only volume published in his lifetime); Vol. II, Platon — Aristote (1972); Vol. III, La philosophie hellénistique — Les néo-platoniciens (1973)
- English: none
The history of pagan philosophy as a “reasoned” progression toward Hegelian wisdom.
Standing. Little read, and partly an introduction to the system that Le Concept was meant to open. A quarry, not a book.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
19. Le Concept, le Temps et le Discours: Introduction au Système du savoir
- Composed: 1950s; a variant of the introduction to the Essai
- First published: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de philosophie, 1990, ed. Bernard Hesbois
- English: The Concept, Time, and Discourse, trans. Robert B. Williamson (St. Augustine’s Press)†
Kojève’s fullest statement of his ontology: the story of philosophy as a passage from Parmenides’ ineffable One, through Plato’s discourse about the eternal, to Hegel’s identification of the Concept with Time.
Standing. The serious answer to whether the end of history entails the end of philosophy. The hardest book here, and the one that most repays effort. The date 1991, found in some reference works, is wrong.
Rating: ★★★★☆
V. Secondary Literature
Biographies
- Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève: la philosophie, l’État, la fin de l’histoire (Grasset, 1990). The first full life, with interviews; indispensable for the ministry years, though its method has been called hagiographic. ★★★☆☆
- Marco Filoni, Il filosofo della domenica (Bollati Boringhieri, 2008; French Le Philosophe du dimanche, Gallimard, 2010; revised as L’azione politica del filosofo, 2021; English The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève, 2025†). Archive-based, and the scholarly standard. ★★★★★
- James H. Nichols, Alexandre Kojève: Wisdom at the End of History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). A lucid introduction with a Straussian inflection. ★★★★☆
- Jeff Love, The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève (Columbia University Press, 2018). A bold rereading through the Russian roots; reviewers fault it for flattening his development. ★★★★☆
- Boris Groys, Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography (Verso, 2025; 176 pp.). Short, brilliant, and often more Groys than Kojève — less a biography than an essay. ★★★☆☆
Interpretation and critique
- Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia, 1987; new ed. 1999). ★★★★☆
- Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Cornell, 1988). ★★★★☆
- Shadia B. Drury, Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics (St. Martin’s, 1994). Hostile, useful as prosecution, unreliable as exegesis. ★★★☆☆
- Robert B. Pippin, “Being, Time, and Politics: The Strauss–Kojève Debate,” History and Theory 32, no. 2 (1993). ★★★★☆
- Boris Groys, “Three Ends of History: Hegel, Solovyov, Kojève,” in Introduction to Antiphilosophy (Verso, 2012); “Romantic Bureaucracy,” Radical Philosophy 196 (2016). ★★★★☆
- Timothy W. Burns and Bryan-Paul Frost, eds., Philosophy, History, and Tyranny (SUNY Press, 2016). ★★★★☆
- Isabel Jacobs and Trevor Wilson, eds., “Alexandre Kojève and Russian Philosophy,” special issue, Studies in East European Thought 76, no. 1 (2024). ★★★★★
- Kyle Moore and Isabel Jacobs, eds., “Alexandre Kojève — Attempt at an Update,” Continental Philosophy Review 58, no. 4 (2025). ★★★★☆
Recognition theory: the necessary corrective
- Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung (Suhrkamp, 1992); The Struggle for Recognition, trans. Joel Anderson (Polity, 1995). ★★★★★
- Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (University of California Press, 1997). ★★★★☆
- Robert B. Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton, 2011). ★★★★☆
Reception: the end of history
- Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989); The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992); In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026). See the companion reading of the whole Fukuyama corpus. ★★★★☆
- Perry Anderson, “The Ends of History,” in A Zone of Engagement (Verso, 1992). ★★★★☆
A note on the espionage allegation
On 16 September 1999 Le Monde reported an unreleased 1982–83 memo from the DST, France’s domestic counter-intelligence service, describing Kojève as having worked for Soviet intelligence for some thirty years. The memo’s own categories range from “contact” through “agent of influence” to “spy.” It has never been published, the evidence is secondhand, and the charge remains unproven. It is not a bibliographical fact, and is noted here only so that readers who meet it elsewhere know its status: write “alleged,” and do not let the allegation stand in for an argument about the work.
Further reading and sources
- Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fonds Alexandre Kojève, finding aid (archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr)
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Alexandre Kojève” — a useful overview, but it carries several of the dating errors corrected above
- Gallimard catalogue entries for the Esquisse, La notion de l’autorité and Sophia I (gallimard.fr)
- Studies in East European Thought 76, no. 1 (2024), special issue on Kojève and Russian philosophy (Springer)
- Continental Philosophy Review 58, no. 4 (2025), “Alexandre Kojève — Attempt at an Update” (Springer)
- Hager Weslati, “Kojève’s Letter to Stalin,” Radical Philosophy (2014)
- Christoph Kletzer, “Alexandre Kojève’s Hegelianism and the Formation of Europe,” Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies 8 (2006)
Star legend: ★★★★★ essential, start here · ★★★★☆ major, read early · ★★★☆☆ important for a fuller picture · ★★☆☆☆ for specialists · ★☆☆☆☆ marginal † detail not confirmed against a primary catalogue at time of writing.