Recounts Kojève’s key role in the pivotal exchange of ideas between Eastern and Western European intellectuals in the early twentieth century

This book shines critical new light on the story of Alexandre Kojève’s intellectual origins and his role in the emigration of Russian philosophy into the West in the early twentieth century. Trevor Wilson illustrates how Kojève, at once adversarial to the insular communities of émigré philosophy and yet dependent on their networks and ideas for professional success, navigated the specters of the Russian tradition in pursuit of an autonomous self-definition as a philosopher and intellectual.

Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy analyzes the philosopher’s complicated relationship to the interwar diaspora and the complex role played by the Russian tradition in his intellectual formation. Wilson examines Kojève’s early writings in the émigré press on Russian religious philosophy, Soviet politics, and Eurasianism and argues for their enduring relevance for understanding Kojève in his mature period. Crucially, he contextualizes Kojève’s famed seminars on Hegel and examines how Kojève’s thought became embedded in the politics of the Cold War. Based on newly transcribed and translated archival material, he highlights a previously unacknowledged, transnational exchange of ideas between Eastern and Western European intellectuals and shows how it played a pivotal role in twentieth-century intellectual history—and its legacy in the twenty-first.

Russian philosophy begins through the impregnation of the ancient Byzantine tradition of Old Russia by the Western thought of the French Enlightenment, and then by German Romanticism. The first original Russian philosopher, Gregory Skovoroda, the "Russian Socrates," was followed by the early philosophy of history and culture, Alexander Radishchev and Peter Chasadayev. The fateful break of Russian philosophiers into two opposed camps of the Slavophiles was accomplished by the middle of the nineteenth century.

The second half of the nineteenth century in Russian philosophy sees it more or less definitive triumph of Westernizing currents over the Slavophiles. There is no doubt that both Nihilism and Populism as successive schools of Russian philosophy, are the authentic progeny of the senior Westernizers—though in the development of their philosophical doctrine they owe much less to German Romanticism than to British utilitarianism, French positivism, and the socialism of left-wing Hegelians. Toward the end of the century these philosopher come increasingly under the influence of the scientific socialism of Karl Marx.