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Alexandre Kojčve, KGB spy
Ideas have consequences. We suppose that
is one lesson of the recent revelation by
the French secret service that the Russian-born
French philosopher and civil servant Alexandre
Kojčve was a Soviet agent for some thirty
years. It would be difficult to overstate
Kojčve’s eminence in the pantheon of twentieth-century
French intellectuals. Daniel Johnson, who
reported the story in the London Daily Telegraph,
noted that “Kojčve’s subterranean influence
is ubiquitous. His ideas echo around our
political arena. Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end
of history’ is recycled Kojčve. So is Tony
Blair’s vision of a post-conservative, post-national,
post-political, post-historical Europe.”
In intellectual and cultural terms, Kojčve’s
influence is even more extensive. Born Alexander
Kochevnikoff in Moscow in 1902, Kojčve left
Russia in 1920, going first to Poland and
then to Germany, where he encountered two
life-changing personalities: his uncle Wassily
Kandinsky, who became a close friend, and
the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, which seduced
him utterly. In 1926, Kojčve moved to Paris,
changed his name, and became a French citizen.
In 1933, he embarked on what is probably
the most famous philosophical seminar of
the century: his Marxist-inspired, line-by-line
dissection of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
His students included André Breton, Georges
Bataille, Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Eric Weil, Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Queneau:
the good, the bad, and the ugly of twentieth-century
French intellectual life. Among Kojčve’s
later admirers was Allan Bloom, who described
him as “the most brilliant man I ever met.”
Aron thought him “more intelligent than Sartre.”
Recalling Kojčve’s seminar in his Mémoires
(1983), Aron wrote that “the subject was
both world history and the Phenomenology.
The latter shed light on the former. Everything
took on meaning. Even those who were suspicious
of historical providence … did not resist
the magician: at the moment, the intelligibility
he conferred on time and events was enough
of a proof.” It is difficult for the uninitiated—namely,
anyone who did not come under the spell of
Kojčve’s personality—to understand his influence.
The printed version of his lectures —Introduction
to the Reading of Hegel (1968) —is almost
comical in its fuzzy megalomania. (Though
in this, it has to be admitted, itclosely
resembles the teachings of Hegel himself.)
The book is full of statements like this:
“there is History because there is Philosophy
and in order that there may be Philosophy.”
Although like Hegel he professed to believe
that history—or at any rate History —came
to an end with the Phenomenology, in 1945
Kojčve nevertheless decided to join the Ministry
of Economy and Finance because, Aron reports,
he “wanted to know how it [history] happened.
… Like Plato, he wanted to advise a tyrant,
in the shadows exercise influence over the
visible actors.” For more than twenty years,
Kojčve (who died in 1968) succeeded in just
that. He was by all accounts a brilliant
negotiator. Dreaming of a resurgent Latin
Empire, he was instrumental behind the scenes
in the formation of the European Economic
Community and encouraged de Gaulle to block
British membership. If nothing else, Kojčve
was a living testimony to the mesmerizing
power of personality. Even Aron was taken
in by Kojčve. Although he noted that in
1938–1939, Kojčve referred to himself as
a “strict Stalinist,” Aron believed that
Kojčve later abandoned his Stalinism for
the sake of serving France. “Did there,”
Aron asks, “remain in him a kind of Russian
patriotism, hidden and rationalized? I don’t
doubt it, although there is no question that
he served the French nation, freely chosen,
with unshakable loyalty.”
It turns out, though, that Kojčve was unshakably
loyal only to the Hegelian ideal of the World
Historical Personality. The young Hegel idolized
Napoleon when he was on his way up, referring
to him in 1806 as diese Weltseele—“this world
soul.” Stalin was Kojčve’s Napoleon: a tyrant
through whom the forces of history seemed
to converge. The French government has not
yet released Kojčve’s dossier, so it is not
clear how much damage he did in his decades
of espionage. He was the confidante of de
Gaulle and Giscard d’Estaing, and doubtless
had access to numerous French secrets. As
Mr. Johnson points out, this “miraculous
mandarin turns out to have been a malevolent
mole. Nobody of his eminence has ever been
exposed as a traitor on this scale before.”
The French, though they have exposed Kojčve,
have yet to condemn him. Perhaps that is
a sign of the lingering influence of his
ideas. If it is true that we are at the dawn
of the “post-historical” era, then working
as a spy for the greatest tyranny of the
twentieth century might be able to be dialectically
interpreted as a “progressive” gesture. Then,
too, many of the people Kojčve worked with
are still alive. Honest condemnation might
be embarrassing or worse. And after all,
Kojčve was universally admired for his beguiling
brilliance. For our part, the saga of Alexandre
Kojčve’s treachery reminds us of Walter Bagehot’s
comment on Ruskin’s harebrained economic
ideas: “In the faculty of writing nonsense,
stupidity is no match for genius.” Bagehot
might have added: In the faculty of perpetrating
evil, common sense is no match for the Hegelian
dialectic.
From The New Criterion Vol. 18, No. 3, November
1999
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Evans Experientialism 
