A surreal maze

Alexandre Kojève

Shadia Drury has written two books on Leo Strauss and the Straussians, "The political ideas of Leo Strauss" and "Leo Strauss and the American right". To all intents and purposes, "Alexandre Kojève: The roots of postmodern politics" also deals with Strauss and his followers. This time, however, Drury takes us on a long detour through the maze of continental philosophy, existentialism and postmodernism in particular. Why? Because she believes that Strauss, despite his vaunted anti-modernism and value conservatism, wasn't much different. And yes, Drury interprets existentialism and postmodernism in the worst possible manner. Essentially, their spokesmen are nihilists whose ideas lead to a celebration of gratuitous violence, terrorism and crime. It's not a co-incidence, Drury believes, that so many continental philosophers embraced Stalinism or Nazism.

In the centre of the labyrinthine web, Drury finds Alexandre Kojève, a Russian émigré who spend most of his life in France and eventually became an important French government official. He was one of the architects behind the EEC and the GATT. Kojève's philosophy turns out to be an idiosyncratic blend of Marx, Heidegger and Nietzsche superimposed on Hegel. Despite his émigré status, Kojève was something of a Stalinist as well. He nevertheless believed that the West would triumph in the Cold War. Over time, Kojève began to see the inevitable triumph of a consumerist mass society as something tragic and negative. It was "the end of history" and the triumph of Nietzsche's "last man". This is the connection with postmodernism.

However, there is also an unexpected connection to Leo Strauss, despite the fact that Strauss and Kojève were seemingly very different and even argued against each other. Strauss sent some of his students to France to study with Kojève, including his star student Alan Bloom who apparently spent long hours discussing with the French philsopher at his government office in Paris. Bloom subsequently edited some of Kojève's works in English. To Drury, Bloom is the arch-nihilist of the Straussian crowd. (For more on Bloom, see Anne Norton's gossipy but revealing "Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire".) Yet another trail leads to Francis Fukuyama, whose ideas about the end of history and the (boring) hegemony of liberal democracy are really a blend of Kojève's strange reading of Hegel and...Leo Strauss!

Drury's book can be a hard read if you aren't already interested in philosophy, and know about some of the philosophers discussed. Apart from those already mentioned, Drury also takes on Foucault, Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Sartre and others. Personally, I had never heard of Kojève before picking up this book. Nor did I know that Fukuyama nominally based his thesis on Hegel.

But then, not even the Ashtar Command can be all-knowing, right?

What I found most intriguing (and exasperating) with this volume is the sheer quantity of bunk put forward in the name of "philosophy" during the 20th century. Socrates was a peaceful man, but he would probably force many of these sophists to drink hemlock! With apologies to Richard Dawkins: Philosophy, is that even a subject? What evidence is there for the bizarre speculations of Kojève, Foucault, Bloom and others? None I can think of.

"Alexandre Kojève: The roots of postmodern politics" exposes a certain kind of contemporary philosophy for what it is: a labyrinthine, surreal maze...leading nowhere.