Fukuyama attends a conference during the first
day of the 2013 Economic Forum in Aix-en-
Provence (AFP/Getty)The last is the fact of human development that underpins a Hegelian understanding of history; a directional
process that reconciles contradictions to culminate in the realisation of an absolute truth; the ideal state of
human freedom through Consciousness.
It is important to note that Hegel does not himself explicitly speak of an “end state”, only a direction. This
directionalism is the Geist, or spirit, of history, which Hegel believes can inhabit the great movers of
history. One such great man was Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Hegel witnessed after his victory over the
Prussians at Jena-Auerstedt in 1806. The philosopher wrote to his friend, Friedrich Niethammer, that he
witnessed “the spirit of history on horseback”, as he believed that Napoleon incarnated the progress of the
values of Enlightenment and the revelation of the absolute truth, against monarchical tyranny, embodied by
Prussia. In his Lectures at Jena, Hegel declared triumphantly: “We find ourselves in an important epoch, in
a fermentation, in which Spirit has made a leap forward, has gone beyond its previous concrete form and
acquired a new one. The whole mass of ideas and concepts that have been current until now, the very bonds
of the world, are dissolved and collapsing into themselves like a vision in a dream.”
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) (Getty)Kojève shared this view. He taught a seminar on Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit from 1933 to 1939 at the École Pratique
des Hautes Études in Paris. Although Kojève himself remains
relatively unknown outside of Paris’s Left Bank, his lectures
were attended by influential intellectuals from European
philosophical and political modernism, including Hannah
Arendt, Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, André Breton,
Jacques Lacan, Raymond Aron, Jean Hyppolite, Victor
Gourevitch and Éric Weil.
New evidence from Soviet archives suggests Kojève might also
have been a Soviet asset during his academic life, which adds to
the veneer of mysterious radicalism surrounding his
scholarship. His interpretation of Hegelian historicism
essentially forms the basis of Fukuyama’s “End of History”
thesis.
Kojève is notorious for his flippant statement that the empirical
end of History was the battle of Jena-Auerstedt, which he says
marked the beginning of the universalisation of the
Enlightenment against tyranny. Writing in 1958, he glosses over