The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation)
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Citation: Brandom, E. (2015). The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation). German Studies Review, 38(2), 438-439. Retrieved from <Go to ISI>://WOS:000355374300027
In the 1930s, Alexandre Koyré gave a regular seminar on G.W.F. Hegel at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Koyré was born in Russia but left as an adolescent to study with Edmund Husserl in Germany. After a few years he left in turn for Paris. In 1936, Alexandre Kojève—younger than Koyré by a decade but following a similar trajectory from Russia through German universities to Paris—took the place of his older colleague at the head of the seminar, which became a paragraph-by-paragraph reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). This seminar became legendary and remains the thing for which Kojève is best known today. Rather than enter the university, Kojève spent the postwar years working in the French ministry of foreign economic relations. He was among the technocrats responsible for setting the course of European economic integration. There is a great deal more to Kojève’s body of philosophical work than the famous seminar, a few polemical or provocative essays—such as the famous exchange with Leo Strauss (reprinted in recent Chicago editions of Strauss’s On Tyranny)—and whatever meaning one might assign to his role in building the European Union. In recent decades, Kojève’s voluminous manuscripts and papers, held at the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris, have become available to researchers. Hager Weslati, translator of the book under review here, is among a new generation of scholars busily exploiting this material.
In the 1930s, Alexandre Koyré gave a regular seminar on G.W.F. Hegel at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Koyré was born in Russia but left as an adolescent to study with Edmund Husserl in Germany. After a few years he left in turn for Paris. In 1936, Alexandre Kojève—younger than Koyré by a decade but following a similar trajectory from Russia through German universities to Paris—took the place of his older colleague at the head of the seminar, which became a paragraph-by-paragraph reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). This seminar became legendary and remains the thing for which Kojève is best known today. Rather than enter the university, Kojève spent the postwar years working in the French ministry of foreign economic relations. He was among the technocrats responsible for setting the course of European economic integration. There is a great deal more to Kojève’s body of philosophical work than the famous seminar, a few polemical or provocative essays—such as the famous exchange with Leo Strauss (reprinted in recent Chicago editions of Strauss’s On Tyranny)—and whatever meaning one might assign to his role in building the European Union. In recent decades, Kojève’s voluminous manuscripts and papers, held at the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris, have become available to researchers. Hager Weslati, translator of the book under review here, is among a new generation of scholars busily exploiting this material.
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