The Notion of Authority

By Alexandre Kojève

In The Notion of Authority, written in the 1940s in Nazi-occupied France, Alexandre Kojève uncovers the conceptual premises of four primary models of authority, examining the practical application of their derivative variations from the Enlightenment to Vichy France.

This foundational text, translated here into English for the first time, is the missing piece in any discussion of sovereignty and political authority, worthy of a place alongside the work of Weber, Arendt, Schmitt, Agamben or Dumézil.

The Notion of Authority is a short and sophisticated introduction to Kojève’s philosophy of right. It captures its author’s intellectual interests at a time when he was retiring from the career of a professional philosopher and was about to become one of the pioneers of the Common Market and the idea of the European Union.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso Books
• Release date: Aug 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781781686300

Book preview

This English-language edition first published by Verso 2014

Translation © Hager Weslati 2014

First published as La notion de l’autorité

© Éditions Gallimard 2004

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-095-7 (HBK)

eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-630-0 (US)

eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-631-7 (UK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Kojève, Alexandre, 1902-1968.

[Notion de l’autorité. English]

The notion of authority : (a brief presentation) / Alexandre Kojève; edited and introduced by François Terré; translated by Hager Weslati.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-78168-095-7 (alk. paper)

1. Authority. 2. Law–Philosophy. I. Title.

BD209.K6513 2014

303.3’6--dc23

2013047896

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Translator’s Note

Introduction to the French Edition by François Terré

PRELIMINARY REMARKS

A. Analyses

I. Phenomenological Analysis

II. Metaphysical Analysis

III. Ontological Analysis

B. Deductions

I. Political Applications

II. Ethical Applications

III. Psychological Applications

APPENDICES

1. An Analysis of the Marshal’s Authority

2. Remarks on the Révolution Nationale

Translator’s Note

The French edition of The Notion of Authority, a work that was never made public in the author’s lifetime, reproduces a note from the manuscript written at the bottom of the table of contents, omitted here in the English translation. The note reads, ‘N.B. Key issues are discussed in A, I and A, II. See also B, I.’ Strange as it sounds, this line of advice opens a window onto the author’s intentions. Firstly, The Notion of Authority was not intended for public consumption. It reads like a memorandum to an addressee involved in the practical running of government. The Notion can, therefore, be read as a policy paper. Since the ‘man of action’ (a tyrant) is always in a hurry, it is important that the philosopher’s counsel to the politician is precise and concise (see ‘L’action politique des philosophes’ in Critique, n. 41, 1950, pp. 46– and n. 42, pp. 138–55). In Kojève’s lifetime, it is very likely that the manuscript of The Notion was shared with his acquaintances in the French government or read by some of his intellectual interlocutors. A letter dated 9 July 1942 from Henri Moysset (senior minister in the Vichy government but also close friends of Eric Weil’s family) acknowledges receipt of The Notion. It is also known for instance that Kojève dispatched a voluminous Russian manuscript to ‘Stalin and the Russian people’ in 1941 via the Soviet embassy in Paris, and that in 1945 he prepared a memorandum to Jean Filippi on French foreign policy, a version of which is best known as ‘The Latin Empire’.

Secondly, the note alerting the reader to what is interesting in the ‘book’ may also be interpreted from a philosophical angle. Since The Notion focuses on the phenomenological analysis of authority, it is nothing other than a fragment from a bigger project. Kojève’s philosophical system consists of three planes: phenomenology, energology, and ontology. He is alerting readers that his study is not conclusive, because it does not cover all three planes of his system.

Kojève’s stylistic idiosyncrasies, namely his use of capitals and italics, have been kept as found in the original French manuscript. All previous editors of Kojève’s published work, Raymond Queneau or Raymond Aron for Gallimard, Georges Bataille or Éric Weil in Critique, as well as his North American translators; they all have respected Kojève’s stylistic oddities. We saw no reason to deviate from that established tradition in the present translation. It is very likely that the use of capitals, in particular, has something to do with Kojève’s philosophical education in German universities in the mid-1920s. It is, however, quite clear that capitalized words such as ‘Authority’ or ‘State’ refer to concepts rather than to abstract words or floating signifiers with changing meanings and usage. Words like ‘Leader’, ‘Father’, ‘Judge’ or ‘Master’, do not refer to actual persons in the flesh, but to phenomenological, ontological and ‘metaphysical’ notions, whose meaning can only be deduced from Kojève’s philosophical system (Système du savoir).

More generally, I have supplied editorial notes throughout both the introduction and main text. These notes are enclosed in square brackets to indicate their provenance.

Introduction to the French Edition

François Terré

Alexandre Kojève exerted a major influence on philosophical thought, and his is a fascinating career. Originally from Russia, born in 1902, he left the land of the Soviets in 1919 or 1920 for the Berlin of Brecht and expressionism. In 1926, as things started taking a turn for the worse in the Weimar Republic, he settled in the Paris of the roaring twenties. The 1929 economic crisis, coming on top of previous bad investments, left him bankrupt. He decided to take up philosophy for a living. In the meantime, he had studied ‘the ultimate ends of the ethics of Christianity and Buddhism’ and published in 1931 an essay on ‘atheism’.¹ The lure of oriental philosophies led him to learn Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan. He defended his dissertation on Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900) at Heidelberg in 1926.

Strains on his financial means, and a good word from his friend Alexandre Koyré, whom he later succeeded in his teaching post, led to Kojève finding himself running a seminar at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Last but not least of the many philosopher–educators before him, he undertook a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on The Phenomenology of Spirit. While access to the seminar was initially limited, it subsequently attracted a number of fascinated listeners as diverse as the directions their respective careers would later take: Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Éric Weil, Robert Marjolin, Gaston Fessard, Raymond Aron, Raymond Polin, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Merleau-Ponty … even Raymond Queneau. It was under the aegis of the latter that Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, a text based on lecture notes taken during Kojève’s seminar,² was published in 1948. Kojève’s teaching was an ongoing flirtation with spectacle and play. In Raymond Aron’s Memoirs, Kojève’s ‘talent’ and ‘dialectical virtuosity’ are explicitly acknowledged, but ‘there still remains a question that [Aron] cannot evade. When [Kojève] described himself as a strictly observant Stalinist in 1938 or 1939, was he serious, or more precisely, in which sense was he serious?’³ Aron, however, insists right away that in private conversation Kojève did not deny the fact that Russia was governed by brutes. ‘I’m still wondering’, adds Raymond Aron, ‘which side of Kojève was mere intellectual or existential play.’⁴

Kojève’s thought was a decisive stage in the return to Hegel which, since 1945, marked ‘most of the protagonists of the three-H generation named after Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger’. This was paralleled, in the same vein of ‘the humanisation of nothingness’, by a ‘revolt against neo-Kantianism’ and the ‘eclipse of Bergsonism’.⁵ It matters little that subsequently we have witnessed the ebb and flow of this line of thought. This sequence still shows the extent to which Hegel’s thought remained an obligatory route even for those who sought to shield themselves from it. In this respect, whether faithful to Hegel or not – but what does such faithfulness mean? – Kojève’s influence was capital in terms of the expansion of the realm of reason. This is excellently formulated by Vincent Descombes in the following terms:

any thinking which aspires to be dialectical must, by definition, induce in reason a movement towards what is entirely foreign to it, towards the other. The whole issue now rests upon whether the other has been returned to the same in the course of this movement, or whether (so as to embrace rational and irrational, the same and the other at once) reason will have to transform itself, losing its initial identity, ceasing to be the same and becoming other with the other.⁶

Hence reason’s obligatory passage via excess or aberration on its path towards wisdom; and via cynicism, violence or terror where, according to Kojève, both the philosopher and the tyrant act similarly, or at times even together. From Hegel, Kojève borrows an immanent teleology that guides the dialectical movement of negativity, the very force of ideologies of progress;⁷ but its essential contribution rests on the idea that there comes a moment, with the contradictions of history ultimately resolved, when this teleology itself comes to an end. The end-of-history thesis is added to the famous Hegelian master–slave dialectic; the one and the other are knit together.

Hegel published The Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807, the year following Napoleon’s victory at Jena. Shaped by the turbulent history of his time, Hegel discerned a movement based on definitive achievements which, in the opinion of many, could trigger the perpetual movement of a system capable of verifying its own totality. Hegel’s 1821 Principles of the Philosophy of Right was his last philosophical work published before his death. When, 122 years later, Kojève finished his Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit, this was in the midst of the Second World War. No sooner had he been naturalized as a French citizen than he was called up to take part in the ‘phony war’, but in 1940, like many others, he lost his regiment. In 1941 he settled in the so-called zone libre, where Nina Ivanoff⁸ managed to reach him, even though she did not have a French passport. They lived in Marseille, where they were joined by Léon Poliakov, a Jew of Russian origin, childhood friend of Nina Ivanoff, and organiser of resistance movements in coordination with the clandestine resistance group led by Jean Cassou.⁹ Kojève participated actively in the Resistance. He had long known what the risk of death meant in theory, and when one day this risk materialised, the well-understood and well-practiced master–slave dialectic helped save lives.¹⁰ When Kojève went to visit Éric Weil’s family in Gramat, a small village in Lot, in the Midi Pyrenees region of France, he settled in a small hotel with Nina Ivanoff during the summer of 1943. There he wrote his Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit, which would be published posthumously, thirteen years after his death.¹¹ Received with immense interest by many legal scholars and philosophers, the Esquisse is an essential contribution to contemporary philosophy precisely in so far as it is an informed treatment of the question of right. Overcoming the enigma that has long been inherent in the definition of right, Kojève undoubtedly brought to this subject a groundbreaking perspective, re-contextualising and then surpassing both the exclusive focus on values and the contemplation of a formal construction claiming that its origin, nature, and justification are to be found nowhere outside itself. More than twenty years after its publication, the Esquisse has remained intact in the face of the excesses of analytic philosophy, probably in part because it assumes and transcends the ambivalence of right in its relations with practical facts. It also identifies a circular movement – from the real to the rational and from the rational to the real – inherent in the very essence of right.

Kojève questioned the definition of right, and how it is to be grasped, identified, and recognised – most vexing questions whose ambiguities have been noted by legal scholars for centuries. According to Kojève, the juridical phenomenon necessarily implies, during the interaction between two human beings, the intervention of an impartial and disinterested third party. This third party is, in its diverse functions, legislator, judge, or law officer; but it is mainly in so far as the third party intervenes as judge that the juridical, as such, is revealed. Moreover, this third party necessarily exists because there is in Man a desire to realise justice and even a pleasure in pronouncing judgements as particular as sexual or aesthetic pleasure. There is a specifically juridical interest proper to Man, and inspired by the idea of justice. According to Kojève, as for Hegel, work presupposes the idea of the other, since economic man is always coupled with a conceited man who aspires to recognition, the very condition of self-consciousness – starting with the consciousness of pronouncing a judgement and proceeding to the consciousness of being judged. From this there follow essential distinctions between the juridical, on the one hand, and the religious, moral, economic, and political, on the other. In other words, if it is still the development of the idea that lies at the heart of Kojève’s philosophy of right, it is henceforth the idea of justice that is at stake and no longer the Hegelian idea of freedom.

The question of authority is not overlooked in the Esquisse. Evidently, Kojève looks at the question of authority in the context of his analysis of ‘Right in the familial society’. A footnote on page 411 reads: ‘See my Brief Article on Authority (which needs to be completed in its application to the familial sphere) (In the State, the Authority of the Master seems to prevail above all in foreign policy, in relations with the Enemy; that of the Leader in domestic policy, in relations among Friends).’¹² The body of the text contains an important passage marking the link in Kojève’s thought between the phenomenology of right and Authority, or more precisely with regard to its diverse types: ‘It is still the Authority of being and not action to which one will have to resort in the Family’. Kojève then adds:

Now, the Authority of being is the Authority of the ‘Father’ type: the Authority of the cause, of the author, of the origin and the source of what is; the Authority of the past which maintains itself in the present by the sole fact of the ontological ‘inertia’ of being. In the political sphere, it is the Authority of action (of the present) and consequently of the project (of the future), i.e. the Authority of the ‘Master’ and ‘Leader’ type, that is primary. In the familial sphere, by contrast, the first Authority, the grounding Authority, is of the ‘Father’ type (of the past). The Authorities of Judge (of