Roth - A Note on Kojeve's Phenomenology of Right

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A Note on Kojeve's Phenomenology of RightAuthor(s): Michael S. RothReviewed work(s):Source: Political Theory, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Aug., 1983), pp. 447-450Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191329 .

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A NOTE ON KOJEVE'S

PHENOMENOLOGY OF RIGHT

MICHAEL S. ROTH

Princeton University

LEXANDRE KOJEVE is best known as one of the great--and

probably the most outrageous-interpreters of Hegel in our century.

His Introduction a la Lecturede Hegel is a work of strikingphilosophicoriginality, barely disguised as a commentary on the Phenomenology

of Spirit. The recent publication of his Esquisse d'unephenomenologiedu droit is the fifth volume of his worksto appearsince the Hegel book,and the only one not to be a study in the history of philosophy.' The

manuscript dates from 1943, and although Kojeve did not choose to

publish it duringhis lifetime, it seems to havebeen regardedby its author

as a finished product.In all his work, Kojeve was concerned with making sense of the pro-

gress of human institutions and practices without recourse to an atem-

poral criterion of judgment (e.g., an unchanging "nature of things" or

God). He recognized the need for some transhistorical standard, and

argued that Hegel had identified this criterion as the end of history.This end was not - as it was for Kant - a horizon that retreated as one

approached it, but a realizable goal for human action. By the end of

the 1940s, Kojeve spoke as if this goal had already been achieved bythe developedcountries, and thus he referred o a "post-historical"world

in which there was literally nothing left to be done. This world, though,turned out not to be the Reich der Freiheit that he and his fellow left-

Hegelians had expected, but an iron cage filled with hollow men. The

end of history seemed to be the final ruse of reason.

The Esquisse, however, was written by a philosopher who thoughthe could glimpse the goal of history at the limits of his own time, and

who wanted to make sense of right in light of the incipient actualiza-

tion of this goal. He did so in three stages: defining the "essence" of

right; showing its origin and historical development; sketching the final

realization of the essence of right in a system.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 11 No. 3, August 1983447450? 1983 Sage Publications, Inc.

447



448 POLITICAL THEORY / AUGUST 1983

The essenceof rightis revealedby "the interactionbetweentwo human

beings, A and B, which provokesnecessarilythe interventionof a third,

C, who is impartial and disinterested.The intervention of C annuls the

reaction of B opposed to the action of A" (p. 28). Kojeve insisted that

right cannot be derived from a set of universal rules, but comes into

existence only as the result of the intervention of "a third" whose act

does not modify his or her own situation. This "behaviorist"definition

of the fundamental juridical situation enabled Kojeve to delimit the

"specificityand autonomy"of right.That is, it enabledhim to distinguishbetween right and other anthropogenic fields such as morality, politics,

and religion.If "C" is truly disinterested or neutral, though, it is not clear why

he or she would act at all in the fundamental juridical situation. If "C"

does act, Kojeve claimed, it will be on the basis of an idea of justice.

Here, it would seem that the behaviorist definition is merely a screen

for a more profound idealist conception of justice. In other words, it

would seem that the idea of justice defines the juridical situation more

than being an outcome of this situation. If this were the case, then "the

just" serves as a standard b, hich to judge actions in any situations

to which it can be reasonablyapplied. The "fundamental uridical situa-tion" would not be so fundamental after all.

Kojeveundercut this argument by giving a historicist and anthropo-

centic account of the origin and development of ideas of justice. As

in all his works, he adopted the master/slave dialectic from Hegel's

Phenomenology as the schema for organizing change over time. In this

schema, man is defined by his desire for recognition-a desire that can

be satisfied only with the conservation of its object-and his will to

risk his life in order tosatisfy

this desire. Kojeveused the master/slave

dialectic as an allegory of human development: There is bloody battle

followed by the rule of the master over the working slave. The master,

however,cannot satisfy his human desire, because he is recognized by

a mere slave. Eventually, the slaves take over, but they remain in servi-

tude in relation to their work. Real freedom comes only through uni-

versal recognition of all and each as citizens. Each moment of the

master/slavedialectic is at the origin of an ideal type of justice: Mastery

is the basis for "equality"(Droit aristocratique);victory of the slave is

the basis for "equivalence"(Droit bourgeois); citizenship is the basisfor the synthetic justice of equity. Thus, Kojeveextractedwhat he took

to be the crucial dialectic in the Phenomenology, and used it to emplot



Roth / KOJEVE'S PHENOMENOLOGY 449

the evolution of right and the connection of this evolution to thingshuman.

Kojeve's nterpretationof a few pages of Hegel as an allegoryto under-stand all juridical phenomena was not a reduction of the latter into a

simplified, or even a logically arrangedsequence of events. Instead, the

allegory was for Kojeve a way of reading the diversity of the expres-sions of right without sacrificing the difference inherent in its field. The

development from an aristocratic justice of equality to a bourgeois

justice of equivalence,for example, is not determinedby a logic intrinsic

to right, but by its suspension through revolutionary risk. The causes

of revolution cannot be accounted forby

aphenomenology of right.Of course, Kojeve's "wayof reading" highlights particular facets of the

evolution of the juridical: risk as suspension of justice, work, and war

are the key turning points in the story, and the desire for recognitionis the fundamental motivation for all the characters.

Kojeve focused the lens of the master/slave dialectic to synthesizehistoricist and rationalistconceptions of right.That is, he took seriouslythe idea that there are concepts of justice and a fundamental juridicalsituation, but he insisted that in orderto know the actualization of these

concepts, we must apprehend them as always already tied to a specific,and changing historical situation:

On peut maintenir l'ide d'un Droit et d'une Justice uniques, universellement et

eternellement valables. Seulement ce Droit et cette Justice ne sont pas donnees

des le debut, ils ne sont pas a priori en dehors du temps et de I'histoire. C'est au

contrairedans et par i'histoirequ'ilsse constituent. Le Droit est le resultatde l'evolu-

tion juridique [p. 314].

The result of the evolution of right is the result, the end, of history.It is thus the final stage of history which functions as the criterionfor evaluating all previous stages, and It is in regardto this stage-"theuniversal and homogeneous Empire"-that the crucial questions arise.

Perhapsthe most strikingfeatureof the endstateis that it has no politicaldimension: its members have no "relevantspecificity" (p. 580), and arecitizens only in terms of their equality and equivalence with others. In

Kojeve'sformulation, their being is equal to their function (p. 585), and,he added almost parenthetically, they "voluntarily and consciously"

accept this coincidence.This so-called democraticaspect of the "socialistEmpire" is, however, merely formal: Only children and the insane donot accept the endstate willingly, and this evidently means that non-



450 POLITICAL THEORY / AUGUST 1983

acceptance would be sufficient proof of insanity.2As the great utopiantheorists before him, Kojeve tried to portray an absolute convergence

of the particularand the general;theirconvergencewould be the triumphof reason. He, however, thought of himself as a realist apprehendingin thought a process being actualized in history.

It is not difficult to see how the ideal of justice and humanity that

the Esquisse presents as the end of history later seemed to Kojeve to

be a nightmare from which there was no chance to awake. If our own

historical experience has made us suspicious of both Kojeve'sideal of

justice and the direction of history he perceived, it has not forced us

togive up

the fundamental link betweenjustice

and historicaldevelop-ment. All distinctions between progressives and reactionaries presup-

pose such a link. It is the great and lasting merit of Kojeve'swork that

it attempts to explicate this connection in almost encyclopedic detail,rather than merely to assume or hope for its existence. As a rich and

rigorous example of his Hegelian attempt to "understandhistory as the

becomingof truth," he Esquissed'unephenomenologle du droit remains

of great interest almost forty years after it was written.

NOTES

1. AlexandreKojeve,Essat d'une Histoire Raisonneede la Philosophie Paienne, 3 Vols.

(Paris, 1968, 1972, 1973);Kant(Parls, 1973). Patrick Riley has written a critical introduc-

tion to Kojeve as a historian of philosophy: "Introduction to the Reading of Alexandre

Kojeve,"Political Theory 9, 1 (February 1981), pp. 5-48.

2. Kojeve made the point succinctly in a letter to Leo Strauss (September 19, 1950):

"Im Endstaat gibt es naturliche kelne 'Menschen' mehr, In unsern Sinne des historischen

Menschen. Die Gesunde 'Automaten' sind zufrieden (Sport, Kunst, Erotik .) und die

'kranken'werdeneingespernd." discuss the correspondencebetweenKoj&vend Strauss-

which will be published in the Independent Journal of Philosophy- n the context of

Kojeve'sworkas a whole in "Knowingand History: TheResurgenceof FrenchHegelianism

from the 1930'sthrough the Post-WarPeriod" (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University,

1983).

Michael S. Roth, who has recentlyfinished his dissertation on FrenchHegelianism

at Prlnceton University, will begin teaching in the history departmentat Scrlpps

College ths fall. He will begiving apaperon Leo Strauss and

Kojeveat the APSA

meetings in September.

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Roth - A Note on Kojeve's Phenomenology of Right