Alexandre Kojève (née Aleksandr Kozhevnikov), famous above all for his 1930s lectures on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, was an émigré from the Russian Empire that vanished with the First World War, the revolutions of 1917, and the subsequent civil and colonial war. However, in contrast to figures like Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and numerous others, scholars have tended not to include Kojève in the “Russian emigration” of the interwar period. One of Trevor Wilson’s claims in Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy is that we should. Even though Kojève gradually left the diaspora, he “remained fixated on themes and problems germane to the Russian philosophical tradition” (3). In this book, Wilson aims to read Kojève “through the lens of Russian intellectual history more broadly” (8), a task in which he succeeds well without essentializing a “Russian philosophical tradition.”

The first of four chapters, “Faith and Atheism,” covers briefly Kojève’s formative years and emigration. Wilson also discusses at length, here and in later chapters, another figure whose trajectory into French academia had many parallels to that of Kojève, namely his “mentor” Alexandre Koyré (Aleksandr Koiranskii). Both thinkers contributed with seminal analyses that explained the emergence of what Charles Taylor has called the “secular age.” Wilson implicitly reminds us that these Russian émigrés belong, together with Hans Blumenberg, Karl Löwith, and Taylor to the group of those who explained how the modern scientific worldview grew “out of Christian theology rather than in opposition to it” (42).

Kojève’s main contribution in this regard, and which Wilson reads as a prelude to his Hegel lectures, was a text on Vladimir Solovʹev’s last work, “Three Conversations.” In contrast to representatives of Russian religious idealism (Evgenii Trubetskoi, for instance), Kojève offered an interpretation that secularized Solovʹev, discerning in his final writings the foundations for an “explicitly atheist philosophical system” (36). Kojève’s approach to Solovʹev, which Wilson’s book resuscitates, should from now on be a reference in discussions about the legacy of Russian religious thought.

Chapter 2, “Desire and Its Others,” is Wilson’s analysis of Kojève’s Hegel lectures. Famously, Kojève made the Master-Slave dialectic the center of Hegel’s phenomenology. What Wilson adds to our understanding is, among other things, seeing the lectures as a continuation of his secularized reading of Solovʹev. Kojève’s anthropological and historicizing reading of Hegel put a particular emphasis on desire, recognition, and negativity, which was also the reflection of his take on Solovʹev’s philosophy of love, according to which “love (poeticized and philosophized as Sophia) is the force that both destabilizes and constitutes the subject” (71). Kojève’s philosophical project in the Hegel lectures was not merely to offer a (better) reading of Hegel, but, as Wilson argues, to articulate a philosophy of the Absolute and the role of desire in it—a project that grew out of his engagement with Russian Silver Age philosophy.

Chapter 3, “Stalin’s Hegel, Kojève’s Napoleon” takes us to the afterlife of the Hegel lectures and Kojève’s attempt to historicize Hegel further. For a period, he held the astonishing view that the Soviet Union represented the end of history, with Iosif Stalin as a “Sage” and the “manager of a homogeneous and universal state” (92). Wilson explains Kojève’s apologetic, if short-lived, embrace of Stalinism with his engagement in Eurasianist leftist arenas, characterized by a postrevolutionary stance, in combination with his atheist interpretation of Solovʹev. After the World War II, Kojève began considering both the US and the nascent European Union as potential universal states instead.

The fourth and final chapter addresses the legacy of Kojève’s ideas—not least Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis, for which Kojève’s lectures were a frame of reference, or even Kojève’s “second life” (142). Wilson hereby brings Fukuyama’s idea back to its “Russian” origins, a point that is worth stressing today when it is so often regarded as the philosophical justification for western hegemony in the post-Cold War world. The final part of this chapter contains illuminating discussions of post-Soviet thinkers who, in a postmodern context of “teleophobia” (139), have developed their projects through critical dialogues with Kojève: Sergei Prozorov, Oksana Timofeeva, and Artemii Magun.

This book is a well-written and well-argued contribution to intellectual history, whether we call it “Russian” or “Western.” For as Wilson concludes, Kojève’s ideas were “products of transnational exchange” (145), and the study of “Russian” as well as “Western philosophy” still needs to come to terms with this insight. Wilson’s book is an important guide and inspiration for future research in this regard.