Original title: L'azione politica del filosofo. Alexandre Kojève's Life and Thought

Translation by Pedro Lomba

The name of Alexandre Kojève has not ceased to be a focus of attraction for the contemporary philosophical and political imaginary. His Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Trotta, 2013), the result of the mythical seminar given between 1933 and 1939 to the French intelligentsia, made an epoch with notions such as the struggle for recognition or the end of history. To his fame as a maître à penser is added the aura of his subsequent career in the media of world diplomacy and high finance. But who was "really" Aleksandr Kozevnikov, from the Russian high bourgeoisie, exile and nephew of Vasily Kandinsky?
These pages aim to restore the different facets, often contradictory, always fascinating, of a thinker who condenses the depth and surface of the twentieth century. Of a philosopher who was a bureaucrat, of a partisan who was an advisor in Vichy, who stimulated and allowed himself to be influenced by some of the best minds of his century, without disdaining the worst. A complex profile that shines like a splinter of the history of the last century, of the crossroads between East and West in the era of totalitarianism and the Cold War. Through Kojève's personality and thought, this book aims to understand what the philosopher's political action is and what meaning it has.