When it comes to colonialism, Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) led a double life. As an émigré philosopher, he captivated 1930s Paris with his lectures on Hegel, reimagining the master–slave dialectic as an emancipatory drama driven by terror, war, and revolution. The oppressed, he argued, were swept up in a global struggle for recognition that would lift all boats. The end of history loomed—a posthistorical world in which exploitation and discrimination, whether rooted in class, race, or gender, would be overcome. From this grand vista, colonialism seemed bound to resolve itself. As a diplomat, however, Kojève struck a different tone. Joining the French administration in 1945 as a trade expert, he became a voca defender of the colonial empire. In the lead-up to the 1957 Treaties of Rome, he lobbied to integrate France’s overseas territories into the European Economic Community — an effort he framed as a “giving colonialism.” Yet as Europe’s empires unravelled, Kojève diagnosed not an end to colonialism but its mutation—from political rule to economic dominance. In his final years, he increasingly aligned himself with the developing world in efforts to shape a more equitable global trade order: backing UNCTAD and advocating a smart form of protectionism to shield infant industries in the Global South.
About the conference:
In recent decades the universalizing projects of the modern West—and the post–Cold War idea that liberal capitalism represents “the end of history”—have fallen into crisis. This conference will therefore explore alternative universalisms from the past and present with a view toward the future. With reference throughout to the ideas of Hegel, Marx, Mao, and other major thinkers of the global left, it will explore an array of topics including Chinese conceptions of world-making; the implication of “modernization” in the Global South; transnational resistance in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; representations of “the people” in modern China; and the relationship between reformism, revolution, and the state.
