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218 Voegelin, Strauss, and Kojève on Tyranny Barry Cooper Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and Alexandre Kojève were close contemporaries. Strauss was born in 1899 in Kirchhain, a small town north of Frankfurt, near Marburg. Voegelin was born in 1901 in Cologne. Kojève was born in 1902 in Moscow. The relations among these three men were, however, quite different, as was their attention paid to one another’s work. The simplest was between Voegelin and Kojève. Voegelin likely first learned of Kojève through the good offices of Strauss, who mentioned him in a letter to Voegelin (April 15, 1949) and then, a little more than a year later, praised Kojève’s book on Hegel to him as “in every detail an outstanding interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit.”1 A few years later Voegelin wrote to Richard C. Cornuelle of the William Volker Fund, which had supported Voegelin’s own work, regarding potential European participants in summer conferences supported by the fund. He warmly recommended Eric Weil (who was much less favorably viewed by Strauss and Kojève) and added: “The other two neo-Hegelians, Alexandre Koj ève and Jean Hyppolite, unfortunately I do not know personally,” so he could not attest to their English-speaking ability. He also doubted that “Kojève, who has an important position in the Ministry of Economics, would be available.”2 What Voegelin knew of Kojève, he knew through his writing.3 Strauss and Kojève met in Berlin during the early 1920s when both were students, ostensibly engaged in the study of religious questions and religious writers. Strauss was studying Spinoza and was attached to the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums; the result was his editorial assistance in the publication of the collected works of Moses Mendelssohn; his 1930 book, Spinoza ’s Critique of Religion; and a study of medieval Jewish and Muslim thinkers published in 1935 as Philosophy and Law. Kojève, though far less studious than Strauss, eventually completed his dissertation under the direction of Karl Jaspers on the Russian mystic Vladimir Soloviev.4 In 1929 Kojève moved to Paris, 9 Voegelin, Strauss, and Kojève on Tyranny 219 and Strauss joined him there on a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1932. It is clear from their letters, the published collection of which begins that year, that they were friends as well as scholars who admired one another’s intellectual gifts. In 1933 Kojève took over the seminar on Hegel’s philosophy of religion that a mutual friend from their Berlin days, Alexandre Koyré, had been teaching at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études.5 Koyré had focused his seminar on Hegel’s “Early Theological Writings” or so-called Jena Manuscripts. Kojève’s seminar was on Hegel’s Phenomenology. It continued over the next six years when he ended his commentary on “The Post-historical Attitude,” which he found in Hegel’s concluding chapter. Kojève attracted a brilliant and varied audience over the years, which included Georges Bataille, Henri Corbin, Raymond Queneau , Gaston Fessard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, Jacques Lacan, Raymond Polin, and Jean Desanti, many of whom became major figures in the intellectual world of postwar Paris.6 Shortly after finishing his commentary on Hegel, Kojève was drafted into the French army (Strauss served in the German army of occupation in Belgium after he graduated from the Gymnasium Phillippinum in Marburg in 1917; Voegelin was never in the military) but apparently did not see combat. He may have been involved with the Resistance in the South of France; other reports indicate he had been a KGB recruit since the late 1930s.7 Whatever his murky role in clandestine political activities, after the war Kojève joined the French Ministry of Economic Affairs as an assistant to one of his auditors from the 1930s, Robert Marjolin, who had been an economic adviser to General Charles de Gaulle during the war and later became an important haut fonctionnaire in the French civil service. His initial postwar responsibilities included administering the Marshall Plan in France. He and Kojève were also instrumental in the creation of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, which later became the OECD. Kojève was the chief architect of the “Kennedy Round” of the GATT in 1964 and a major participant in French negotiations establishing the European Economic Community. As Voegelin said to Cornuelle, he was an important (and evidently very busy) bureaucrat. Strauss, in contrast...

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