America at the End of History

“The universal end-state society, Kojève argued, was the society in which any individual could attain what he desired with ease and without opposition…”

With the deafening thunder of Napoleon’s canons filling the air at Jena, the romantic story goes that a middle-aged university professor and philosopher by the name of Georg W.F. Hegel was riding away busily making revisions to his explosive philosophical work, Phenomenology of Spirit. In the aftermath of the thunder and lightning that struck across the Sale River on that October morning, the conventional (but ultimately apocryphal) story goes that Hegel declared “the end of history.” Liberté, égalité, and fraternité—irrespective of how it was particularly manifested—was the movement of all history and human desire.

Alexandre Kojève is arguably the most consequential modern interpreter of Hegel. There is no reason to enter the petty bickering over his analysis of Hegel and how much of it is Kojève’s projection onto Hegel contra Kojève’s analysis of Hegel qua Hegel. Instead, Kojève’s brilliance lies in his use of Hegel to offer his own end of history: the universal homogenous end-state of mass consumerism and happiness.

The universal end-state society, Kojève argued, was the society in which any individual could attain what he desired with ease and without opposition: an equality of consumption and the happiness it brings for all persons. Until we have equal outcomes in our consumeristic desires, we cannot have the mutual recognition we all seek. Freedom is to be free from all barriers and constraints to our consumeristic desires—the barriers and constraints of supposedly arbitrary cultural and social distinctions, and, especially, the barrier imposed onto humans by nature. Kojève, in this respect, is very much the Enlightenment philosopher par excellence in the tradition of Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes, where the task of philosophy should not be to discover the truths of nature to help man imitate nature (as in the classical paradigm of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, which was subsequently theologized by Christianity) but, rather, to help man master nature and improve the quality of his material life in this world.