The “anthropologization” of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in twentieth-century French thought is well known; equally well known are its apparent mistakes and misunderstandings. Perhaps none of the French readings of the Phenomenology manages to be quite as immediately anthropologizing and (therefore) quite as apparently mistaken as that of Kojève -both in his celebrated courses on the Phenomenology in the 1930s and in the book (Introduction à la lecture de Hegel) that comes out of these courses. And yet, by the same token, there is no denying the obvious power of Kojève's reading and its widespread influence on several generations of French thinkers (and not just the to-be-illustrious figures who attended the courses). How can this be -to get things so wrong and yet to wield such power and such influence?

And don't get me wrong here! The power and the influence are such that they are not to be explained away by the clichés of intellectual history (about “influence” of one thinker's “ideas” on another), or by reference to institutional factors (a favorite of academics), or by imputing some kind of mesmerizing charisma to Alexander Vladimirovitch Kojevnikov (or, as he preferred to refer to himself, “Moi, Kojève …”). Indeed, it is not too much to say that, with “Kojève,” i.e., with Kojève's reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit – or, to be still more specific, with Kojève's reading of the “Self-consciousness” chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology – something occurs, something happens, and because it does so and is therefore genuinely historical, accounting for this “something” and its truly historical (and therefore material) reasons is a very overdetermined matter.