structural:scholar_edition
Reception in France

It has become commonplace to identify "French Hegel" with the lectures of Alexandre Kojève, who emphasized the master-servant dialectic (which he mistranslated as master-slave) and Hegel's philosophy of history. This perspective, however, overlooks over sixty years of French writing on Hegel, according to which Hegelianism was identified with the "system" presented in the Encyclopedia. The later reading, drawing instead upon the Phenomenology of Spirit, was in many ways a reaction against the earlier. After 1945, "this 'dramatic' Hegelianism, which centered on the theme of historical becoming through conflict, to be seen as compatible with existentialism and Marxism."

By confining the dialectic to history, the dominant French readings of Jean Wahl, Alexandre Kojève, and Jean Hyppolite effectively presented Hegel as providing "a philosophical anthropology instead of a general metaphysics." This reading took the topic of desire as its focal point of intervention. A major theme was that "a reason that seeks to be all-inclusive falsifies reality by suppressing or repressing its 'other. ' " Although it cannot be attributed entirely to Kojève, this reading of Hegel shaped the thought and interpretations of thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and Georges Bataille.

Kojève's interpretation of the "master-slave dialectic" as the basic model of historical development also influenced the feminism of Simone de Beauvoir and the anti-racist and anti-colonial work of Frantz Fanon.