Your complimentary articles
You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please
If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.
To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.
If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.
Books
The Notion of Authority by Alexander Kojève
Daniel Tutt finds The Notion of Authority authoritative.
This recent English translation of Alexander Kojève’s The Notion of Authority (originally published in French in 1954) is an important addition to philosophical studies of authority and an essential text for understanding Kojève’s political thought. Although Kojève’s (1902-1968) influential lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit left an indelible mark on continental philosophers Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and American philosophers such as Leo Strauss, this book was written primarily for a European political audience during the Second World War. The text is best read alongside later philosophical studies on authority, especially Hannah Arendt’s essay, What is Authority? and Herbert Marcuse’s A Study on Authority, as all three texts sought to bring authority back to political and social life in ways that don’t justify oppression, patriarchy, or traditionalism.
Despite their titles, the books by Arendt and Marcuse don’t offer a philosophical definition of authority, whereas Kojève offers both a definition and a schema for understanding every type of authority. Kojève first quickly defines authority overall, and then moves to three distinct categories of analysis of it, in phenomenological, metaphysical and ontological terms.
…