Kojève’s death

Reivew of Jeff Love, The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève

Jorge Varela ~ RP 2.04 (Spring 2019), pp. 104–107 ~ Review

Jeff Love, The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 376pp, £30.00 hb., 978 0 23118 656 8 In the notebooks Alexandre Kojève wrote on his way to Germany, he sketched a structure of all relevant fields of knowledge, with each field labelled ‘bolshevism in …’: ‘politics’, ‘religion’, and […]

All power to the soviets: Marx meets Hobbes

Dossier: On the 1917 commemorations

Lars T. Lih ~ RP 2.01 (February 2018), pp. 64–78 ~ Article

‘[M]en have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company, where there is no power to over-awe them all.’ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 1 The way we think about revolution is deeply involved with the great traditions of political theory, and conversely, our understanding of these traditions is strongly influenced […]

Order in disorder: Revolution against the state becomes but a page in its history

Dossier: On the 1917 commemorations

Ilya Budraitskis ~ RP 2.01 (February 2018), pp. 58–63 ~ Article

It would seem that the centenary of the Russian Revolution could not have come at a more inopportune moment for Russia. The colossal scale and universalist ambitions of that event are at odds with the apathetic state of Russian society today. Indeed, efforts to dispense with this inconvenient ghost appear to provide the sole point […]