Introduction: Alexandre Kojève—attempt at an update

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a peculiar slogan began cropping up across certain parts of the United States: "Don't immanentize the eschaton!"This imperative, made popular by the American conservative intellectual William H. Buckley Jr., was turned into a political mantra by the Young Americans for Freedom, plastered on car bumpers and raised on placards at rallies.The pithy phrase served as an injunction against political ideologies, from both the left and right, which promise various versions of secular utopia.According to Eric Voegelin, what these kinds of political ideas share is an immanentist view of Christian transcendental fulfilment.It is precisely such assurances of an eschatological solution which should be avoided, since they inevitably come to bear on a fallacious understanding of history that lends itself to a totalitarian impulse.It is in this vein that Buckley and his supporters situated their own refusal to grant a place to the "no-place" of secular utopia.Sitting directly opposite to the political thought of Voegelin and the Young Americans for Freedom is the philosophy of Alexandre Kojve. 1 In fact, it would be difficult to imagine a philosophy more opposed to the idea that one should not immanentize the eschaton.For Kojve, we no longer need to call on the prophets of the apocalypse nor wait in restless expectation for the elusive end to appear on the scene.Not only is it not a question of whether the eschaton can or even should be immanentized, the 1 For an analysis of the relation between the eschatology of Kojve and Voegelin, see Colebrook (2022).