February 19, 2026
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A Famous Enigma: On Alexandre Kojève
Two new Kojeve bios drop; the internet fights over 'the end of history' and call centers
TLDR: Two new English biographies revive philosopher Alexandre Kojève and his “end of history” idea, sparking a brawl over what he really meant. Commenters meme about call-center purgatory and AI rejection emails while split between dunking on Fukuyama’s 1990s spin and defending it as a different argument
Two fresh biographies—by Marco Filoni and Boris Groys—just pulled Alexandre Kojève out of myth and into English, and the comments went feral. Fans are cheering the “at last!” moment, while skeptics are like, “so we’re celebrating the guy who predicted our endless press-0-to-reach-a-human nightmare?” The crowd latched onto Kojève’s big provocation—“history is over”—and applied it to everything from customer service hell to AI job rejections. One meme ruled: a phone tree that ends with “To reach a human, please wait until the end of history.”
The juiciest fight? Whether Francis Fukuyama butchered Kojève’s idea in the ’90s. Half the thread is dunking—“he didn’t even cite him!”—while a calmer camp says Fukuyama meant a different kind of “end,” not a victory lap for capitalism. Others are bickering over labels: was Kojève the “father of postmodernism,” a doom prophet of late capitalism, or just the guy who said the quiet part about bureaucracy out loud? Meanwhile, people are gawking at Kojève’s wild backstory—Moscow riches, soap-trading arrest, daring escape—and turning it into a Netflix pitch. Newcomers are asking who this man even was; veterans are flexing seminar lore; and everybody’s projecting their current headaches onto him. In short: Kojève’s back, and he’s answering your call—eventually
Key Points
- •Two English-language biographies of Alexandre Kojève by Marco Filoni and Boris Groys were published in 2025.
- •The books present Kojève as an original thinker diagnosing modern bureaucratic and automated life, not merely a Hegel interpreter.
- •The article argues Francis Fukuyama misread Kojève’s 'end of history' by equating it with the post–Cold War triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism.
- •Kojève’s own timeline for the 'end of history' shifted (Napoleon, Stalin, then a stylized Japanese modernity), and his view included ambivalence toward socialism.
- •Biographical details include Kojève’s 1902 birth in Moscow, studies in Germany, life in Paris, arrest by Bolsheviks, and family tie to painter Wassily Kandinsky.