The Hegelian Legacy in Kojève and Sartre

Abstract

French academic philosophy, from the mid-1930s until the end of the 1950s, was dominated by at least four German philosophers: Hegel, Marx, Husserl and Heidegger. In some ways, the originality of the French philosophy of this period lay in its way of associating these entirely dissimilar thinkers. In reality, however, Hegel’ss ascendancy in France was short-lived, particularly because it was associated with the phenom-enological-existential thinking which developed in Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1905–1980) wake — a current of thought that was violently attacked from the 1960s onwards, particularly by structuralism. Still, an assertion by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) in 1946 expresses Hegelianism’s success in France from the 1930s to the 1950s: ‘For a century, Hegel has been at the origin of everything great which has been achieved in philosophy’.¹