The Notion of Authority. Alexandre Kojève
i.e. of impartiality), of Leader (who foresees and guides), and of Master (who decides and acts) are derived from that of the Father (who generates being and assures the perpetuity of the past identical with itself). In the State, on the contrary, it is the Authority of the Father (and of the Judge) that is derived from those of Master and Leader (that of the Master being primary). One therefore sees here again an essential difference between the Family and the State. On the one hand, the Kinsmen are not Friends opposed to a common Enemy. On the other hand, they are not the Governed who recognise the Authority of the Master and the Leader of the Governors. They are kinsmen who love another according to their degree of kinship, who therefore love above all their common kin, their ancestors, the source and origin of the being to which they attribute a positive value. And if they recognise an Authority (which gives them an appearance of political unity, but in fact only a familial unity), it is the Authority F, of that ‘kinsman’ par excellence, that they recognise, and it is this Authority F of being as such who is recognised also by non-kindred members of the Family: by slaves, servants, and so on, and – if the case arises – by other Families. Familial organisation of the Family is therefore something entirely different from the political organisation of the State: the kinsmen subordinate themselves to kinsmen (by love or authority) according to the kinship that determines their being, but they are not properly speaking governed by them.13
These passages corroborate the thesis that ‘the brief article on authority’ was written before the Esquisse, even if it mentions in passing another ‘article on right’ and even a ‘special article on the state’.14 While the first typed page of the manuscript that was subsequently published as the Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit is signed and dated ‘Marseille, 1943’, the last page of the Notion de l’Autorité is signed at the end as follows: ‘A. Kojevnikoff, Marseille, 16/V 42’. Five months separate this date from the Allied invasion of French North Africa (9 November 1942) and the occupation of the zone libre by the German army. It was not until early in 1943 that von Paulus capitulated at Stalingrad, and, even closer, there was Pierre Laval’s famous speech of 22 June 1942 in which he declared that he ‘hoped for a German victory because without it, tomorrow Bolshevism will be everywhere’.
The publication of Kojève’s study of the ‘notion of authority’ had to wait even longer than that of the Esquisse. Dominique Auffret refers to the manuscript, noting that ‘it has not yet been located’. It remained in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale, later the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Thanks to the fortunate attention of Florence de Lussy, chief librarian at the department of manuscripts, and to the donation by Nina Ivanoff of Kojève’s unpublished writings, this manuscript has finally seen the light of day. It completes, in the areas of phenomenology, metaphysics, and ontology, Kojève’s already published work on right, politics, and philosophy. In the years after writing this text in 1942, Kojève played a major role in the construction of Europe, on the fringes of administrative hierarchies. The wealth of knowledge and experience he gained is best illustrated by his controversy with one of his preferred interlocutors, Leo Strauss. The latter had just published a commentary on one of Xenophon’s dialogues: Hiero the Tyrant. The 1954 French translation of the book included a substantial critical study by Kojève on ‘Tyranny and Wisdom’. This is a seminal text for those who wish to know how Kojève carried on his essential investigation, history being in his opinion a succession of political actions guided by philosophers, themselves assisted by ‘intellectual mediators’.
Kojève titled his study The Notion of Authority. From the outset, he notes that ‘It is a curious fact that the problem and notion of Authority have been little studied’:
Questions pertaining to the transfer of Authority and its genesis have been the main concern, while the actual essence of this phenomenon has rarely attracted any attention. However, it is obviously impossible to tackle political power or even the structure of the State without knowing what Authority is as such. A study of the notion of Authority, albeit provisional, is therefore essential, and must precede any study of the question of the State.
In relation to what he could not have overlooked in writing these lines, particularly the controversy between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt on the subject of dictatorship and the state of exception,15 Kojève’s introductory observation deserves great attention, even though, between 1942 and the present publication, philosophical reflection has made significant progress on the subject of authority, as it did already in Kojève’s lifetime. Even ignoring studies that do not touch upon or even address the subject except in a peripheral aside, we cannot overlook other works in relation to which, anachronisms notwithstanding, Kojève’s findings are and will remain fundamental.
Firstly, Kojève’s argument throws light on and supplements the achievements of sociological development.16 The latter acknowledges that the decline of traditional authority is partly linked with the retreat of old institutions such as guild, neighbourhood, parish, and the family – institutions that formerly acted as intermediaries between power and the masses.17 In the course of this development, the distinction between (social) authority and (political) power became more marked. Social authority reflects the attachment of conservatives, or even radicals, to intermediary bodies, while political authority is seen as the foundation of a model inherited from the French Revolution, and by implication from the Enlightenment, especially Rousseau, characteristically hostile to ‘partial associations’ existing within the state. Subsequent development, marked by the return of communities, will be distinguished by a certain divide focused on the place and role of authority in its relation to power in the works of Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, and many others. The natural persistence of authority in large-scale industry was confirmed by Engels,18 while bureaucracy played an important role in Weber’s theory of authority. Whether perceived in terms of integrative triangular relations (states, groupings, individuals), or in the guise of a circular relation between domination and obedience, dominations and subordinations, and so on; authority is defined in relation to that which it is not, i.e. as a negative. It is in this respect that Kojève’s argument is crucial.
Later studies on the subject of authority, however, must not be overlooked, especially that of Hannah Arendt. In a study published in 1958, entitled ‘What is Authority?’, Arendt precisely went beyond reflections related to the definition and notion of authority as such.19 After noting ‘a more or less general, more or less dramatic breakdown of all traditional authorities’, Arendt moved on to underline the fact that this crisis
has spread to such pre-political areas as child-rearing and education, where authority in the widest sense has always been accepted as a natural necessity, obviously required as much by natural needs, the helplessness of the child, as by political necessity, the continuity of an established civilisation which can be assured only if those who are newcomers by birth are guided through a pre-established world into which they are born as strangers.20
According to Arendt, Greco-Roman tradition, extended and relayed by Christianity, has transmitted a concept that rests on the combination of three components: tradition, religion, and authority. At the same time, its history has been marked during recent centuries by the disappearance of tradition and the loss of religion. More stable, and yet fatally undermined in its very foundations, authority is also destined to disappear, even though its disappearance is only that of a ‘very specific form which had been valid throughout the Western World over a long period of time’. It is for this reason that ‘practically as well as theoretically, we are no longer in a position to know what authority really is’. Arendt adds that ‘the answer to this question cannot possibly lie in a definition of the nature or essence of “authority in general”.’21
However, this is exactly where the rest of her argument unintentionally leads; and it is here that an expectation is revealed which is more or less conscious and to which Kojève’s argument now responds. What lies at the origin of this tradition in decline, which offers, after all, and despite its vicissitudes, an ideal type born from a lasting conjunction in which tradition, religion, and authority converge? The premonitory signs are to be found, once again, in Greek philosophy. If authority necessarily goes hand-in-hand with the obedience that it always requires, it nevertheless