Ideas have consequences. We suppose that is one lesson of the recent revelation by the French secret service that the Russian-born French philosopher and civil servant Alexandre Kojève was a Soviet agent for some thirty years. It would be difficult to overstate Kojève’s eminence in the pantheon of twentieth-century French intellectuals. Daniel Johnson, who reported the story in the London Daily Telegraph, noted that “Kojève’s subterranean influence is ubiquitous. His ideas echo around our political arena. Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ is recycled Kojève. So is Tony Blair’s vision of a post-conservative, post-national, post- political, post-historical Europe.”

In intellectual and cultural terms, Kojève’s influence is even more extensive. Born Alexander Kochevnikoff in Moscow in 1902, Kojève left Russia in 1920, going first to Poland and then to Germany ...

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