Description

Philosophy and Politics at the Precipice maintains that political philosopher Alexandre KojŠve (1901?68) has been both famously misunderstood and famous for being misunderstood. KojŠve was famously understood by interpreters for seeing an “end of history” (an end that would display universal free democracies and even freer markets) as critical to his thought. He became famously misunderstood when interpreters, at the end of theÿtwentieth century, placed such an end at the center of his thought. This book reads KojŠve againÿ? as a thinker of time, not its end. It presents KojŠve as a philosopher and precisely as a time phenomenologist, rather than as a New Age guru. The book shows how KojŠve?s time is inherently political, and indeed tyrannical, for being about his understanding of human relation. However,ÿKojŠve?s views on time and tyranny prove his undoing for making rule impossible because ofÿ what the book terms the “time-tyrant problem.” KojŠve?s entire political corpus is best understood as an attempt to rectify this problem. So understood, Philosophy and Politics at the Precipice provides fresh perspective on the true nature of KojŠvian irony, KojŠve?s aims in the Strauss?KojŠve exchange, and how KojŠve at his best captures a philosophical, phenomenological time, one that marks some of the most dynamic and unique events of the twentieth century. Headlines have largely erased the notion that history has ended. Philosophy and Politics at the Precipice, on the other hand, provides the philosophical justification for arguing that the end of the last millennium was not an end and that, for his view of time, KojŠve remains a thinker for the times ahead.??