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In The Black Circle, Jeff Love reinterprets Kojève´s works, showing him to be a provocative thinker who challenged modern society and its valuation of individuality, self-interest, and freedom from death. Emphasizing Kojève´s neglected Russian roots, The Black Circle puts him in the context of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian debates over the proper ends of human life. Love explores notions of perfection, freedom, and finality in Kojève´s account of Hegel and his neglected later works, clarifying Kojève´s emancipatory thinking and the meaning of the oft-misinterpreted "end of history." Joining intellectual history, close textual analysis, and philosophy to reassess an essential modern theorist, The Black Circle reveals Kojève´s thought as a profound critique of capitalist individualism and a timely meditation on human freedom.

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The Black Circle is an extraordinary study, in which hardcore philosophical issues are approached at a cosmic level but lyrically, almost as part of an intimate conversation. Alexandre Kojève was so thoroughly at home in German and French culture that his origins in yet a third culture have been neglected. In this book, Jeff Love restores Russian contexts to Kojève´s thought on Hegel and the end of history.´ Caryl Emerson, Princeton University

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Jeff Love is professor of German and Russian at Clemson University. He is the author of The Overcoming of History in War and Peace (2004) and Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed (2008), cotranslator of F. W. J. Schelling´s Philosophical Investigations Into the Essence of Human Freedom (2006), and editor of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy (2016) as well as Heidegger in Russia and Eastern Europe (2017).

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