Reviews

The Notion of Authority by Hager Weslati, Alexandre Kojève

liam's review

2.0

It might just be that I didn't have the true philosophical vocabulary to appreciate the first half of this book but, as theory can often be, Alexandre Kojeve's The Notion of Authority felt far more obscure than insightful. Kojeve admits multiple times throughout his analysis that it is incomplete, yet even what he does get down seems to be a strange if not utopian conception of authority. Most prominent is Kojeve's insistence on the exclusiveness of force from authority, a take that informs this strange definition of authority (or maybe I should refer to it as 'Authority' instead) and, most problematically, seems to ignore the repressive nature of a demand from Authority. It is a definition that separates authority from violence in politics and might refer to something else outside of our day to day use of the word. But even then, it begs the question as to why Kojeve would create a notion of authority entirely separate from force other than in an attempt to valorize authoritarianism and obscure the violence, active or implied, that it frequently utilizes.
That being said, Kojeve's critical side shines in the book's second half. I must say that I am a sucker for critiques of liberalism, and Kojeve delivers both a somewhat historically interesting and truly insightful criticism of Rousseau and Montesquieu. While I still hold strong reservations of his 'Notion of Authority', the constitutive and 'mixed' forms of authority developed in the book are at the very least interesting in how he manages to synthesize different authorities from an array of philosophical traditions. That along with the temporal dimension of this notion certainly gives this book value to anyone concerned with the philosophy of authority while keeping a critical eye.