Kant forms the centrepiece of Alexandre Kojeve’s intriguing discovery of objective reality and its repressed history in Western philosophy

Immanuel Kant’s philosophical system, Kojève argues, is haunted by the Thing-in-itself as the ultimate expression of ‘bourgeois hypocrisy’ and its internally divided reason, split between action and discourse. Making a case for the post-historical moral imperative to turn away from infinite progress and the practical justification of the ideas of God and the immortality of the soul, Kant outlines the material conditions of possibility for revolutionary action within the twin horizons of accomplished and recollected history.