http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/k/kojeve.htm
Chronology of life and works
"...French philosopher (1902-196
, born Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov in Russia. Kojève studied in Germany (Heidelberg) where, under the supervision of Karl Jaspers, he completed a thesis (Die religöse Philosophie Wladimir Solowjews, 1931) Vladimir Solovyov, a Russian religious philosopher deeply influenced by Hegel. He later settled in Paris, where he taught at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Ētudes. Taking over from Alexandre Koyré, he taught a seminar on Hegel from 1933 till 1939. Along with Jean Hyppolite, he was responsible for the serious introduction of Hegel into French thought. His lectures exerted a profound influence (both direct and indirect) over many leading French philosophers and intellectuals - amongst them Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille, Althusser, Queneau, Aron, and Breton. Via his friend Leo Strauss, Kojève’s thought also exerted influence in America, most especially over Allan Bloom and, later, Francis Fukuyama. His lectures on Hegel were published in 1947 under the title Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, appearing in English as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1969). After the Second World War Kojève worked in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs, until his death in 1968. Here he exercised a profound, mandarin influence over French policy, including a role as one of the leading architects of the EEC and GATT. He continued to write philosophy over these years, including works on the pre-Socratics, Kant, the concept of right, the temporal dimensions of philosophical wisdom, the relationship between Christianity and both Western science and communism, and the development of capitalism. Many of these works were only published posthumously. The Hegelian Context
Hegel’s philosophy of history, most especially the historicist philosophy of consciousness developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit, provides the core of Kojève’s own work. However, Kojève’s Hegel lectures are not so much an exegesis of Hegel’s thought, as a profoundly original reinterpretation. By reading Hegel’s philosophy of consciousness through the twin lenses of Marx’s materialism and Heidegger’s temporalised ontology of human being (Dasein), Kojève can rightly be said to have initiated ‘existential Marxism’. Here I will briefly sketch the most salient dimensions of Hegel’s philosophy of history, before proceeding to outline Kojève’s own interpretation of it..."
Francis Fukuyama
http://www.sais-jhu.edu/faculty/fukuyama/bio_frame.htm
"...Francis Fukuyama is Dean of Faculty and Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University...
...He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation from 1979-1980, then again from 1983-89, and from 1995-96. In 1981-82 and in 1989 he was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State, the first time as a regular member specializing in Middle East affairs, and then as Deputy Director for European political-military affairs. In 1981-82 he was also a member of the US delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian autonomy.
Dr. Fukuyama is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. He holds an honorary doctorate from Connecticut College and Doane College, and is a member of advisory boards for the National Endowment for Democracy, The National Interest, the Journal of Democracy, and The New America Foundation. He is a member of the AmericanPolitical Science Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the Global Business Network. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children."
Allan Bloom
http://www.selu.edu/Academics/Faculty/nadams/educ692/Bloom.html
"...Bloom was a professor of social thought and a noted translator of Plato and Rousseau. Bloom believed that a liberal education with a judicious use of great texts was the essential element of education...
...His book, The Closing of the American Mind, is essential reading in order to understand Bloom’s thought and the decay of the modern university. It was with this publication in1987 that Bloom argues that the social and political crisis of twentieth century America is really an intellectual crisis. Bloom blamed high technology, the sexual revolution, and the introduction of cultural diversity into the curriculum at the expense of the classics, which in turn produced students without wisdom or values. According to Bloom, American democracy has unwittingly played host to vulgarized continental ideas of nihilism and despair, and of relativism disguised as tolerance...
...Bloom died October 7, 1992 while being hospitalized for peptic ulcer bleeding complicated by liver failure. At the time of his death he was co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy..."
http://olincenter.uchicago.edu/about_olin.html
About the John M. Olin Center
"...Founded in 1984 by Allan Bloom (d. 1992) and Nathan Tarcov.
...The Olin Center is sponsoring the conference "Democracy and Popular Culture" (April 19-20) on the campus of the University of Chicago, and co-sponsoring, with the LeFrak Forum and the Symposium on Science, Reason and Modern Democracy of Michigan State University and with the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, the conference "Living Issues in the Thought of Leo Strauss: Fifty Years After Natural Right and History" (June 17-20) to be held in Munich....
...The Olin Center is managing the digital re-mastering of the tapes of classes taught by Leo Strauss. The Center helped obtain funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation for the microfilming of the Strauss archives at the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library, and has worked on other projects in support of that archive. The staff of the Olin Center also catalogued Allan Bloom's papers, which have now been donated to Regenstein Library..."
From yet another great PNAC-summary:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EC20Ak07.html
This war is brought to you by ...
By Pepe Escobar
Mar 20, 2003
"...It was Allan Bloom, the brilliant author of The Closing of the American Mind and professor at the University of Chicago, deceased in 1992, who steered Wolfowitz towards political science. Wolfowitz had the honor of being cloned by Saul Bellow in the novel Ravelstein: the Wolfowitz character shows up under a fictional name in the same role he occupied in 1991 at the Pentagon. Messianic, and a big fan of Abraham Lincoln, Wolfowitz is a walking contradiction: his fierce unilateralism is based on his faith in the universality of American values.
Wolfowitz and his proteges's are hardcore "Straussians" - after Leo Strauss, a Jewish intellectual who managed to escape the Nazis, died in 1999 as a 100-year-old and was totally anti-modern: for him, modernity was responsible for Nazism and Stalinism. Strauss was a lover of the classics - most of all Plato and Aristotle. His most notorious disciples were Chicago's Allan Bloom and also Harvey Mansfield - who translated both Machiavelli and Tocqueville and was the father of all things politically correct in Harvard.
Strauss believed in natural right and in an immutable measure of what is just and what is unjust. Thus the Wolfowitz credo that a vague "democracy and freedom" is a one-size-fits-all panacea to be served everywhere, even by force. Plenty of neo-hawks followed Bloom's courses at the University of Chicago: Wolfowitz of course, but also Francis Fukuyama of "end of history" fame, and John Podhoretz, who reigns over the editorial pages of the ultra-reactionary Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid the New York Post. As to Mansfield, his most notorious student was probably William Kristol, the editor of the also Rupert Murdoch-financed magazine Weekly Standard. In Kristol's own formulation, all these Straussians are morally conservative, religiously inclined, anti-Utopian, anti-modern and skeptical towards the left but also towards the reactionary right. ..."
Robert Kagan
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/sto ry/0,6000,906421,00.html
Author of "Paradise & Power: America and Europe in the New World Order" (2003)
...coined the phrase "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus".
...In the maelstrom of transatlantic relations unleashed by the present Iraq crisis, one question goes begging: Is there a middle path between the increasingly pacifist, Kantian worldview of Europe and the increasingly belligerent Hobbesian worldview of the US, a workable compromise between Europe's suspicion of power and faith in an international legal order, on the one hand, and America's belief in power and suspicion of international legal order, on the other? The answer, if there is one, might be found in Britain and in the person of Tony Blair...."
http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/AuthorBiography.aspx?AuthorId=174
"...Mr. Kagan is a world affairs columnist for the Washington Post. He is also a contributing editor at the New Republic as well as at The Weekly Standard.
Previously, he worked in the U.S. Department of State as a deputy for policy in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs and as principal speechwriter to the Secretary of State.
Mr. Kagan received his master’s degree in public policy and international relations from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and his undergraduate degree from Yale University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is currently based in Brussels..."
http://www.travelbrochuregraphics.com/extra/power_and_weakness.htm
June & July 2002
Number 113
Published by Hoover Institution
Power and Weakness
By Robert Kagan
"...It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power — the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power — American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less..."