Master-slave Dialectic - Influence

Influence

The master and slave relationship influenced numerous discussions and ideas in the 20th century, especially because of its supposed connection to Karl Marx's conception of class struggle as the motive force of social development, although Chris Arthur has argued that this connection was falsely instigated by Sartre under the influence of (Russian-born) French philosopher Alexandre Kojève.

Hegel's master–slave dialectic has been influential in the social sciences, philosophy, literary studies, critical theory, postcolonial studies and in psychoanalysis. Furthermore, Hegel's master–slave trope, and particularly the emphasis on recognition, has been of crucial influence on Martin Buber's relational schema in I and Thou, Simone de Beauvoir's account of the history and dynamics of gender relations in The Second Sex and Frantz Fanon's description of the colonial relation in Black Skin, White Masks. Susan Buck-Morss's article 'Hegel and Haiti' considers how the Haitian revolution greatly influenced Hegel's writing of his slave-master dialectic.

Kojève argued that Hegel's intentions were to illustrate that overcoming the fear of death was the only way to achieve true freedom. This was not actually stated by Hegel (in truth at points in this work he makes a direct argument against the use of force as the manner in which history develops). A recent work that uses this argument is Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama admits in the work that his understanding of Hegel is mostly Kojèvian, in particular his conception of the end of history as an ultimate stage of history, while it is, according to Georg Lukács' interpretation, not a transcendent end but an aim immanent to the never-ending process.