In Heidelberg, he completed in 1926 his PhD thesis on the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev's views on the union of God and man in Christ under the direction of Karl Jaspers.

Kojève spent most of his life in France and from 1933 to 1939 delivered in Paris a series of lectures on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's work Phenomenology of Spirit.

[5][6] Although not an orthodox Marxist,[7] Kojève was known as an influential and idiosyncratic interpreter of Hegel, reading him through the lens of both Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger.

The well-known end of history thesis advanced the idea that ideological history in a limited sense had ended with the French Revolution and the regime of Napoleon and that there was no longer a need for violent struggle to establish the "rational supremacy of the regime of rights and equal recognition".

Kojève's end of history is different from Francis Fukuyama's later thesis of the same name in that it points as much to a socialist-capitalist synthesis as to a triumph of liberal capitalism.

Other French thinkers who have acknowledged his influence on their thought include the post-structuralist philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Kojève, a senior statesman in the French government, argued that philosophers should have an active part in shaping political events.

[12] From now on, he once claimed in his letter to Tran Duc Thao, dated October 7, 1948, that his "... course was essentially a work of propaganda intended to strike people's minds.

(...) Toward the end of the nineteenth century Western thought effectively concluded its development [...] turning into a philosophical school of 'scholasticism' in the popular, negative sense of the term.

(...)"Mark Lilla notes that Kojève rejected the prevailing concept among some European intellectuals of the 1930s that capitalism and democracy were failed artifacts of the Enlightenment that would be destroyed by either communism or fascism.

Thus, victory by either side, he posited, would result in what Lilla describes as "a rationally organized bureaucracy without class distinctions".

(...)"[18] The most important result of this era was Kojève's work addressed to Stalin, Sofia, filo-sofia i fenomeno-logia (Sophia, Philo-sophy and Phenomeno-logy), a manuscript of more than 900 pages that was penned between 1940 and 1941.

"[20] According to Weslati, several versions of Sofia, including a typesetted copy, had been completed in the first week of March 1941, and one of them was given to Soviet vice consul in person by Kojève.

In 1999, Le Monde published an article reporting that a French intelligence document showed that Kojève had spied for the Soviets for over thirty years.

According to the 1973 account, "ten years ago or more" he was "dining in Paris with a distinguished historian of philosophy who was also a high official of the French Government", namely, Kojève.

[26] In a commentary on Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, the traditionalist conservative thinker[30][31] Roger Scruton calls Kojève "a life-hating Russian at heart, a self-declared Stalinist, and a civil servant who played a leading behind-the-scenes role in establishing both the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the European Economic Community" and states his opinion that Kojève was "a dangerous psychopath".

[11] In the 1950s, Kojève also met the rightist legal theorist Carl Schmitt, whose "Concept of the Political" he had implicitly criticized in his analysis of Hegel's text on "Lordship and Bondage" [additional citation(s) needed].

In addition to his lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Kojève's other publications include a little noticed book on Immanuel Kant and articles on the relationship between Hegelian and Marxist thought and Christianity.

His 1943 book Esquisse d'une phenomenologie du droit, published posthumously in 1981, elaborates a theory of justice that contrasts the aristocratic and bourgeois views of the right.

[33] Kojève also challenged Strauss' interpretation of the classics in the voluminous Esquisse d'une histoire raisonnée de la pensée païenne which covers the pre-Socratic philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, as well as Neoplatonism.