Genius sometimes comes cheaply

... or free, as the case may be: the entire text of Kojéve's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel available here.

Kojéve contends that Hegel’s work is really about man’s struggle to be autonomous, to achieve ‘satisfaction’ in overcoming the Other to whom he is beholden, be it God or capitalism or the socio-historical archetype of the Master. Kojéve congealed the unfolding of history as depicted in (and includes the publication of) the Phenomenology of Spirit and took his cues from there.

The problem of man’s satisfaction is one of the greatest raised by the debate surrounding the Phenomenology. Is Man satisfied in achieving self-consciousness? Is Man satisfied in achieving a self-mastery that is beholden to no one? Is Man satisfied momentarily in the achievement of self-consciousness? Kojéve seems to deny the basis of man’s experience as radically free, or ‘thrown’. How is Man to live in his ‘satisfaction’? - that is the question that is posed in the last chapter of Kojéve's book. And Kojéve seems to be saying - we’ve arrived at the problem of Nietzsche’s Ultimate Man; but that means that Kojéve has regressed some fifty years in the history of thought.