The Notion of Authority in Tales of the Metric System

Abstract

One of the writers mentioned in Imraan Coovadia's novel, Tales of the Metric System (2014) is the Russian philosopher, Alexandre Kojève,1 who wrote the treatise, The Notion of Authority (which was directed at post-revolutionary Russia). In this essay I shall use the notion of authority, in various forms and understandings, as a pivot around which some important issues in the novel, Tales of the Metric System, may rotate.