Dangerous thinkers: 20th-century philosophers' love affair with totalitarianism.

• Author: Goldblatt, Mark
• Position: 'The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics' - Book Review

The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, by Mark Lila, New York: New York Review of Books, 216 pages, $24.95

IF PHILOSOPHERS WERE ranked like baseball players, you'd wind up with three generally agreed-upon Hall of Famers: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The major leagues would consist of the great synthesizers and systematizers, figures like Augustine and Aquinas, Avicenna and Maimonides, Kant and Hegel. Dispersed throughout the minor leagues--you can decide the level case by case--you'd find a ragtag collection of pre-Socratics, skeptics, and Stoics, churchmen, rabbis, and Muslims, along with a handful of later Europeans such as Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau, Mill, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche.

Saying that, the first thing to note about Mark Lilla's incisive new book, The Reckless Mind, is that only one of the minds he profiles, Martin Heidegger, rises even to the level of a single-A farm team. Most of the rest--including Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojeve, and Michel Foucault--are wobbly Little Leaguers. And one, Jacques Derrida, has made a career out of playing whiffle ball in his own backyard, with half the humanities professors in the United States watching and doing color commentary.

Lilla's book reminds us that some of the most renowned European thinkers of the 20th century were high-octane sons of bitches. Drawing his inspiration from Czeslaw Milosz's 1953 classic, The Captive Mind, in which the future Nobel Prize winner examined how leading intellectuals in postwar Poland became apologists for Stalinism, Lila gives us a rogues' gallery that spans 75 years of European thought.

He grants that "history dealt a bad hand" to Milosz's bunch. To speak out against the horrors of communism would have been to risk their lives. "But how are we to explain the fact," Lilla asks, "that a chorus for tyranny also existed in countries where intellectuals faced no danger and were free to write as they pleased?" Rather than stare down the reality that the extremes of Nazism and communism were flip sides of a single debased coin, the thinkers in Lilla's book were drawn to one or the other by virtue of its very extremity.

Indeed, they came to regard moderation as the overriding threat to humanity and thus turned against the great moderating force of the last 200 years, Western liberal democracy. With the stench of death camps and gulags hovering over Europe, they honed in on such abstruse, rarefied bogeymen as "capital," "bourgeois conformity," "metaphysics," "power," and "language." If political philosophy begins, as Lila says, "with Plato's critique of tyranny in the Republic," how in the last century did it degenerate to the point that "it became respectable to argue that tyranny was good, even beautiful"?

The answer Lilla proposes is both ingenious and cautionary, and serves as the unifying principle for his book. Each thinker Lila discusses attempted to reason his way out of rationality, to wriggle free from the straitjacket of common sense, to think beyond the strictures of logical thought in the belief that something truer than truth could be had. The elusive thing that is the proper object of philosophy is never quite definable, but the passionate (or reckless) pursuit of it is the driving force in the philosophical lives Lilla sketches. These are clever people. But the deification and pursuit of the irrational made fools of each of them.

The juiciest tale Lilla tells is that of Heidegger, Jaspers, and Arendt--a bizarre triangle of misplaced loyalty, romantic delusion, and philosophical penis envy whose closest political cognate would be Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Monica...