The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics

In 1953 Czeslaw Milosz published The Captive Mind, his classic study of how intellectuals in postwar Eastern Europe were tempted to collaborate with the Communist system under which they lived. But they were hardly unique. European history of the past century is full of examples of philosophers, writers, and jurists who, whether they lived in democratic, Communist, or fascist societies, supported and defended totalitarian principles and horrific regimes.
How can intellectuals, who should be most alert to the evils of tyranny, betray the liberal ideals of freedom and independent inquiry? How can they take political positions that, implicitly or not, endorse oppression and human suffering on a vast scale? In profiles of Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojeve, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, Mark Lilla demonstrates how the convulsions of the twentieth century shaped the political sensibilities of important thinkers who were so deluded by the ideologies of the time that they closed their eyes to brutality, coercion, and state terror.

Mark Lilla is Professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.