Mark Lilla is Professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (1993) and the editor of New French Thought: Political Philosophy (1991). His latest book is The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. »

The Reckless Mind (paperback)

Intellectuals in Politics

By Mark Lilla

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. But how can intellectuals, who should be alert to the evils of tyranny, betray the ideals of freedom and independent inquiry? How can they take positions that, implicitly or not, endorse oppression and human suffering on a vast scale?

In profiles of Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojève, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, Mark Lilla demonstrates how these thinkers were so deluded by the ideologies and convulsions of their times that they closed their eyes to authoritarianism, brutality, and state terror. He shows how intellectuals who fail to master their passions can be driven into a political sphere they scarcely understand, with momentous results for our intellectual and political lives.

Reviews

Mark Lilla is right now America's most brilliant commentator on the European intellectuals—lucid and deep at the same time, which is no small feat.
— Paul Berman

The essays that make up Mark Lilla's book... are driven by his sense of disappointment, a lover's kind of disappointment, that such profound and influential minds should have been so politically insouciant when confronted by the hectic barbarity of the 20th century.... Lilla has a gift for nimble exposition, and each study in his collection is illuminating, often revelatory.
— The New York Times Book Review

As Mr. Lilla ably shows, what is common to these thinkers is a rejection of political philosophy. They deny the possibility of a patient, sober and rational exploration of political possibilities. And even when they become disillusioned with specific tyrants—Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Khomeini—they continue to reject political moderation and balanced analysis.
— Daniel J. Mahoney, The Wall Street Journal

Lilla's accessible, summary look at eight 20th-century thinkers is a compilation of cautionary tales....a very canny book showing us how not to think and chew politics at the same time.
— Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Lilla has a gift for nimble exposition, and each study in his collection is illuminating, often revelatory. He possesses the skills of a dramatist, and the dilemmas and choices of his subjects are framed sharply though the eyes and judgements of their friends and sometimes lovers.
— Sunil Khilnani, The New York Times Book Review

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