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The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics

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Mark Lilla's book aims to be both a collection of biographical sketches of influential European intellectuals of the 20th Century and a study of the disastrous attraction political power can have on on the minds of philosophers. In six chapters, each running 30-40 pages, Lilla casts the lives of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Alexandre Kojeve, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger. Each of these thinkers, according to Lilla, at some point in their intellectual life, went astray turning from the well lit path of reason and taking up the route of "philotyranny".

Lilla's book succeeds most in giving us concise, well researched, and engagingly told stories of the thinking lives of these European intellectuals. His gift for biographical narrative rivals the best profiles of the New Yorker. But Lilla succeeds less well at demonstrating the habits of thought that attract certain intellectuals to politics or making the case for the necessarily disastrous consequences of mixing political power with philosophical thinking. Nevertheless, perhaps precisely because these biographical narratives are told with Lilla's one-sided but engaging tale of "recklessness", his book serves as a good introduction to readers familiar with the names of these revered European intellectuals who have been put off by the often ponderous (and prodigious) prose describing their work.

Lastly, haunting this text, but unfortunately never stepping forward as subject, is the ghost of Leo Strauss. He makes appearances in almost every chapter, as commentator or interlocutor, but the reader never benefits from Lilla's "open" and "clear" descriptive style in order to learn of this other important European emigre whose life and work parallels so many of Lilla's subjects. For an American writer ensconced at the University of Chicago, to avoid an exoteric treatment of the tutor of so many American public intellectuals (from Allan Bloom, Harry Jaffa, Joseph Cropsey, to Clarence Thomas, William Bennett and Irving Kristol) seems to deprive us of a fuller account of the attraction of intellectuals to public life. ~ J. D. Petersen

Lilla's account of various philosophers and their disastrous forays into the world of politics is interesting but rather unfocused and often superficial. I enjoyed his opening chapter of the relationships between Jaspers, Heidegger, and Arendt. I gained some insight into how an intelligent Jewish woman like Arendt could have fallen in love with Nazi apologist Heidegger. I remain somewhat baffled by Heidegger's love affair with Nazism except that his philosophical speculations were so abstract that they seem to have become attenuated from a realistic asssessment of politics in the real world. The next chapter on Nazi supporter Carl Schmitt was also interesting. His theologically inspired but militantly unsentimental critique of liberalism as an unrealistic vision in a harsh Hobbesian world of power politics has since gained the attention of leftist thinkers. (Schmitt first came to my attention in the early 1980s when his name began to be frequently mentioned in Telos, a leftist periodical that was in transition to a more conservative political outlook.) Lilla's chapter on Walter Benjamin fails to capture the complexity and originality of his thought. Chapter 4 concerns Alexandre Kojeve, the least well known of the theorists featured in Lilla's book, an apologist for Stalin who reintroduced Hegel into philosophical and political discussion. Lilla does not succeed in informing us of any new ideas that Kojeve contributed yet tells us that many more prominent thinkers made extravagant claims about his absolutely extraordinary importance and influence. Lilla's chapter on the notoriously irresponsible and popular Michel Foucault is a bit more informative and interesting but again somewhat superficial, especially compared to the excellent biography of Foucault by James Miller. The chapter on Derrida gives us some idea of the unreliability of deconstructionism as a tool of analysis. Its American appeal is explained by the fact that both democracy and deconstruction have the tendency to decenter reality. Lilla does succeed in showing us that Derrida's utopian wishful thinking relies on dark and irrational notions that ultimately are incompatible with a just and democratic society. The last chapter is strange--it is meant to be a summing up of the previous chapters through a discussion of the insights of Plato and a warning about the temptations of Dionysian totalitarianism. It seems to me that totalitarianism can also be Appollonian to use Nietzsche's terminology. Despite some interesting observations and comparisons, this final chapter is generally too abstract and mundane to offer much insight into contemporary philosophy's problematic relationship with politics.
I would recommend the following books on the same subject as a better investment of time: Three Intellectuals in Politics--James Joll; The Betrayal of The Intellectuals-Julien Benda (one of the earliest modern discussions of the problem--but overly conservative in that it seems to disapprove of the relationship of politics and philosophy altogether.); The Burden of Responsibility-Tony Judt, a scathing account of French intellectual subservience to Soviet Communism that makes Lilla's book seem very bland in comparison. Recent books by Russell Jacoby and Todd Gitlin (whose titles I have forgotten) offer a corrective view to Benda in which they bemoan the decline of public intellectuals and reassert the need for their ethical and progressive involvement in politics.

Very well written and very readable. Lots of interesting details about several European philosophers. Unfortunately, there isn't much beyond the biographical details. The "afterword" is the closest the book gets to a serious critique and an original contribution. (The philosopher bios are generally compiled from other biographers.)

Also, the book is really a compilation of (revisions of) previously published essays by the same author, and it shows:
there is not much that connects the chapters.

Readers interested in short and readable summaries of the intellectual and political follies of some of the 20th century's better known German and French philosophers might still find this book valuable.

This is an excellent book. It is as easy to read as it is insightful. Lilla does not separate the personal lives of the intellectuals from their work and analyzes the dangerous mix of philosophy and politics. Starting from the example of Plato and the Republic Lilla shows the attempts of many philosophers to take up - and fail - politics. he does not separate their lives from their conceptions of the world nad the manner in which they were unable to separate the political from the ideological. se .I found the critiques of Heidegger and Schmitt very useful, but I was especially drawn to Foucault and Derrida. Not because the otehr intellectuals in questions are less interesting but because the latter have shaped the postmodern intellectual framework that we have just recently began to question. the conclusion is masterful and makes an excellent case to fear the philotyrannical intelelctual as Lilla terms it. It is possible to read it in a weekend and I can find few books that offer such intellectual value for so little time.

Ok, Ok. This is a good book. First, some of the dirty facts: If you believe in objective truth, you'll like this. If you don't believe in objective truth, you won't be convinced otherwise by its largely Platonic argument. Essentially, Lilla borrows Plato's concept of rational moderation to show how a few of the well-known 20th century European intellectuals became victims of their own tyrannical appetites. Both rational and irrational behavior are inspired by Eros, but only the rational position, with proper moderation of the tyrannical and irrational appetites, can inspire moral responsibility. There's really nothing new in the ethical exposition, but the biographical portraits are good. The real gems are Lilla's lucid presentation of key points in the philosophies of each of the respective characters in question.

Lilla is describing the flip-side of the argument Tony Judt offers in The Burden of Responsibility. He offers essentially the same conclusions from a different point of view.

Lilla is masterful in revealing the excesses and foolishness of much of what American academics find profound. The critiques of Derrida and Foucault are the best I have ever read. Derrida is shown to be a charlatan-- completely bereft of any useful insights. But the core of these essays -- the relationship of personal psychology to the philosophy/politics mix -- displays a rich and insightful intelligence at work. A must-read.

The germ of The Reckless Mind was a series of intellectual biographies of influential European thinkers published in literary magazines. Each philosopher is examined firstly in terms of his thoughts, friendships and the academic milieu; secondly his opinions & actions are profiled against the political realities of the time. The author aims to understand why these men who enjoyed freedom chose to promote tyranny while demonizing the free society.

Lilla looks at Heidegger's rise in the 1920s on the concepts of 'being' & 'authenticity', his relationships with Hannah Arendt & his mentor Karl Jaspers, his support of Nazism and his post-war attempts at absolving himself. Heidegger's contemporary Carl Schmitt became an official advocate for Hitler's regime and remained a rabid antisemite until his death in 1985. His core concept was 'enmity', meaning that any entity is defined by & discovers its true nature through an enemy.

The literary critic Walter Benjamin embraced Marxism as a secular salvationist ideology, was disillusioned by the Hitler-Stalin Pact and took his own life while fleeing the Nazis. The Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève became a Stalinist, gave up philosophy for bureaucracy after the war and contributed to the formation of what would become the European Union.

Then came the PoMo prophets: the power-besotted Michel Foucault who denounced Western 'totalitarianism' but adored Mao & the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Jacques Derrida, the great deconstructor who modified his extreme skepticism in the 1990s with a touch of sentimental romanticism. For greater insight, I highly recommend Stephen Hicks' Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.

In the final chapter, Lilla discusses what he calls the 'philotyranny' of these intellectuals who were driven beyond reason by unhinged mental passions. Benjamin & Kojève displayed the most marked mystical yearnings whilst violence in various forms appealed to all: real bloodlust were most pronounced in Foucault & Schmitt. In Derrida's case, it manifested in the desire to destroy meaning; he's also the one that most desperately craved adulation & celebrity.

Despising ordinary people & everyday life, they were all antimodernist to some degree. Schmitt was what Michael Polanyi called a romantic nihilist whilst this urge erratically held Heidegger in its grip; the author agrees with Jaspers on this one, rejecting Arendt's forgiving view of Heidegger as merely a naïve romantic.

Lilla observes that the reckless mind possesses impressive powers of reason over a vast reservoir of cherished unreason; the first are harnessed to satisfy a profound desire for power/prestige. According to Eric Hoffer, it's the temperament - not the ideological content - that drives fanatics. That's why they so easily switch from one type of extremism to another.

Fitting the mould, these wreckers were slaves of their impulses. Their political thoughts (it's improper to call them philosophies) are utopian fantasies articulated via a spectrum of techniques, from insipid word-games designed to subverting reason to the despicable promotion of genocide. It's no surprise then that their offspring, the ideologies of multiculturalism & moral relativism, contain the same poisonous blend or that the true believers of these try to enforce their doctrines with equal fanatical zeal through 'politically correct' speech. Chantal Delsol explains the implications in her extended essay The Unlearned Lessons Of the Twentieth Century.

This is a wonderful, beautifully written book. Worth buying just for the Afterword about Plato's political meddling, "The Lure of Syracuse."

Arendt should certainly not be classed in with intellectuals enamored to fanatical, homicidal philosophies but an ardent, perceptive and acute critic of those philosophies. Arendt's attitude towards Heidegger can't be confused with support for actual tyranny. She may have found appealing aspects of Heidegger's philosophy that may have in turn justified tyranny and may have been blind to Heidegger's weaknesses, but she never slipped into rationalizing or justifying tyranny at all- either in her own time or in the past. Instead, Hannah Arendt was a voice of intellectual integrity and moral clarity. The same cannot be said for the intellectuals profiled in this book, which kicks derriere.

Simply, this is one of the most disingenuous books I've read in the last couple of years. Not only is Lilla often wrong in his interpretations-- only his reading of Derrida strikes me as plausible -- but the central argument of the book is utterly disingenuous. As a good Straussian, Lilla unreflectively, and anachronistically, rehearses the ancient category of Tyranny without paying any attention to the work done on the nature and scope of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. And let's not dwell on the organization of the chapters -- the chapter on Strauss is, of course, in the middle. Thus following the obtuse numerology often found in the Straussian sect, as well as the one-sided interpretation of Kojeve.

That a simplistic argument such as Lilla's, one done with blatant smugness, has received raving reviews, and has been published by the NYRB, are signs that the world of letters has indeed -- to borrow an apt phrase from Godfrey Hodgson --"turned right side up."