A sharp, often contentious study of the philosophers formed in Heidegger’s orbit and the problem of what it means to inherit a thinker whose brilliance is inseparable from political disgrace.

Wolin looks at Arendt, Löwith, Jonas, and Marcuse not simply as “students” but as intellectual descendants who each carried, revised, resisted, or broke from Heidegger in different ways. The book is strongest when it treats philosophy as a lived and compromised field rather than an abstract lineage chart: friendship, seduction, Jewish exile, German thought, fascism, influence, and betrayal all sit inside the argument.

It isn’t just for Heidegger specialists. It lands with readers interested in twentieth-century European thought, intellectual history, Frankfurt School lines, Arendt, Jewish modernity, and the old ugly question of whether ideas can be cleanly separated from the lives and politics of the people who make them. 

Princeton University Press hardback, 2001.