Dangerous Thinkers examines the role played by the antimodernist political philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger in the return of the Far Right. In his brief, thoughtful book Ronald Beiner argues that in view of recent far-right political challenges, proponents of liberal democracy must once again grapple with basic questions about human value and purpose. What is liberal democracy? Why is it preferable to the conservative regimes that it replaced? What is it about far-right politics that proves attractive to some people? Beiner maintains that liberal political theorists, after focusing so long on procedural issues within a liberal modernity whose legitimacy was assured, must once again defend it.

The book's two main chapters indicate that care must be taken when reading Nietzsche and Heidegger, given that—according to Beiner—these thinkers exhibit recklessness, megalomania, and even insanity. Beiner shows these they also share many views: that the “decline of the West” began 2500 years ago with Plato (!); that nihilism reigns in liberal democratic Europe either because of the “death of God” (Nietzsche) or the “eclipse of Being” (Heidegger); that the “revolt of the masses” has crushed the rank order needed for cultural vitality; and that only a dramatic cultural transformation can save the West from “the last man” (Nietzsche) or from “inauthenticity” (Heidegger).

According to Beiner, for Nietzsche “Western civilization is going down the toilet because of too much emphasis on truth and rationality and too much emphasis on human dignity” (24). Two interrelated ideas govern Nietzsche's account of such a “decadent” modernity: the rise of nihilism and the disappearance of the tragic sense of life. Nihilism follows from the loss of a meaning-giving horizon, as when natural science undermined religious faith, thereby hastening the “death of God.” The weak-willed “last man” of modernity forgoes risk in exchange for comfort and security, which according to Nietzsche fail to compensate for loss of meaning. In contrast, pre-Socratic culture operated within a meaning-giving horizon, offered by a tragic sense of life, which staved off nihilism by valorizing courageous, steely resolve in the face of life's bleakness. Such “active nihilism” requires keeping the bow of life taut, that is, organizing a strict, hierarchical, patriarchal society. Although an atheist, Nietzsche understood that new cultural gods, born of noble lies, were required to sustain a viable European society, on the basis of which there might arise “overmen” who would “justify” human existence. Freud and Weber shared Nietzsche's gloomy assessment of a neurotic humankind trapped in the iron cage of rational efficiency. Beiner calls them pessimistic liberals for whom there is no viable alternative to an unhappy modernity. In contrast, Nietzsche was a hopeful antiliberal, an ultra-reactionary longing to overcome what he regarded as the baleful consequences of the French Revolution (116).

Heidegger attributed the West's 2500-year decline to the fact that humankind's unique endowment—understanding what, that, and how beings are—has become increasingly attenuated. In Being and Time, he contrasts inauthentic, escapist human existence with authentic existence, which affirms mortality and thus allows for disclosure of new historical possibilities. Written shortly after the end of World War I, Being and Time describes resolute authenticity (“running forward towards death”) in almost martial terms, as if contrasting combat's intensity with civilian life's shallowness. What is the point of life, Nietzsche and Heidegger asked, as do many on today's far right, without a significant place for valor, sacrifice, comradeship, endurance, and glory, so prized by the ancient Greeks?

As Beiner writes, Heidegger concluded that the modern industrial understanding of Being discloses everything (including humankind) as raw material for enhancing power for its own sake. National Socialism supposedly offered a “third way” between capitalism and Soviet Marxism, ideologies that threatened to extinguish humankind's relation with Being. Having joined the Nazi party in 1932, Heidegger never abandoned his faith in Nazism's “inner truth and greatness,” but he did conclude that the movement was just another power-oriented industrial disclosure of beings. Sounding like Nietzsche, Heidegger concluded in 1966 that “only a god can save us now.”

In view of far-right challenges to the legitimacy of liberal modernity, Beiner questions Francis Fukuyama's notion that such modernity constitutes “the end of history.” Beiner might have noted, however, that in The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama asked whether people would long remain satisfied with the freedom and material well-being provided by liberal democracy, or whether thymos—the thirst for recognition and respect—would reassert itself. Both Beiner and Fukuyama acknowledge the limitations of liberal democracy, but reject far-right alternatives to it, given that the last full-scale revolt against modernity—National Socialism—resulted in such vast destruction.

Beiner might also have emphasized that most prewar European humanists contrasted the nobility of ancient Greece with modernity's tawdry commercialism. Heidegger was only the most famous of many German philosophers who became fellow travelers or outright Nazis. Even noted left-wing German contemporaries of Heidegger, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, criticized Enlightenment modernity's “domination of nature” in ways remarkably similar to Heidegger. Despite Nietzsche's arch-conservative views, many left-wing intellectuals have shared his contempt for bourgeois society, enjoyed his antimetaphysical rhetoric (despite the fact that he affirmed his metaphysics of the Will to Power), and even fancied themselves “higher men.” Clearly, antimodernity sentiments are found not only on the far right.

Beiner might have noted how postmodern theorists such as Jacques Derrida played key roles in introducing Nietzsche's and Heidegger's thinking to North American humanities departments. Deconstructing master narratives that justified European colonialism meant showing that liberal universalism was merely an ideological cloak for gaining power. The concomitant rise of multiculturalism that denies a universal humanity appeals to the Far Right, which for millennia rank ordered people in terms of caste, and more recently in terms of race. Today, far-right advocates urge white Americans, who are confronted with declining economic and/or social status, to vanquish less worthy tribes in the struggle for recognition, respect, and power.

As Beiner notes, the work of defending liberal democracy has been made all the more difficult by the election of Donald Trump. Such a defense, in my view, should avoid depicting all right-wingers as protofascists. There are still far more right-wingers than far-right-wingers. Nevertheless, having read Beiner's provocative book, we may ask: Does Trump's election presage what Plato foresaw as the inevitable decline from democracy to tyranny? Will human “progress” once again be viewed—as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hitler viewed it—as a decline from a higher, more vital, more authentic sort of humankind? Can liberal democracy develop a new version of universal mutual respect that takes into account resentment from groups who rightly felt excluded or oppressed by the ideals of European Enlightenment? Will increasingly large numbers of people be persuaded that violent, extralegal means are needed to halt the ostensible cultural, economic, and racial decline of the West? These are only a few of the troubling questions to which Beiner's book gives rise.