The place of Martin Heidegger in the Western canon of philosophical thought is assured, even if most analytic philosophers still studiously avoid him (for reasons of idiom more than anything else). His place with respect to the canon of Western political thought is far more ambiguous, even if we bracket the fraught question of his Nazi involvement. In the 1950s and 1960s, when existentialism was big, some minimal acquaintance with his thought was necessary for anyone who even pretended to know what was going on in European thought. In the 1970s and 1980s, this imperative began to fade—at least for political theorists. The advent of Rawlsianism, Reaganism, the liberal/communitarian debate, and (finally) multiculturalism made acquaintance with Heidegger's philosophy appear increasingly recherché.

Secondary works on Heidegger's thought aimed at political theorists often do little to ameliorate this situation. They either presume a level of involvement with his texts that few novices can fairly be asked to muster, or they are pitched at such a level of analytic generality that few will see what all the fuss is about. In other words, either Heidegger remains forbiddingly opaque or he becomes all too accessible and innocuous—like Wittgenstein, a dissolver of philosophical “pseudo-problems” and not much more. It is the great merit of both books under review that they avoid these extremes, making Heidegger's thought relevant to political theorists and students of politics more generally.

Gregory Bruce Smith's Martin Heidegger makes a vigorous case for the relevance of Heidegger's philosophy to our globalizing, technological, and increasingly cosmopolitan civilization. It does so with no apologies, and in uncluttered English prose. If one had to recommend a single secondary work to students or colleagues beginning their study of Heidegger, Smith's book would probably be it. Or—to qualify that judgment just a bit—Chapters 3 (on An Introduction to Metaphysics), 4 (on Being and Time), 7 (on Heidegger's critique of technology), and 8 (on the place of art, poetry and Gelassenheit) provide intelligent and accessible yet sophisticated discussions of key aspects of his philosophy. Any students who carefully make their way through these chapters (especially 3 and 4) would be rewarded with a reasonably sharp picture of Heidegger's project and its overall trajectory.

Smith's Heidegger is a kind of foundationalist—a characterization that will surprise many who think of him as the intellectual godfather of any number of antifoundationalist schools of thought (Foucaultian, deconstructionist, postmodern, etc.). Smith's characterization is aimed precisely against the antifoundationalist interpretation, which he views as facile and misleading.

Despite a certain amount of polemical overstatement, Smith does have a point. No reader of Being and Time can doubt that Heidegger was looking to uncover, or make explicit, what he thought was the existential-ontological ground of human existence. This ground he conceived in terms of a modified version of the phenomenological idea of a life-world (Lebenswelt), an idea he hooked up to an “ek-static” conception of human temporality, one in which the present is constituted by our projection of possibilities into the future, and our rootedness in the pregiven world of a particular cultural-historical situation. The result—the distinctively Heideggerian idea of human being as Being-in-the-world or “thrown projection”—has been tremendously influential. With it, Heidegger highlighted a raft of Greek, Christian, and Cartesian prejudices underwriting the contemplative (detached, theoretical, unworldly) idea of the self. Taken as a whole, the philosophical-theological tradition covers over the involved character of human being, the fact that we are always already acting and making in a world (understood not as a thing or collection of things but as a totality of referential relationships).

It is this “priority of the practical” that Smith wants to rescue from anti-foundationalist or “post–metaphysical” readings of Heidegger, readings that privilege his “destruction” of traditional ontology over the actual results of his self-described “fundamental” ontology. What Smith likes about Heidegger's relentless emphasis on the priority of the “pre–theoretical” is that it reminds us that we—thrown, possibility-projecting Dasein—are centrally implicated in how our shared world comes to presence, how it is preserved, and how (in light of the future) it can be altered. “Being” is a temporalized presencing process—a disclosing of different referential totalities and the possibilities implicit in them—that cannot occur without human beings.

Heidegger, then, teaches us that without human beings, “Being would not be” (p. 89). Moreover, he teaches us that we are responsible for how Being presences, even if this presencing process is not entirely under our control (the dream of metaphysics). We can understand and act in our world as “one” or “they” understand(s) it. Or we can “resolutely” project new possibilities for our society and way of life, possibilities informed by a profound and novel appropriation of the “roots” of our culture and the radical possibilities they open up. This is what Heidegger, in the famous Chapter 5 of Division II of Being and Time, calls the “moment of vision” (Augenblick).

Smith is well aware of the dangers of a contempt for the passive, the received, and the “everyday” that such a stance implies. In Heidegger's case, it led—eight years after the publication of Being and Time—to the embrace of Hitler and National Socialism as representing such a “moment of vision,” a “resolute” projection of possibilities. Smith does not shy away from the moral disaster and sheer stupidity of Heidegger's initial enthusiasm for the Nazi “conservative revolution.” However, he reminds us that what made this enthusiasm possible was less the teaching of Being and Time than Heidegger's nationalism and the formalism of his existential ontology. One can easily come up with a list of men or women of vision who are more palatable than Hitler and (arguably) truer to Heidegger's conception of “authentic resolve.” Smith (somewhat implausibly) instances “the Churchills and Roosevelts, the Reagans and the Thatchers” as “resolute” leaders who “fought and won the hot and allegedly cold wars” (p. 142).

The problem with Smith's “practical” reading of Being and Time is less the rightward tilt of such examples than the fact that it privileges the “moment of vision” passage as the interpretive key to the whole work (pp. 99–111). This makes “co-historicizing” and the “futural co-Destiny of a people” the gravitational center of Heidegger's thought. But the idea of a “rooted” people manfully following a “resolute” leader is clearly only one of the paths opened by Being and Time. It is, moreover, a path in tension with many of the more obvious individualist themes (such as being-toward-death and the “call of conscience”) for which the book is famous. The Socratic and Kierkegaardian elements of Being and Time sit more than a little uneasily with the Herderian and Nietzschean elements.

Smith's interpretation will be of most interest to those who seek a political Heidegger not reducible to Nazism or something very much like it. Smith goes so far as to state that “beyond all the hyperventilating preoccupation with ‘Heidegger's Nazism,’ his concern for encouraging modern man to take responsibility for future generations seems to me an altogether noble undertaking” (p. 110, Smith's emphasis). This is a courageous statement to make at the present time. It is a tribute to his scholarship that he makes a persuasive case that this undertaking—the call to responsibility for the world we live in—was Heidegger's guiding philosophical passion. I would merely add that it is a pity Smith thinks that the subsequent “post–metaphysical” writings are a retreat from this project, a regress into bad poetry and/or something very much like metaphysics.

Nikolas Kompridis's Critique and Disclosure has, as its title suggests, a different agenda. The book is not centrally concerned with explicating Heidegger or offering an interpretation of a political Heidegger that deviates from the norm. Rather, Kompridis's primary project is to preserve and renew the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, and the broader tradition of German philosophy it has always drawn upon. He worries that Jürgen Habermas's linguistic turn toward communicative rationality and a normative notion of intersubjectivity has impoverished both the reception of the German philosophical tradition (much of which gets dismissed as entangled in “the philosophy of the subject”) and the potential of critical theory itself.

On one level, Kompridis's concerns are familiar. He thinks that Habermas's turn away from the emphatic (and substantive) conception of rationality manifest in the first-generation Frankfurt School theorists has produced a narrow focus on procedural forms of rationality derived, for the most part, from the idea of undistorted communication. This focus restricts the reach of critical theory, leading it to concentrate on the same issues of basic institutional legitimacy that have been the bread and butter of contemporary liberal theory. The ultimate result is a flattened version of critical theory, one divested of much of its power to disclose new social and political possibilities, one that seems little more than a prolix German Dopplegänger of John Rawls.

To his credit, Kompridis does not argue for a return to the more emphatic conception of rationality that guided the earlier Frankfurt School. That conception—in which a philosophical reason (available only to specialists) used traditional distinctions like that between essence and existence to deduce the historically possible potentials of radical reform—posited too great a gap between critical reason and everyday communicative practice. It is precisely that gap that Habermas tried to overcome in his theory of communicative action (and his critique of the “philosophy of the subject”).

Yet in the course of bringing critical theory down to linguistic earth (and the “rationality potential built into communicative action”), Habermas felt obliged to target not just the antidemocratic “system imperatives” of bureaucratic and economic structures, but also the traditions and background practices that constitute much of our Lebenswelt. Put somewhat differently, the primary task of Habermas's theory of communicative action is to deploy the distinction between instrumental and communicative rationality in a way that a) reveals the Janus-faced nature of rationalization as such; b) defends the dialogical practices and norms of the “life-world” from the ever-proliferating encroachments of the “system”; and c) rationalizes the contents of the life-world itself by bringing traditional norms and practices before the bar of an unrestricted communicative rationality (one that insists on undistorted communication and recognizes the “force of the better argument” as the only true authority).

It is with regard to (c) that Kompridis thinks that Habermas overreaches and, in doing so, impoverishes both critical theory and our reception of the German philosophical tradition. Communicative rationality in its most self-reflective form—as what Habermas calls “discourse” (Diskurs)—is set up as arbiter, testing all comers for conformity to canons of procedural or public reason. Practices, norms, and institutions that cannot survive exposure to such an unrestricted test of their (communicative) universalizability stand condemned as irrational and “untrue.” But what if every iteration of procedural or “public” rationality is grounded in a life-world or upon a set of background practices that it cannot make entirely explicit? What if there is an ineradicable “hermeneutic” horizon to our understanding and practice of communicative rationality? What if validity (the ultimate product of undistorted communication, as theorized by Habermas) is not prior to meaning, but parasitic upon it (p. 46)?

If the answer to these questions is yes—as both Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty have argued—then it would suggest that Habermas's attempt to bracket the Heideggerian concern with the “world-disclosive” dimension of language is misplaced. It would suggest the need for a rapprochement between the normative insights of Habermas vis-à-vis modernity, and the “epistemological” insights of Heidegger vis-à-vis the background practices and meanings that make the “world” of democracy possible. It would suggest that we conceive reason as having a possibility-disclosing dimension, not just a procedural and testing one (p. 238).

Keeping our democratic institutions and practices alive is a project that frequently takes the form of radical reinterpretations (or appropriations) of our past—of possibilities that have been “dimmed down” in the course of time. What democracy means, as both a practice and an ideal, is an ongoing interpretive and conflictual project, one in need of “strong poets” who think it anew, as well as procedural umpires who try to minimize unreflective context dependence. Kompridis argues—persuasively, I think—that contemporary critical theory would do well to abandon its insistence that communicative rationality is the quasi-transcendental core of democratic legitimacy, and that any concern with the “world-disclosive” dimension of language leads, inevitably, to anarchism or reaction. Whether the disclosive dimension can provide a new basis for critical theory and practice, as Kompridis suggests, is another question.