Among the many intellectual surprises of this fascinating book is the casual way in which Richard Velkley acknowledges the shadow of the Nazi past that hovers over the life and work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and then moves on to show how the exiled German-Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973) was filled by an awe-like admiration for Heidegger's attempt to recover the premodern roots of Western thinking in ancient Greece. This admiration of Strauss for Heidegger's intellectual courage began in the early 1920s when he was listening to lectures of the young philosopher at the University of Freiburg. Like Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), who fell under the intellectual spell of the philosopher and became his student and more, Strauss never lost the deep respect for Heidegger's radical revisioning of the premodern origins of European reflection.

For many reasons, however, one has to contrast Arendt's and Strauss's attitude with that of another exiled political philosopher from Nazi Germany, namely, Eric Voegelin (1901–1985), who never indulged in Heidegger admiration. On the contrary, Voegelin's lifelong dismissal of Heidegger's work began after his return to Vienna from a Rockefeller-funded three-year stay from 1924 to 1927 in the United States and France. His encounters with John Dewey at Columbia, Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard, and the social scientist John R. Commons at Wisconsin, along with the neo-Thomist philosophers and theologians in Paris, helped him to extract himself from the neo-Kantian methodology debates of postwar German-school philosophy. In his Autobiographical Reflections (Louisiana State University Press, 1989) Voegelin actually refers to his return in 1927 and suggests that his time in America and especially Wisconsin had “immunized” him against the work of Martin Heidegger, whose Sein und Zeit he read in 1928. However, he also mentions in the Reflections the importance of two towering intellectual figures in the German-speaking world of the 1920s who are not cited by Velkley, namely, the Viennese editor and sole contributor of the journal Die Fackel (The Torch), Karl Kraus, and Stefan George. Voegelin calls Kraus the “great artist of language who would defend the standards of language against its corruption in the current literature and especially through the journalists” (Autobiographical Reflections, 17). George, who is known in the United States primarily as a German poet, had a tremendous impact on the philosophical, aesthetic, and literary sensibilities of young philosophers, writers, and scholars, among them a generation of classicists who began to lay the groundwork for the study of the basic sources of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Italian Renaissance. Some of those scholars ended up like Strauss, Arendt, and Voegelin in American exile, radically transforming the teaching of the humanities at US universities.

For Strauss, Heidegger opened “the possibility of a genuine return to classical philosophy, to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle” (6). He was the guide who led the way to the unknown understanding of texts that were buried under layers of conventional historical interpretations, which were devoid of any recognition of their original truth. But Heidegger was not only removing misinterpretations of the ancient texts, he was in a way renewing the battle between the ancients and the moderns, a battle the Enlightenment modernists seemed to have won. Strauss became intrigued by Heidegger's assertion that the moderns were united in the “forgetting of Being” and appreciated “his accounts of ‘forgetting of Being’ as ever-deepening oblivion” that should be countered “by interpretations of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling, and Nietzsche that ascribe to these thinkers levels of insight close to, if not quite equal to, that of the greatest ancient figures” (19). Interesting again in Velkley's reconstruction of this primarily German philosophical configuration is the absence of any attempt to draw culturally deterministic lines between the mandarins of German high culture—even Nietzsche, who is often treated as the godfather of fascism—and the Nazi formation. Velkley articulates the German affinity between Strauss and Heidegger succinctly when he writes: “The shared project of the German philosophers, including Nietzsche (and Heidegger, as I will argue) could be summed up this way: Burdened with homesickness in modernity, or a sense of loss, they diagnose the ground of that loss, so that it (the illness, wound, or ugliness) is preserved somehow, or justified in the transformation. … The renewal of antiquity includes somehow the gulf, the abyss that separates modernity from antiquity” (29).

The Jewish philosopher who recognized the unusual interpretive and imaginative abilities of Heidegger was at the same time, as Velkley states, a “committed Zionist” (43). Yet he was “troubled by the attempts to fuse Jewish orthodoxy with rationalism in the Jewish Enlightenment and in its romantic-nationalist successor, Zionism” (43). In his first book, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, published in German in 1928, he emphasized the limits of reason and its unproven superiority to revealed truth (44). Still, he later recalibrated some of his critique when realizing that “orthodoxy” or “a romantic longing without content” (44) was not what he was aiming at, either. In a way, his second thoughts on the critique of the Jewish Enlightenment echoed his misgivings on the wholesale attack on modern rationalist thinking as belonging to the realm of ideological opinions since it was also threatening to include premodern reason in this indictment, instead of emphasizing its role in freeing humans from their biased and limited cave existence.

Strauss expressed his indebtedness to Nietzsche and Heidegger in a public lecture in Syracuse, New York, in 1940 when, according to Velkley, he questioned rationalistic and progressive solutions to social problems by reflecting on the German problem. He talked about “both the intellectual glory and the political misery of Germans” and traced it back to the fact that they were political latecomers as free citizens, yet as a result of their philosophical tradition they were able to be youthful critics of the misdirection of modern civilization. Velkley continues: “Strauss refers to Nietzsche's description of German thought as a longing for the past and for origins, and most of all for building a bridge leading back from the modern world to the world of Greece. Implicitly Strauss allies himself with this tendency in two ways. He is in accord with this tradition insofar as it has seen a theoretical problem in the ideas of progress and science-based civilization central to the Western Enlightenment, and thus on a practical plane he cannot deny having profound misgivings about the modern democratic natural right tradition, which his adopted country is dedicated to defending. At the same time Strauss regards … German attempts to reverse the modern development as having politically disastrous consequences, and … such consequences cannot be separated from a theoretical critique of the German tradition” (63).

Strauss was certainly aware that this critique had to include Heidegger and his support of the Nazi movement in 1933. Velkley deals at length with Heidegger's Rectoral Address of 1933, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” and contrasts it with Heidegger's attempt at self-justification from 1945, “The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” which was published by his son in 1983, seven years after his death. In that statement he blamed “mediocre and incompetent” persons for derailing “the possibility of an inner gathering and renewal of the people [das Volk] and a way for it to find its historical Western destiny. I believed that the self-renewing university could be called on to work as the standard for the inner gathering of the people.” He added: “But the question may be put: what would have happened and what could have been prevented if in 1933 all the competent forces [vermögende Kräfte] had aroused themselves and slowly, in secret persistence, purified and moderated the movement that came into power?” (85). Velkley rightly points out that Heidegger affirmed in 1945 his stance of 1933. For most critics of Heidegger, not only did this reaffirmation mean the visionary misperception of the Nazis at the beginning of their reign, but it also pointed toward major flaws in his thinking and emphasized the moral gutlessness of the philosopher in his refusal to admit this profound failure.

For Strauss the case of Martin Heidegger was more complex since he could not accept treating, as Velkley writes, his philosophy as a “version of National Socialist ideology. Even on a practical and political plane Strauss shows guarded respect for Heidegger, insofar as Strauss indicates some sympathy for his criticism of modernity. Yet Strauss wholly rejects all extremist political responses to the problems of modernity. Whereas philosophical inquiry by nature calls for radicalism in questioning, politics (which includes the political actions of philosophers as teachers and writers) by its nature requires moderation and prudence” (114). Whether one should call Leo Strauss's treatment of Heidegger's deep yet temporary support for the Nazi movement as described in this book a kind of de-Nazification of the philosopher or simply consider it an act of honest appreciation of his work, remains an open question. Yet there is no question that Richard Velkley has succeeded in writing a remarkable study about the intellectual impact of one of the master thinkers of the twentieth century.