In his book, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft engages three seminal figures of twentieth-century philosophy—each a German-Jewish émigré, each a student of Martin Heidegger, each confronting Heidegger’s politics and philosophy in his or her work, and each a refugee from the Nazi regime with which Heidegger notoriously aligned himself. Obviously, it barely warrants mentioning that Heidegger’s influence on the contemporary intellectual world is difficult to overstate, especially in the areas of philosophy and political thought. Thus, the first comparative study of the ideas of arguably his three most prominent Jewish students—each of whom suffered at the hands of his political allies—clearly merits scholarly attention.

In his introduction to Thinking in Public, Wurgaft notes that though the book’s title may suggest a study of public intellectuals, he is interested in a different question. He wants to consider how having an audience to address affects the intellectual activity of thinking itself. For Wurgaft, two events framed how Leo Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas, and Hannah Arendt would approach the question of intellectuals: the Dreyfus Affair and Heidegger’s Nazi turn in the lead-up to World War II. These events prompted a common concern that he sees each of the three thinkers confronting: a deep tension between the figure of the intellectual and their public. This theme often remains in the background through much of the study. There should be no confusion that this is primarily a work of intellectual history, focusing on the events and sources that formed these thinkers’ ideas, and on the development of their thought.

In general, however, the common thread Wurgaft highlights among the thinkers’ assessments of the role of intellectuals in public life is their recognition of the ancient notion that philosophy and politics have an uneasy relationship, that the pursuit of philosophical truth can never—and perhaps should never—be a matter for public consumption. Consequently, each thinker tended to circumscribe the public function that intellectuals should serve rather narrowly, according to Wurgaft. For Strauss and Arendt, this was largely the educative function, while for Levinas it meant an obscure notion he called “witnessing” to the public for the struggles of those who suffer in the world. However, Wurgaft also finds among the three a common fascination with the figure of Socrates and his practice of engaging his fellow citizens in the activity of thinking itself. Relying especially on Arendt’s account of Socrates, he argues that each in different ways and to greater and lesser degrees saw a kind of secondary function of the intellectual in him, that of teaching fellow citizens how to think. This is, of course, the notion of thought that Arendt famously articulated in her later work as the “two-in-one” dialogue I have with myself. Wurgaft suggests that they might have viewed Socratic thought as a latter-day answer to the political theology problem: a turn toward the notion of conscience as a replacement for public religion.

As noted, this is primarily a work of intellectual history, and as such, it is a solid book. Wurgaft is a fine writer and an able historian. He is conversant in the relevant secondary literature and many of the more recent textual sources. He also has a strong grasp of the philosophical literature of the time period, and is able to make helpful links to the broader philosophical questions that were being asked. A natural storyteller, he brings his subjects to life, possessing knowledge of the events that shaped them, as well as their intellectual milieux and interlocutors. The exchanges between Jean-Paul Sartre and Levinas, for instance, have a gripping quality. They leave the reader wishing for perhaps a broader narrative that focused not just on his subjects, whom he sees as fundamentally diffident about the relation of the intellectual to the public, but one which also explored those such as Sartre who argued for more engagement.

This presentation of their views on intellectuals—that, normatively speaking, they should remain politically disengaged—is an interpretation that could be challenged in Arendt’s case. Wurgaft states that “Arendt called for public life, but not one in which intellectuals were to play a special role; and yet it is difficult to argue that she was not an intellectual who wrote and acted in public herself. At the end of her career she held out a political role for philosophy that was essentially educative” (p. 224). This may not capture the full sense of Arendt’s position on the political role of intellectuals, which she presented in her essay “Truth and Politics” in Between Past and Future (1961). Given the theme of the book and Wurgaft’s obvious skill as an intellectual historian, it is striking that he neglects this piece. There, she fleshed out her position on the question of intellectuals and politics. She argued that political opinion and the intellectual pursuit of truth appealed to two fundamentally distinct forms of validity. Intellectuals, or “truth-tellers,” as she called them, must seek to establish their claims in such a way that there should, in principle, be no doubt about their factual or rational status. Political opinion, on the other hand, is the presentation of one’s distinctive perspective on the political world, and thus can never have the status of truth. Because of this distinction, intellectuals are not acting politically when they engage in truth-telling; rather, they are establishing the facts on which political opinions should be based. But the key to Arendt’s position is that these are not mutually exclusive activities; they are, rather, overlapping roles. Intellectuals may establish truth claims, but they may also go further and act in their capacity as citizens by offering their opinion about the political meaning of those truth claims.

In an unpublished lecture from 1967 called “Intellectuals and Responsibility,” Arendt said: “Intellectuals have greater responsibility because they know more … [but that] knowledge does not mean that they are able to arrive at better … judgments.… Their special responsibility lies in giving facts of the matter after which they resume their roles as judging citizens like everybody else.… Each one of us wears two hats. We … teach the truth as we see it … [but] in addition, we are also citizens, and take our responsibilities.” (This manuscript is in the Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress. It is very rough, and so I have edited the quote somewhat.)

Perhaps the major complaint a reader may have with his book is that Wurgaft left the most urgent questions that the study raises unaddressed by focusing on these particular thinkers, and by interpreting their ideas as having a consensus on the need for intellectuals to remain primarily politically disengaged. It remains the case today that the function of intellectuals within the public sphere is a deeply contested question, and the general absence in the book of voices such as Sartre’s, who saw intellectuals as having a more activist role, seems likely to limit the relevance that Thinking in Public may otherwise have had. This is, of course, a work of intellectual history being reviewed in a political science journal, and thus much of this criticism largely reflects the differing interests and objectives of political theorists and intellectual historians. In sum, Wurgaft offers us a deft and thoughtful comparative study of three seminal thinkers of the twentieth century, each of whom thought deeply about the unique character of that eventful century’s politics, and about the role intellectuals should have in that political context.