Hitler's Philosophers

Yvonne Sherratt

May 2013 · Yale University Press

About this ebook

A gripping account of the philosophers who supported Hitler's rise to power and those whose lives were wrecked by his regimeHitler had a dream to rule the world, not only with the gun but also with his mind. He saw himself as a "philosopher-leader" and astonishingly gained the support of many intellectuals of his time. In this compelling book, Yvonne Sherratt explores Hitler's relationship with philosophers and uncovers cruelty, ambition, violence, and betrayal where least expected—at the heart of Germany's ivory tower.Sherratt investigates international archives, discovering evidence back to the 1920s of Hitler's vulgarization of noble thinkers of the past, including Kant, Nietzsche, and Darwin. She reveals how philosophers of the 1930s eagerly collaborated to lend the Nazi regime a cloak of respectability: Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and a host of others. And while these eminent men sanctioned slaughter, Semitic thinkers like Walter Benjamin and opponents like Kurt Huber were hunted down or murdered. Many others, such as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, were forced to flee as refugees. The book portrays their fates, to be dispersed across the world as the historic edifice of Jewish-German culture was destroyed by Hitler.Sherratt not only confronts the past; she also tracks down chilling evidence of continuing Nazi sympathy in Western Universities today.

Ratings and reviews

Couldn't put it down. Hands down 5 stars for being intimate and exciting. Not to mention a healthy sense of caution for a lot of our philosophical tradition-continental and analytic.

People really pay this much? shocking.

About the author

Yvonne Sherratt was educated at Cambridge University, was a fellow of Corpus Christi College and most recently taught at New College, Oxford. She is author of Adorno's Positive Dialectic and Continental Philosophy of Social and Political Science.