New York Times review: The Reckless Mind: When Smart People Get Dumb Ideas

The essays that make up Mark Lilla’s book — essays on the Nazi tastes of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, on Walter Benjamin’s mystical Marxism, on Alexandre Kojeve’s weakness for Stalin and on the antiliberal fusillades of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida — are driven by his sense of disappointment, a lover’s kind of disappointment, that such profound and influential minds should have been so politically insouciant when confronted by the hectic barbarity of the 20th century.