There are moments in the reception of particular thinkers – especially in translation – when the literature about them, building up a critical mass, explodes, giving rise to whole new subdivisions of the academic industry. It happened to Hegel and Marx in the 1970s and to Benjamin and Habermas in the 1980s. Now it is happening to Heidegger.

Such events are rarely of merely academic interest and Heidegger’s case is no exception. Indeed, following Victor Farias’s mould-breaking Heidegger et le Nazisme (1987, translated 1989) debates about Heidegger’s work have acquired a directly political dimension, absent from European philosophy since the heyday of Marxism in the early 1970s. It used to be said that Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism was a barrier to the dissemination of his thought; today, it is the means of its publicity.*

At first sight, it is hard to see why this should have occurred. After all, Heidegger’s involvement with fascism in the 1930s was never a secret; nor is the idea that it was intrinsically linked to his philosophy a new one. Karl Lowith, a one-time pupil, made the connection at the time, in an essay which was published in Les Temps Modernes after the war. He was followed by Habermas in his review of Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), Lukács in The Destruction of Reason (1954), and Adorno in The Jargon of Authenticity (1964) – a work which gives free and splenetic rein to an analysis which Adorno had held since the early thirties.

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* Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, translated by Allan Blunden, London, HarperCollins, 1993. 407pp., £20 hb., 0 00 215399 8. London, Fontana, 1994. £8.99 pb., 0 00 686187 3.

Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany, Cambridge MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1993. x + 285pp., £23.95 hb., 0 674 387112.

Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 1993. xiii + 608pp., £45.00 hb., 0 520 08150 1.