Friedrich Nietzsche thought that there were two ways you could respond to what he called “the eternal recurrence of all things.” This was the idea that, as he put it in The Gay Science, “this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more.” If you were a typical human weakling, you could “throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus.” But there were other souls, greater and stronger. They could rise above the herd, stare that same demon in the eye, and respond: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

A certain dosage of Nietzschean amor fati is required for the endeavor that the political theorist Ronald Beiner undertakes in his new book, Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right. His subject is the relationship between, on the one hand, Nietzsche and the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and on the other hand Nazism — a matter of posthumous conscription in the case of Nietzsche, of intense mutual admiration in the case of Heidegger. Beiner wants to show that extreme right-wing politics were baked into the cake of their philosophies. As a result, postmodern attempts to fashion a “left-Nietzscheanism” or “left-Heideggerianism” are doomed to misfire.

We have indeed lived this argument before, and will have to live it once more, perhaps innumerable times more. It is territory trod, to little avail, by an impressive array of philosophers and intellectual historians: Georg Lukács, Jürgen Habermas, Zeev Sternhell, Richard Wolin, and many others. And Beiner calls on many of his predecessors throughout Dangerous Minds.