The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

Durant’s book was published in 1926, and so none of its subjects were born in the 20th century (the youngest, Bertrand Russell, was born in 1872). Among 20th-century European philosophers, the Germans once again loomed large, but for the worst of reasons. Two of Germany’s greatest minds, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, lent their immense intellectual weight to the Nazi regime, Schmitt as a jurist and Heidegger as the rector of a prominent university.

Other Germans, especially Jewish Germans, had their worldview irrevocably shaped by experiencing the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, directly or indirectly. Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School wrestled with the political and social implications of the rise of totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt traveled to Jerusalem for the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a major Nazi official kidnapped by Israeli officials. His trial led her to coin the term “the banality of evil” in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) to describe moral collapse as a matter of bureaucratic routine rather than sadism.

World War II cast a long shadow over non-Germans as well. The Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre had been a prisoner of war and then lived under Nazi occupation in France, experiences which helped inform his embrace of existentialism, emphasizing the absurdity and often pointless cruelty of life. Sartre also outraged his fellow Frenchmen by openly endorsing the Algerian uprising against French rule not only as justified, but also as a noble unleashing of violence against a cruel oppressor. Sartre’s longtime partner, Simone de Beauvoir, made a major contribution to feminist theory. Her book The Second Sex (1949) criticized the way in which men were considered the default form of humanity, leading to various forms of oppression and discrimination against women.

Finally, the most significant American thinker of the 20th century is generally considered to be John Rawls, whose 1971 work A Theory of Justice (revised many times throughout his long career) sought the most comprehensive possible foundation for a liberal political theory. Rare among the voices of a violent and tumultuous century, Rawls was relatively optimistic that people of different backgrounds could come together and form a consensus on universal principles of social living, while pursuing their own ideal of the good in their private lives.