Raymond Geuss

Raymond Geuss (; born 1946) is an American political philosopher and scholar of 19th and 20th century European philosophy. He is a professor emeritus in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge. Geuss is primarily known for his early account of ideology critique in The Idea of a Critical Theory; his works instrumental to the emergence of political realism in Anglophone political philosophy, including Philosophy and Real Politics; and his essays on topics including aesthetics, Nietzsche, contextualism, phenomenology, intellectual history, and ancient philosophy.

Life Geuss was educated at Columbia University, receiving a B.A. in 1966 and a Ph.D. in 1971. His Ph.D. thesis was written under the direction of Robert Denoon Cumming. Geuss also worked with Sidney Morgenbesser and Robert Paul Wolff during this time.

Geuss taught at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago in the United States, and at Heidelberg University and the University of Freiburg in Germany before taking up a lecturing post at the University of Cambridge in 1993. In 2000 he became a naturalised British citizen. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2011.

Geuss has supervised the graduate work of several prominent scholars of philosophy. His students also include lawyer J. Richard Cohen, and philosopher Cornel West.

Work Geuss has published 16 books of philosophy, including Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), A World Without Why (2014), and Not Thinking Like a Liberal (2022). He has co-edited two critical editions of works of Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Writings from the Early Notebooks. Geuss has also published two collections of translation-adaptations of poetry from Ancient Greek, Latin and Old High German texts. No one among contemporary moral and political philosophers writes better essays than Raymond Geuss. His prose is crisp, elegant, and lucid. His arguments are to the point. And, by inviting us to reconsider what we have hitherto taken for granted, he puts in question not just this or that particular philosophical thesis, but some of the larger projects in which we are engaged. Often enough Geuss does this with remarkable economy, provoking us into first making his questions our own and then discovering how difficult it is to answer them.

Books