One would assume that commenting in some controversial way about politics would precipitate a rapid fall from power, but that is apparently not the case. Both the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the literary critic Paul de Man have been accused of being anti-Semitic, yet their reputations have remained relatively untarnished.

Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party who was appointed director of the University of Freiburg in 1932. His writings at the time indicate strong support of the Nazi cause, and a contemporary photograph shows him in full Nazi regalia. He later denied that he had been a fervent Nazi and said he had joined the party only to save his university. Subsequent documentation proves otherwise, and, as many have noted, he never apologized for his involvement in Nazism. Yet his ideas are still widely studied and taught.

Paul de Man, a Yale professor and inaugurator of deconstruction in the United States, was found after his death to have written over a hundred articles for the Belgian collaborationist newspaper Le Soir. Both de Man and Heidegger have been the focus of vigorous arguments for and against ignoring politically reprehensible actions in favor of a body of work. De Man's reputation has perhaps suffered a bit, but he has had many heavy-hitting apologists, including Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miller. In some sense, there has been both scandal and spin, and the reputations of both de Man and Heidegger depend on the effectiveness of the latter over the former. Still, it has been hard to strip fame from those two scholars and drape them with notoriety, or even infamy, because their ideas endure.

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