Karl Löwith

A student of Heidegger and Husserl, Löwith turned his exile from Nazi Germany into a body of work that questioned the century's faith in historical progress. His 1949 book Meaning in History argued that Enlightenment ideas of history moving toward a goal — from Vico to Marx — were secularized versions of Christian providence, stripped of the theology that made them coherent. Forced out of Germany in 1934 over his Jewish ancestry, he taught in Italy, Japan, and the United States before returning to a professorship at Heidelberg in 1952.