Feuer was born in Manhattan, grew up on the Lower East Side, and attended DeWitt Clinton High school.
He graduated from City College with distinction in 1931, and was awarded a Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1935. for a dissertation in philosophy entitled "The philosophical analysis of space and time", supervised by Alfred North Whitehead.
[2][3] After World War II he taught at Vassar College and the University of California at Berkeley, where he early witnessed some of the student unrest about which he was to write.
His experiences at Berkeley, where he challenged left wing student movements and professors who ceded to their demands, led Feuer to reject left wing, radical politics and he wrote continuously after this period about the corrupting influences of ideology on thought, the dangers of totalitarianism in the modern world and the role of the United States as a bulwark against tyranny and authoritarianism in the modern world.
His edited collection, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (1959) is one of the most widely used readers on Marxian thought ever published.