Geuss took both his undergraduate (B.A., summa cum laude, 1966) and graduate (Ph.D., 1971) degrees at Columbia University, where he wrote his thesis under the direction of Robert Denoon Cumming. He formerly taught at Princeton University, Columbia University, and University of Chicago in the United States and at Heidelberg and Freiburg in Germany before taking up his present post at Cambridge.

Geuss supervised the graduate work of several prominent scholars working in the history of continental philosophy, social and political philosophy and in the philosophy of art.

To date Geuss has published eight books of philosophy, of which three are collections of essays. They are: The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School; Morality, Culture, and History; Public Goods, Private Goods; History and Illusion in Politics; Glueck und Politik; Outside Ethics, Philosophy and Real Politics, and Politics and the Imagination, which has just appeared from Princeton University Press. He has also edited two critical editions of works of Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Writings from the Early Notebooks. Together with Quentin Skinner, Geuss co-edits the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series of books. Geuss has also published two collections of translations/adaptations of poetry from Ancient Greek, Latin and Old High German texts.