Professor Richard Wolin

Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of Political Science, History and Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of City University of New York, where he has worked since 2000. He received a B.A. from Reed College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from York University in Toronto and has held faculty positions at Reed College and Rice University, Houston, where he was D.D. McMurtry Professor of History (1999-2000). He is on the editorial board of South Central Review, Critical Horizons, on the editorial council of Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory and the editorial committee, Intellectual History Newsletter. He is also the general editor of the book series European Perspectives: A Series in Social Philosophy and Cultural Criticism, Columbia University Press, 1989-1994 Wolin’s many books present penetrating analysis of a number of crucial twentieth century European intellectuals. His approach can be characterized as distant, sceptic, yet always with a sense of the concerns of the intellectuals he is writing about. It would make sense to characterize his own position as an intellectual as ‘Habermasian’, i.e. in the democratic tradition of the Enlightenment beyond the positions of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Like Habermas, Wolin is not only a scholar, as a contributor to a variety of periodicals (e.g. New Republic, Dissent and The Los Angeles Times) he is also a public intellectual. His interventions in public debate articulate balanced reflections on political and cultural issues of the day. Books by Wolin have been or are about to be published in Japanese, Chinese, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and Swedish. His first book Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (University of California Press, 1994; second edition; first edition 1982) is an all round, clear minded, accessible presentation of this notoriously difficult writer. Several of Wolin’s publications cover various aspects of the Frankfurt School, such as chapters in The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (Columbia University Press, 1992) and The Frankfurt School Revisited: Portrait and Profiles (Routledge, 2006). Both of these books include chapters on other German as well as a number of French intellectuals (e.g. Adorno, Löwenthal, Marcuse, Jaspers, Levinas, Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Arendt, Derrida, Foucault, Blanchot and Bataille), yet also chapters on more general issues. This 4 is also the case in Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas Ideas (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). Martin Heidegger is the subject of two volumes, a monograph: The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (Columbia University Press, 1990) and a documentation: The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (MIT Press, 1993). The concern of both of these books is the relation between Heidegger’s philosophy and his political positions, including his membership of the Nazi party and his operations as university rector. This heated question and the debates related to the question is convincingly worked through and documented in what is one of the best contributions to a clarification of a nexus that is usually denied by Heidegger’s followers. Relations between philosophy and politics is a general theme in Wolin’s writings, as it is the case in The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism From Nietzsche to Postmodernism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), in reference to Kant’s famous short essay Wolin gave his introduction to this volume the significant title ‘Answer to the Question: What is Counter-Enlightenment?’

A persistent concern is Wolin’s books is the afterlife of thinkers, in particular the various roles of Heidegger in German and French intellectual life. This is the theme in his introduction to Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism (co-edited by Wolin; University of Nebraska Press, 2005), in Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcuse Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, as well as in Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism (1995) edited by Wolin), and in a number of essays on French Heideggerianism. Wolin’s most recent book is The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton University Press 2010). In this combination of broader history and analysis of specific intellectuals (among them Sartre, Foucault, Kristeva and Badiou) Wolin in a characteristic double take points out how misinformed receptions of the Chinese cultural revolution both sparked dubious ideas and contributed to a revitalization of French intellectual life and politics. Wolin is thus an eminent representative of the great US-tradition in European intellectual history (as earlier scholars in this traditon e.g. H.Stuart Hughes and Martin Jay come to mind). His work is a significant contribution to the analysis of central intellectuals and issues in twentieth century European culture. His qualifications cover 5 crucial aspects of CEMES’ field, in particular within the cultural and intellectual sphere, yet including political dimensions. The intellectuals he takes up in his books are furthermore not only parts of cultural history, they are also in various ways points of reference in cultural theory today across the fields of the humanities. Both Wohlin’s research and his broad teaching and supervision experience, his ability to influence the public agenda and his interdisciplinary reach will be a great contribution to CEMES