Richard Wolin | Britannica

Richard Wolin

Contributor

BIOGRAPHY

Richard Wolin is an intellectual historian. He is Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he has worked since 2000. He is known for studying the particular contributors to and sources of postmodernism's late 20th-century formulation, including Nietzsche and Heidegger. Before going to CUNY, he was a professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

His books include The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader; The Frankfurt School Revisited; The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s; The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism; and Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology.

Primary Contributions (13)

Articles

metaphysics

Metaphysics, branch of philosophy whose topics in antiquity and the Middle Ages were the first causes of things and the nature of being. In postmedieval philosophy, however, many other topics came to be included under the heading “metaphysics.” (The reasons for this development will be discussed in…

continental philosophy

Pierre-Félix Guattari

Jean-François Lyotard

Publications (3)

The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (March 2012)

By Richard Wolin

Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who's who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China's Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless exposé of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, The Wind from the East tells the colorful story of this legendary period in France. Richard Wolin shows how French...

The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (March 2006)

By Richard Wolin

Fifteen years ago, revelations about the political misdeeds of Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man sent shock waves throughout European and North American intellectual circles. Ever since, postmodernism has been haunted by the specter of a compromised past. In this intellectual genealogy of the postmodern spirit, Richard Wolin shows that postmodernism's infatuation with fascism has been widespread and not incidental. He calls into question postmodernism's claim to have inherited the mantle of the...

The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (December 1992)

This anthology is a significant contribution to the debate over the relevance of Martin Heidegger's Nazi ties to the interpretation and evaluation of his philosophical work. Included are a selection of basic documents by Heidegger, essays and letters by Heidegger's colleagues that offer contemporary context and testimony, and interpretive evaluations by Heidegger's heirs and critics in France and Germany.In his new introduction, "Note on a Missing Text," Richard Wolin uses the absence from this...