WOLIN, Richard

PERSONAL: Born in Great Lakes, IL; son of Melissa Wolin (a teacher). Education: Reed College, B.A., 1974; York University, Ph.D., 1980.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—History Program, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10016. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Reed College, Portland, OR, assistant professor of history, 1982-84; Rice University, Houston, TX, professor of history, 1984-2000; City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, NY, distinguished professor of history, 2000—.

WRITINGS:

Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1982, with a new introduction, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1994.

The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1990.

(Editor) The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1991, new edition, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1993.

The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor) Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, translated by Gary Steiner, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1995.

Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2001.

Also a regular contributor to New Republic and Dissent.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Seduction of Unreason: The Persistence of Counter-Enlightenment in Modern Thought, for Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ); research on the post-World War II French Left.

SIDELIGHTS: Richard Wolin is one of the foremost—and most controversial—scholars of twentieth-century continental political philosophy in the United States. Although the bulk of his work is about German political philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger, he has also written about German literary and social critic Walter Benjamin and about Heidegger's famous students, including Hannah Arendt and Karl Löwith.

Wolin's first book, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, is a revised version of his doctoral thesis. This book, the first English-language text to provide a comprehensive overview of Benjamin's major works, is "a remarkable achievement of critical analysis, written with poise and generosity," Nicholas Jacobs wrote in New Statesman. Although Benjamin was a complex figure, an adherent of Marxism, Zionism, and mysticism who wrote on many widely varied topics, "Wolin, to his credit, stresses the unifying tendencies in Benjamin's thought" in his "admirable summaries and sharp critiques," a critic noted in Choice.

Wolin's body of work on Heidegger began in the early 1990s, when he published The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger and The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. With these books, Wolin dove into an already-raging controversy over the extent to which Heidegger's philosophy leads inevitably to the Naziism Heidegger embraced. In The Politics of Being Wolin presents a "very lucidly written and persuasively argued brief" for the position that Heidegger's philosophy and his politics are inextricably linked, as Horst Mewes claimed in the American Political Science Review. As he had earlier done with Benjamin, Wolin carefully and without oversimplifying explains the overarching themes in the work of a complex intellectual in this "vigorously argued but at the same time cautious, provocative but at the same time thoroughly responsible and discriminating" book, as Klemens von Klemperer described it in the American Historical Review.

The Heidegger Controversy is intended to be a summary of the debate about the connections between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics. In the book Wolin collects writings by Heidegger, including speeches from the 1930s in which the philosopher endorsed Naziism and later writings in which he tried to distance himself from those opinions, as well as essays by other scholars who have weighed in on the question. Interestingly, The Heidegger Controversy was soon embroiled in a controversy of its own. One of the pieces Wolin included was an interview with French social critic and Heidegger supporter Jacques Derrida that had originally appeared in Nouvel Observateur. That publication owned the rights to the interview and gave Wolin permission to use it without consulting with Derrida. When Derrida saw the way in which the interview was used, he threatened to sue Wolin's publisher, Columbia University Press, if the interview was not removed from future editions. Wolin would only allow the interview to be removed if he could add a new preface to the book explaining why the change was necessary. Columbia University Press, which also publishes English translations of Derrida's works, refused to publish Wolin's criticism of Derrida's legal threats and instead quietly allowed the hardback, which had been selling well, to go out of print. MIT University Press had no such conflicts and soon printed a paperback edition without the Derrida interview and with Wolin's new preface. At the time this new edition appeared Derrida and Wolin began a "prolonged and rancorous" war of words within the New York Review of Books in what was dubbed "one of the oddest chapters in the culture wars" by Scott McLemee in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Wolin is also the author of Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and HerbertMarcuse. These four "children" were doctoral students under Heidegger before he became the rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933. The four, all assimilated Jews, have since become famous scholars in their own rights. Wolin's goal in this book is to examine how Heidegger's philosophy affected these scholars' later thought and how each thinker reconciled the parts of Heidegger's philosophy—particularly his critiques of the bureaucratic, mechanistic nature of modernity—they accepted with those that supported Naziism and which they all to varying degrees rejected. Through his descriptions of these matters, Wolin "provide[s] insightful portraits of the intellectual evolution" of these influential theorists, James Ryerson noted in the New York Times Book Review.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

American Historical Review, April, 1992, Klemens von Klemperer, review of The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger, pp. 517-518; October, 1993, John E. Toews, review of The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism, pp. 1207-1208.

American Journal of Sociology, September, 1992, Dmitri Shalin, review of The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, pp. 409-411.

American Political Science Review, June, 1992, Horst Mewes, review of The Politics of Being, pp. 519-520; June, 1997, review of Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas, pp. 448-449.

Central European History, March, 1995, David S. Luft, review of The Heidegger Controversy, pp. 479-501.

Choice, December, 1982, review of Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, p. 578; April, 1991, N. Lukacher, review of The Politics of Being, p. 1329; June, 1992, H. N. Tuttle, review of The Heidegger Controversy, p. 1559; July-August, 2002, N. Lukacher, review of Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse, p. 1975.

Chronicle of Higher Education, January 18, 2002, Scott McLemee, "Losing Friends and Influencing People: Richard Wolin, an Intellectual Historian, Works at the Bloody Crossroads of Ideas and Ideology," pp. A12-A14.

Comparative Literature, summer, 1995, review of The Terms of Cultural Criticism, pp. 281-283.

Criticism, summer, 1993, Stephen Harnett, review of The Terms of Cultural Criticism, pp. 489-494.

Dialogue, winter, 1999, Jean-Claude Simard, "L'affaire. . . . ," pp. 135-164.

Dissent, summer, 1991, Michael E. Zimmerman, review of The Politics of Being, pp. 438-442.

Ethics, April, 1992, Thomas Sheehan, review of The Politics of Being, p. 696; October, 1992, Thomas Sheehan, review of The Heidegger Controversy, pp. 178-181; April, 1994, review of The Terms of Cultural Criticism, p. 677.

European History Quarterly, January, 1998, Martyn Housden, review of Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, pp. 141-142.

First Things, Damon Linker, review of Heidegger's Children, pp. 40-49.

Foreign Affairs, May-June, 2002, Stanley Hoffman, review of Heidegger's Children.

History: The Journal of the Historical Association, April, 1997, Carol Diethe, review of Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, pp. 367-368.

Journal of American History, September, 1993, Jeffrey C. Isaac, review of The Terms of Cultural Criticism, pp. 734-735.

Journal of Politics, May, 1992, Mark Warren, review of The Politics of Being, pp. 626-629.

Library Journal, September 1, 1982, review of Walter Benjamin, p. 1663; October 1, 1991, Leon H. Brody, review of The Heidegger Controversy, p. 103.

Midstream, April, 2002, Arnold Ages, review of Heidegger's Children, pp. 45-46.

Modern Language Review, April, 1994, G. Salemohammed, review of The Heidegger Controversy, pp. 536-537.

Nation, February 1, 1993, Elizabeth Pochoda, review of The Heidegger Controversy, p. 129.

New Republic, April 10, 1995, David Stern, review of Walter Benjamin, pp. 31-38.

New Statesman, May 20, 1983, Nicholas Jacobs, review of Walter Benjamin, pp. 24-25.

New York Review of Books, January 14, 1993, Thomas Sheehan, review of The Heidegger Controversy, pp. 30-31.

New York Times Book Review, December 16, 2001, James Ryerson, review of Heidegger's Children, p. 13.

Philosophical Review, January, 1998, review of Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, pp. 160-163.

Political Theory, May, 1993, David Michael Levin, review of The Politics of Being, and The Heidegger Controversy, pp. 325-331.

Times Higher Education Supplement, February 5, 1993, Roy Boyne, review of The Terms of Cultural Criticism, p. 29; September 10, 1993, Joanna Hodge, review of The Heidegger Controversy, p. 21.

Times Literary Supplement, June 24, 1994, Michael Rosen, review of The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, pp. 4-6; January 18, 2002, George Steiner, review of Heidegger's Children, pp. 36-37.

World Literature Today, winter, 1984, H. H. Rudnick, review of Walter Benjamin, p. 102.*