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Richard Wolin (/ˈwoʊlɪn/;[2] born 1952) is an American intellectual historian specialising in 20th-century European philosophy, particularly German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the group of thinkers known collectively as the Frankfurt School.

Life

Wolin was born at the United States Navy‘s Naval Station Great Lakes near North Chicago in Lake County, Illinois as a son of Merle Wolin.[3] In his senior year of high school, he attended the trial of the Chicago Seven, which he later recalled as a formative event.[4]

Wolin earned a bachelor of arts from Reed College in 1974,[3] where he helped circulate the writings of the Situationist International, graduating with a senior thesis on György Lukács‘s History and Class Consciousness.[4] He received both his master of arts and doctor of philosophy degrees from York University, Toronto. He defended his PhD dissertation on Walter Benjamin, written under the supervision of Christian Lenhardt, in 1980.[5][3]

He then returned to the United States[5] and participated in Jürgen Habermas‘s lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, published in 1981 as The Theory of Communicative Action. He met Habermas and later acknowledged that the lectures formed an “intellectual turning point” in persuading him away from Theodor W. Adorno‘s critique of late capitalism as a “totally administered world” and towards a renewed appreciation of reason.[6] Wolin’s fresh commitment to defending “the valuable potentials for reform, contestation, and critique residing in existing democratic societies” led him to re-examine the link between Martin Heidegger (as a prominent critic of the alienation characteristic of capitalist modernity) and Nazism.[4]

Wolin taught at Reed College from 1982 to 1984, and at Rice University in Houston from 1984 to 2000.[3][7] Around 1991, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt, with Jürgen Habermas as his host.[8] After the publication of his edited volume The Heidegger Controversy, he was embroiled in a public dispute with Jacques Derrida, who threatened to sue Wolin’s publisher Columbia University Press over the inclusion of an interview with himself that he considered mistranslated and abused; the dispute reached a high point with an exchange between Wolin and Derrida in The New York Review of Books.[4][3]

In 2000, Wolin was appointed Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center.[9][10] He dedicated his 2001 book Heidegger’s Children to Jürgen Habermas, who in turn devoted a lecture at the CUNY Graduate Center in November of the same year to it.[4]

He has been a regular contributor to The New Republic and Dissent.[3] He also wrote for Les Temps modernes and the Houston Chronicle during the 1980s.[4]

Works

Books

  • Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (1982)
  • The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (1990)
  • The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, editor (1991)
  • The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (1992)
  • Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, editor (1995)
  • Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas (1995)
  • Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (2001)
  • The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism: From Nietzsche to Postmodernism (2004)
  • Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, co-editor with John Abromeit (2005)
  • The Frankfurt School Revisited: And Other Essays on Politics and Society (2006)
  • The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (2010)
  • Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (2022)

Selected articles

References

  1. ^ Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason, Princeton University Press, 2019, p. 180.
  2. ^ Interview with Richard Wolin on YouTube
  3. ^ a b c d e f “Wolin, Richard”. Encyclopedia.com. Archived from the original on 15 August 2025. Retrieved 27 December 2025.
  4. ^ a b c d e f McLemee, Scott (January 18, 2002). “Losing Friends and Influencing People”. The Chronicle of Higher Education.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)
  5. ^ a b Morrow, Raymond A. (1985), “Critical Theory and Canadian Sociology: An Introduction” (PDF), Canadian Review of Sociology, 22 (5): 726, doi:10.1111/j.1755-618X.1985.tb00389.x
  6. ^ Wolin, Richard (2015), “Preface”, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (new paperback ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. liii, ISBN 978-0-691-16861-6
  7. ^ “Center for Modern European Studies, University of Copenhagen, official page”. Archived from the original on 2013-10-20. Retrieved 2013-11-19.
  8. ^ Wolin, Richard (2015), “Preface”, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (new paperback ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. liii–liv, ISBN 978-0-691-16861-6
  9. ^ CUNY official page
  10. ^ Britannica profile