Richard Wolin

Richard Wolin (born 1952) is an American intellectual historian whose work focuses on 20th-century European philosophy, especially the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the thinkers of the Frankfurt School.

Wolin was born at the Naval Station Great Lakes in Lake County, Illinois, near North Chicago, to Merle Wolin. During his senior year of high school, he attended the trial of the Chicago Seven, an experience he later described as formative. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Reed College in 1974, where he helped distribute writings from the Situationist International and completed a senior thesis on György Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. He went on to earn both a master’s and a PhD from York University in Toronto, defending his dissertation on Walter Benjamin in 1980 under the supervision of Christian Lenhardt.

After returning to the United States, Wolin attended Jürgen Habermas’s lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, which were published in 1981 as The Theory of Communicative Action. He met Habermas and later called the lectures an “intellectual turning point,” as they moved him away from Theodor W. Adorno’s view of late capitalism as a “totally administered world” and toward a renewed defense of reason. This shift led Wolin to reexamine the connection between Martin Heidegger—a prominent critic of capitalist modernity’s alienation—and Nazism.

Wolin taught at Reed College from 1982 to 1984, then at Rice University in Houston from 1984 to 2000. Around 1991, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in the philosophy department at Goethe University Frankfurt, hosted by Habermas. After publishing the edited volume The Heidegger Controversy, he became involved in a public dispute with Jacques Derrida, who threatened to sue Columbia University Press over an interview Derrida claimed was mistranslated and misused. The conflict peaked with an exchange between Wolin and Derrida in The New York Review of Books.

In 2000, Wolin was appointed Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He dedicated his 2001 book Heidegger’s Children to Habermas, who later devoted a lecture at the CUNY Graduate Center to the book. Wolin has written regularly for The New Republic and Dissent, and during the 1980s he also contributed to Les Temps modernes and the Houston Chronicle.

His books include Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (1982), The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (1990), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (1991), The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (1992), Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism (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-edited 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), and Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (2022). He has also published numerous articles in journals such as Theory and Society, Telos, New German Critique, Representations, Political Theory, Constellations, and Antisemitism Studies, among others.