By WKNO-FM
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkno/local-wkno-984829.mp3
Extended interview with Richard Wolin.
Memphis, TN – Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center at City University of New York.
A long list of influential books have established Wolin as one of America's leading scholars of modern European intellectual history. He is the author of several works on philosopher Martin Heidegger, and on Heidegger's influential Jewish students; on Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School; and on many other giants in the pantheon of twentieth-century thought.
In addition to his scholarly writing, Wolin is a regular contributor to The New Republic and Dissent, among other national journals, earning him a reputation as a leading public critic.
We discuss his most recent book, The Wind From the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s, in which Wolin addresses how French radicals in the 1960s became enraptured with the ideas emanating from Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. They applied these notions to French society and politics, and, in the process, transformed French intellectual life. The unintended bi-product of this intellectual adventurism was the reclamation of the French Revolutionary tradition and its ideas of global human rights, which continue to have an international impact today.
For more on Richard Wolin's published work, visit: the Graduate Center at City University of New York. For more information on his September 8, 2011 lecture at the University of Memphis, visit the Events Listings page at the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities.
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