The Collected Papers of Robert Paul Wolff Series

For more than half a century, Philosopher Robert Paul Wolff has been thinking and writing about the great figures of eighteenth century philosophy and about the ideals and realities of American higher education. In this first volume of his collected published and unpublished papers, a number of those writings are collected and made available. The volume opens with Wolff's very earliest published writings, including a letter to the Harvard Crimson that sparked a ten year controversy between two scholars with the same name and diametrically opposed political opinions, and an impassioned defence of Aristotle by the nineteen year old scholar in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction. The volume continues with some of Wolff's well-known writings on David Hume and Immanuel Kant, including a little known essay in which he identifies, in one of Kant's late works, the argument for the Categorical Imperative that is missing from the well-known Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. This portion of the volume opens with Wolff's uproarious account, never before seen, of a conference devoted to Kant's philosophy of law. For twenty-five years the account has languished in a file marked "unpublishable essay." The volume concludes with many of Wolff's writings on aspects of Higher Education, including the now classic review of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, said by some to be the best book review ever written.

For thirty-five years, Robert Paul Wolff has been carrying on a deep study of the tradition of social and economic theory that started with the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith and was brought to its highest point of development by Karl Marx. Wolff is unique among students of the thought of Marx in his ability to address the philosophical underpinnings of Marx's thought, the formal mathematical reinterpretation of Marx's economic theories carried out in the 1960's, 70's, and 80's by economists around the world, and also the theoretical significance of the extraordinary literary style of Marx's greatest work, Capital. No other scholar has even attempted an integration of these different dimensions of Marx's writings. In these essays and papers, we see Wolff working through the several aspects of Marx's thought and bringing them into fruitful and unified conjuncture. The volume opens with two literary/philosophical readings of Marx's writings, and then turns to the tradition of Classical Political Economy, with detailed analyses of the writings of David Ricardo and his modern interpreter, Piero Sraffa. Included here is Wolff's own original contribution to the modern mathematical reinterpretation of Marx's economic theories, together with responses to Wolff's work by two major modern Marxist thinkers, John Roemer and David Schweickart. In the third section of the volume, Wolff offers penetrating critiques, from a Marxist perspective, of the work of Jon Elster and Hannah Arendt. The volume concludes with a bitter-sweet essay entitled "The Future of Socialism."

For fifty-five years, Robert Paul Wolff has been reflecting on the theory of modern political society and engaging actively in a number of progressive political movements, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the protest against the Viet Nam War, and the world-wide effort to end the apartheid regime in South Africa. This volume brings together a wide-ranging selection of the writings that have flowed from his pen, his typewriter, and his word processor. The volume opens with a brief Credo for Progressives, in which Wolff forthrightly states the moral and political commitment that has shaped his life and writings. The first section of the volume consists of seven selections of a general theoretical nature, including the essay "On Violence" that foreshadowed Wolff's classic work, In Defense of Anarchism. Three of these: "The Concept of Community," "The Indexing Problem," and "Who Owns Our National Story" have until now not been available in print. The second section of the volume contains ten pieces written about specific people or for specific occasions. These include Wolff's important refutation of the first version of John Rawls' theory of justice, a touching personal reminiscence of his departed friend, Herbert Marcuse, a sharp critique of the reaction of the University of Massachusetts to the arrival on campus of Minister Louis Farrakhan, and several memoranda written for a graduate seminar Wolff taught on ideological critique. The third section contains a selection of writings of an immediate practical nature on issues with which Wolff has been deeply involved. The volume closes with a photocopy of a handwritten document in which we see Wolff working out, first hand, an issue of great importance for those who continue to hope for a socialist transformation of capitalism.

When Robert Paul Wolff retired in 2008 after a fifty-year career as a university professor, he was somewhat at a loss as to what to do. One of his sons said, "Why don't you start a blog, Dad?" And so, like hundreds of millions of others around the world, he did. The Philosopher's Stone has been running now for more than four years, and Wolff has poured hundreds of thousands of words into the blogosphere. His eight hundred page Autobiography, A Life in the Academy, was originally written day by day for his blog and was posted as it was written. But if the truth be told, Wolff is a teacher more than a blogger, and early on he devised a new format, the "Tutorial," that would permit him to continue what he loves best, explaining difficult ideas in simple and engaging ways to students, colleagues, and readers. In this volume, Wolff has brought together many of these extended explications that he wrote for his blog. Some of the essays are full-scale Tutorials that appeared in fifteen, twenty, or more daily segments. Among these are "The Thought of Karl Marx," "The Thought of Sigmund Freud," and "The Study of Society." Some of Wolff's expositions were concluded more quickly, and he labeled these Mini-Tutorials or Micro-Tutorials. And from time to time, Wolff simply shared his enthusiasm for a particular book in what he called an Appreciation. A sampling of the titles of the essays in this volume give some sense of the breadth of Wolff's interests: Afro-American Studies, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, Ideological Critique, Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, among others.