Mao Zedong

(Chinese revolutionary, political leader and Marxist political theorist, 1893-1976). Mao Zedong was the main political leader of the Chinese Revolution, the first head of the People's Republic of China, and the principal theorist of "Mao Zedong Thought" or "Maoism", a contemporary development of revolutionary Marxist theory. Mao's writings deal with topics as broad as art and literature, organizational questions, and military strategy and tactics, in addition to philosophical matters. Mao drew heavily from Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks on Hegel in writing his main work on dialectical materialism, On Contradiction, and its companion text on Marxist epistemology, On Practice. Mao also wrote a considerable amount on issues of political philosophy, elaborating on and developing Marx and Lenin's theories of class dictatorship and democracy in works such as On New Democracy and On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People. Mao's "official" Selected Works run into five heavy volumes. While he remains a controversial figure, Mao is having a considerable impact on contemporary philosophy, notably through his influence on Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou, and others, including Slavoj Žižek, who recently edited a collection of his philosophical writings under the title On Practice and Contradiction (Verso, 2007).