Sheldon Wolin

Sheldon S. Wolin (/ˈwoʊlɪn/; born August 4, 1922) is an American political philosopher and writer on contemporary politics. Wolin is currently Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, where he taught from 1973 to 1987.

During a teaching career which spanned over forty years Wolin also taught at Oxford University, Oberlin College, Cornell University, UCLA, University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, Santa Cruz.^[1] During this time he mentored many graduate students who would become leading political theorists, such as Wendy Brown (who dedicated her famous book States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity^[2] to him) and Hanna Fenichel Pitkin. He was also a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.^[3] A critic of contemporary American politics,^[4][5] Wolin is known for coining the term inverted totalitarianism. His most famous work is Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought.

Early life

Wolin attended Oberlin College as an undergraduate. During World War II, he was a US Army Air Force bombardier/navigator serving in the Pacific.^[6] He was married to Emily Purvis Wolin for over sixty years. (She died in 2012.)

Academic career

In 1950, Wolin received his Harvard University doctorate for a dissertation titled Conservatism and Constitutionalism: A Study in English Constitutional Ideas, 1760–1785. After teaching briefly at Oberlin College, Wolin taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1954 to 1970. In a political science department that was largely composed of empirical studies of micro-political issues, Wolin was a political theorist who managed to build that component of the program by bringing Norman Jacobson, John Schaar, and Hanna Pitkin into the department. He was a major supporter and interpreter to the rest of the world of the theory behind the Free Speech Movement (FSM), and he became a mentor to one of the FSM's more prominent activists, Michael Lerner on whose PhD committee he served. He also published frequently for The New York Review of Books during the 1970s.^[7] He left Berkeley in the fall of 1971 with John H. Schaar to teach at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught until early-1972.

From 1973 through 1987, Wolin was a professor of politics at Princeton University. During his academic career, he mentored a large number of students who have subsequently become leading figures in contemporary political theory, including most notably, at Berkeley: Hanna Pitkin (Emerita, Berkeley), J. Peter Euben (Emeritus, Duke University), the late Wilson Carey McWilliams (Rutgers), and at Princeton, Uday Mehta (CUNY Graduate Center), Wendy Brown (Berkeley), Frederick M. Dolan (Emeritus, Berkeley and California College of the Arts), Dana Villa (Notre Dame), Nicholas Xenos (Massachusetts), John R. Wallach (Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY), and Kirstie McClure (UCLA). At Princeton, Wolin led a successful faculty effort to pass a resolution urging university trustees to divest from endowment investment in firms that supported South African apartheid.

Aside from Oberlin, UC Berkeley and Princeton, Wolin has also taught at UC Santa Cruz, UC Los Angeles, International Christian University (Tokyo, Japan), Cornell University, and Oxford University.

Political theorist

Wolin made his name with the 1960 publication of Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton 1960, 2nd Ed. 2004). He published a seminal article, "Political Theory as a Vocation" (1969) that challenged positivist political science and enlivened the field of political theory. In addition to the usual canon of Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, Wolin wrote penetrating essays on Augustine of Hippo, Richard Hooker, David Hume, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and John Dewey as well as books on the American Constitution and Alexis de Tocqueville.

Wolin defended a radical account of democracy. He took it not as a form of government, but as a form of political activity which needs to be wrested away from its close association with the mega-state.

As political theorist William E. Connolly notes,

Politics and Vision did not simply tell us how important it is to address the "tradition" of Western political thought, it engaged comparatively a series of exemplary political thinkers in pre-Christian thought, Christendom, and the modern world in a way that revivified the energy, confidence, and vision of an entire generation of political theorists.

— Democracy and Vision, Princeton 2001.

Wolin's work addresses participatory democracy with primary focus on the United States. He makes a distinction between democracy as system of governance and any of the formal political institutions of the state. In other words, he decouples democracy from governance and towards a political system based on democratic principles.

Works

Books

• Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded ed. (1960; Princeton University Press, 2004). ISBN 978-0-691-12627-2
• The Berkeley Student Revolt: Facts and Interpretations, edited with Seymour Martin Lipset (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1965).
• The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond: Essays on Politics & Education in the Technological Society, with John H. Schaar (Vintage Books/New York Review Books, 1970).
• Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory (William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles: University of California, 1970). (Spanish translation: Hobbes y la tradición épica de la teoría política, Colección Rétor, Madrid: Foro Interno, 2005. ISBN 978-84-933478-1-9)
• Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (1989)
• Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton University Press, 2001). ISBN 978-0-691-11454-5
• Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2008). ISBN 978-0-691-13566-3 (Trad. esp.: Democracia S. A., Buenos Aires/Madrid, Katz editores S.A, 2008, ISBN 978-84-96859-46-3)

Articles

• "Inverted Totalitarianism" by Sheldon Wolin Article published in The Nation magazine May 19, 2003
• "A Kind of Fascism Is Replacing Our Democracy" by Sheldon S. Wolin Article published on Friday, July 18, 2003 by Long Island NY Newsday, archived at Common Dreams website
• "Political Theory as a Vocation": The American Political Science Review, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Dec., 1969), pp. 1062-1082. (Spanish translation: "La teoría política como vocación": Foro Interno, vol. 11 (Diciembre, 2011), pp. 193-234).

Awards

Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism won a 2008 Lannan Award for an "Especially Notable" Book.

See also

• Wendy Brown
• Inverted totalitarianism

Notes

References

• Botwinick, Aryeh; Connolly, William E, eds. (2001), Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political .
• Brown, Wendy (1995), States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton: Princeton University Press .
• Miller, Joshua I (2002), "Sheldon S. Wolin", in Utter, Glenn H; Lockhart, Charles, American Political Scientists: A Dictionary (2nd ed.), Westport, CT: Greenwood .

External links

• Quotations related to Sheldon Wolin at Wikiquote
• Hedges & Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? The Real News, October 2014. Chris Hedges interviews Wolin. The entire interview is available in eight (8) parts.