Sheldon Sanford Wolin (; August 4, 1922 – October 21, 2015) was an American
political theorist
A political theorist is someone who engages in constructing or evaluating political theory, including political philosophy. Theorists may be Academia, academics or independent scholars. Here the most notable political theorists are categorized b ...
and writer on contemporary politics. A political theorist for fifty years, Wolin became Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...
, where he taught from 1973 to 1987.
During a teaching career which spanned more than forty years, Wolin also taught at the
University of California
The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Franci ...
,
Berkeley
Berkeley most often refers to:
*Berkeley, California, a city in the United States
**University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California
* George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher
Berkeley may also refer ...
,
University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of ...
,
Oberlin College,
Oxford University
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to th ...
,
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
, and
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California S ...
. He was a notable teacher of undergraduate and particularly graduate students, serving as a mentor to many students who themselves became prominent scholars and teachers of political theory.
Academic career
After graduating from
Oberlin College, Wolin received his doctorate from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
in 1950, for a dissertation entitled ''Conservatism and Constitutionalism: A Study in English Constitutional Ideas, 1760–1785''. After teaching briefly at Oberlin, Wolin taught political theory at the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
, from 1954 to 1970, and built a political theory program by bringing Norman Jacobson,
John H. Schaar,
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, and Michael Rogin into the department.
One of Wolin's central concerns was how the history of political thought could contribute to understanding contemporary political dilemmas and predicaments. He played a significant role in the
Free Speech Movement
The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a massive, long-lasting student protest which took place during the 1964–65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The Movement was informally under the central leadership of Be ...
and with
John Schaar interpreted that movement to the rest of the world. During the seventies and eighties he published frequently for ''
The New York Review of Books
''The New York Review of Books'' (or ''NYREV'' or ''NYRB'') is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of i ...
''.
He also wrote opinion pieces and reviews for ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
''. In 1980, he was the founding editor of the short-lived but intellectually influential journal ''democracy'' (1980–83) funded by
Max Palevsky Max Palevsky (July 24, 1924 – May 5, 2010) was an American art collector, venture capitalist, philanthropist, and computer technology pioneer. He was known as a member of the Malibu Mafia – a group of wealthy American Jewish men who donat ...
. 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
Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...
.
Wolin left Berkeley in the fall of 1970 for the
University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of ...
, where he taught until the spring of 1972. From 1973 through 1987, he was a professor of politics at
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...
. Wolin served on the editorial boards of many scholarly journals, including ''
Political Theory'', the leading journal of the field in the Anglo-American world. He consulted for various scholarly presses, foundations and public entities, including
Peace Corps
The Peace Corps is an independent agency and program of the United States government that trains and deploys volunteers to provide international development assistance. It was established in March 1961 by an executive order of President John F ...
,
American Council of Learned Societies, and the
Social Science Research Council
The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is a US-based, independent, international nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing research in the social sciences and related disciplines. Established in Manhattan in 1923, it today maintains a he ...
. Wolin also served as president of the Society for Legal and Political Philosophy.
Political theorist
Approach to political theory
Wolin was instrumental in founding what came to be known as the
Berkeley School of political theory.
In his work ''
Politics and Vision'', Wolin formulates an interpretative approach to the history of political thought, based on careful study of different theoretical traditions. He pays particular attention to how the latter contribute to the changing meanings of a received political vocabulary, including notions of authority, obligation, power, justice, citizenship, and the state. Wolin's approach also had a bearing on contemporary problems and questions and he notoriously defined the inquiry into the history of political thought, and the study of different traditions and forms of theorizing that have shaped it "as a form of political education."
Wolin's approach to the study of political theory consisted of a historical-minded inquiry into the history of political thought to inform the practice of political theory in the present. A consummate reader of texts, he carefully combined attention to both the intellectual and political contexts in which an author intervened and the genres of writing he deployed, with an eye to understanding how a particular body of work shed light on a specific political predicament. But this was no antiquarian exercise. It rather consisted of an attempt to "understand some aspect of the historical past
hat
A hat is a head covering which is worn for various reasons, including protection against weather conditions, ceremonial reasons such as university graduation, religious reasons, safety, or as a fashion accessory. Hats which incorporate mecha ...
is also conscious of the historical character and locus of
he inquirer'sown understanding. Historicity has to do with the convergence of the two, and the inquirer’s contribution of his present is crucial."
Similarly, his essay "Political Theory as a Vocation", written in the context of the
Cold War, the
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War (also known by other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam a ...
and the
Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the Unite ...
, mounted a seething critique of Behaviorism and how it impaired the ability to grasp the crises of the time. Thirty years later, he explicitly formulated the importance of political theory and the study of political thought as “primarily a civic and secondarily an academic activity.” Wolin's 2001 study of
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville (; 29 July 180516 April 1859), colloquially known as Tocqueville (), was a French aristocrat, diplomat, political scientist, political philosopher and historian. He is best known for his wor ...
, ''Tocqueville Between Two Worlds'', constitutes his second summum opus. Cornel West has called it Wolin's masterpiece, the crowning achievement of “the greatest political theorist of and for democracy of our time.”
Works on modern thinkers
In essays dealing with major thinkers of the recent past, including some of the most formidable bodies of work of the twentieth century, Wolin probed different approaches to both understanding the nature of theory and its bearing on the political from a perspective clearly aligned with the principles of participatory democracy. From this perspective, Wolin engaged with a vast array of thinkers:
Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno ( , ; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; 11 September 1903 – 6 August 1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer.
He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of criti ...
&
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer (; ; 14 February 1895 – 7 July 1973) was a German philosopher and sociologist who was famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the Frankfurt School of social research. Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, militari ...
,
Hannah Arendt,
John Dewey,
Michel Foucault,
Leo Strauss,
Harvey C. Mansfield
Harvey Claflin Mansfield Jr. (born March 21, 1932) is an American political philosopher. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1962. He has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships a ...
,
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
,
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his ...
,
Michael Oakeshott
Michael Joseph Oakeshott FBA (; 11 December 1901 – 19 December 1990) was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote about philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of ...
,
Karl Popper,
John Rawls
John Bordley Rawls (; February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the liberal tradition. Rawls received both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in ...
,
Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic ...
, and
Max Weber. Politically, Wolin penned essays on a variety of themes and figures, including terrorism, conservatism, Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan. His ''The Presence of the Past'' offered an original critique of Reaganism, its discourse and practice, and a series of searching reflections on the bicentennial of the American Constitution. His last book, ''Democracy Incorporated'' (2008) formulates a scathing critique of the administration of George W. Bush and its war on terror and a plea for the recovery of democratic values and practices.
Fate of democracy
In these interventions, Wolin formulated an original non-Marxist critique of capitalism and the fate of democratic political life in the present. In his effort to think about the fate of democracy in the United States, he formulated a novel theorization of modern and postmodern forms of power and how these shaped the limits and horizons of political life in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries. While influenced by Marx's critique of capitalism as a form of power, Wolin's political thought is decidedly non-Marxist in his insistence on participatory democracy, the primacy of the political, and the conviction that a radical theory of democracy requires mapping the forms of power beyond the economy. Wolin's political thought is particularly concerned with the fate of democracy at the hands of bureaucratic imperatives, elitism, and managerial principles and practices. His ideas of "
inverted totalitarianism" and "fugitive democracy" constitute well-known signatures of his reflections. Another signature contribution is his account of the liberal-democratic state, which
Wendy Brown has characterized as a "
neo-Weberian" account of the state, "heavy with rationalities and bureaucratic domination; it is a Marxist-structuralist state, neither identical with nor a simple instrument of capitalism but complexly entwined with it. It is an administrative and penetrative state - those tentacles are everywhere and on everyone, especially the most disempowered; they do not honor public/private distinctions, political/economic distinctions, or even legal/extra-legal distinctions...the contemporary state is a complex amalgam of political, economic, administrative and discursive powers."
Out of this diagnosis of the state and its complex relationship to capitalism, Wolin forged the idea of "fugitive democracy." In his view, democracy is not a fixed state form, but a political experience in which ordinary people are active political actors. In this construction "fugitive" stands for the ways in which contemporary forms of power have made this aspiration an evanescent and momentary political experience.
Personal life
Wolin was born in Chicago and raised in Buffalo, New York. At the age of nineteen, Wolin interrupted his studies at Oberlin College to become a
US Army Air Forces
The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF or AAF) was the major land-based aerial warfare service component of the United States Army and ''de facto'' aerial warfare service branch of the United States during and immediately after World War II ...
bombardier/navigator, serving on the
Consolidated B-24 Liberator. Wolin flew 51 different combat missions serving in the South Pacific, specifically the islands surrounding the
Philippines
The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no),
* bik, Republika kan Filipinas
* ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas
* cbk, República de Filipinas
* hil, Republ ...
, during World War II. Wolin's team were tasked with
Douglas MacArthur's strategy of conducting raids against the
Japanese Navy
, abbreviated , also simply known as the Japanese Navy, is the maritime warfare branch of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, tasked with the naval defense of Japan. The JMSDF was formed following the dissolution of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) ...
, which required flying low over Japanese destroyers in order to bomb them. This was incredibly risky, as the B-24 was a "big, lumbering aircraft" which was hard to manoeuvre, and this cost the lives of many of Wolin's fellow airmen, "which proved disastrous." Wolin mentioned that his flight mates were all very young at the time, being between nineteen and twenty-four years of age. Wolin mentioned that several of his flight mates, both at the time and years later, suffered psychological problems as a result of their activities in the War.
He was married to Emily Purvis Wolin for over sixty years.
Awards
*Rockefeller Foundation Fellow
*American Council of Learned Societies Fellow
*Center for the Advance Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellow, Stanford University
*Guggenheim Fellow
*Fulbright Fellow
*Clark Library Fellow, UCLA
*Member of the National Foundation for the Humanities
*Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
*Christian Gauss Lectures
*David and Elaine Spitz Prize, Conference on Political Thought, for "Politics and Vision."
*1985 American Political Science Association's Lippincott Award for the 1960 edition of "Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought"
*David Easton Award for "Tocqueville Between Two Worlds"
*2008
Lannan Award for an "Especially Notable" Book for "Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism''"
Works
Books
*''
Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought'', expanded ed. (1960;
Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large.
The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financia ...
, 2004).
*''The Berkeley Student Revolt: Facts and Interpretations'', edited with
Seymour Martin Lipset
Seymour Martin Lipset ( ; March 18, 1922 – December 31, 2006) was an American sociologist and political scientist (President of the American Political Science Association). His major work was in the fields of political sociology, trade union o ...
(Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books
Vintage Books is a trade paperback publishing imprint of Penguin Random House originally established by Alfred A. Knopf in 1954. The company was purchased by Random House in April 1960, and a British division was set up in 1990. After Random ...
, 1965).
*''The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond: Essays on Politics & Education in the Technological Society'', with
John H. Schaar (
Vintage Books
Vintage Books is a trade paperback publishing imprint of Penguin Random House originally established by Alfred A. Knopf in 1954. The company was purchased by Random House in April 1960, and a British division was set up in 1990. After Random ...
/
New York Review of Books
New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created.
New or NEW may refer to:
Music
* New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz
Albums and EPs
* ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013
* ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator ...
, 1970).
*''Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory'' (William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles:
University of California Press
The University of California Press, otherwise known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish scholarly and scientific works by facult ...
, 1970). (Spanish translation: ''Hobbes y la tradición épica de la teoría política'', Colección Rétor, Madrid: Foro Interno, 2005. )
*''Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution'' (1989;
Johns Hopkins University Press)
*''
Tocqueville
Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville (; 29 July 180516 April 1859), colloquially known as Tocqueville (), was a French aristocrat, diplomat, political scientist, political philosopher and historian. He is best known for his work ...
Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life'' (Princeton University Press, 2001).
*''Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism'' (Princeton University Press, 2008). (Trad. esp.: ''Democracia S. A.'', Buenos Aires/Madrid, Katz editores S.A, 2008, )
*''Fugitive Democracy and Other Essays.'' Edited by Nicholas Xenos (Princeton University Press, 2016).
Articles
*Sheldon Wolin
"Inverted Totalitarianism" ''
The Nation
''The Nation'' is an American liberal biweekly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper t ...
'' magazine, May 19, 2003.
*Sheldon Wolin
"A Kind of Fascism Is Replacing Our Democracy" ''
Newsday'', July 18, 2003, archived at Axis of Logic.
*Sheldon Wolin
"Political Theory as a Vocation" ''
American Political Science Review
The ''American Political Science Review'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering all areas of political science. It is an official journal of the American Political Science Association and is published on their behalf by Cambri ...
'', Vol. 63, No. 4 (December 1969), pp. 1062–82. (Spanish translation
"La teoría política como vocación" ''Foro Interno'', vol. 11 (Diciembre 2011), pp. 193–234]).
References
Further reading
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Wolin, Sheldon
1922 births
2015 deaths
American political philosophers
United States Army Air Forces personnel of World War II
Oberlin College alumni
Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
Princeton University faculty