Sheldon Wolin
Sheldon Wolin | |
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Born | Chicago, Illinois, U.S. | August 4, 1922
Died | October 21, 2015 Salem, Oregon, U.S. | (aged 93)
Alma mater | Oberlin College, Harvard University |
Spouse | Emily Purvis |
Era | Contemporary philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Continental philosophy |
Main interests | Democracy, political philosophy |
Notable ideas | Inverted totalitarianism |
Sheldon Sanford Wolin (
During a teaching career which spanned more than forty years, Wolin also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Santa Cruz, Oberlin College, Oxford University, Cornell University, and University of California, Los Angeles.[3] 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.[4]
Academic career
After graduating from
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 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.[5] He also wrote opinion pieces and reviews for The New York Times. In 1980, he was the founding editor of the short-lived but intellectually influential journal democracy (1980–83) funded by Max Palevsky. 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.
Wolin left Berkeley in the fall of 1970 for the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught until the spring of 1972. From 1973 through 1987, he was a professor of politics at Princeton University. 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, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council. 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
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."[6]
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.[7] But this was no antiquarian exercise. It rather consisted of an attempt to "understand some aspect of the historical past [that] is also conscious of the historical character and locus of [the inquirer's] own understanding. Historicity has to do with the convergence of the two, and the inquirer’s contribution of his present is crucial."[8]
Similarly, his essay "Political Theory as a Vocation", written in the context of the
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:
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 "
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.[14]
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
He was married to Emily Purvis Wolin for over sixty years.
Awards
This section needs additional citations for verification. (November 2023) |
- 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" Bookfor "Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism"
Works
Books
- ISBN 978-0-691-12627-2
- The Berkeley Student Revolt: Facts and Interpretations, edited with Anchor Books, 1965).
- The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond: Essays on Politics & Education in the Technological Society, with New York Review of Books, 1970).
- Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory (William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles: ISBN 978-84-933478-1-9)
- Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (1989; Johns Hopkins University Press)
- 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 978-84-96859-46-3)
- Fugitive Democracy and Other Essays. Edited by Nicholas Xenos (Princeton University Press, 2016). ISBN 978-0691133645
Articles
- Sheldon Wolin. "Inverted Totalitarianism". The Nation 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, 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
- ^ Michael, Hotchkiss (24 October 2015). "Political theorist Sheldon Wolin dies at 93". Princeton University News Service. Archived from the original on 2016-04-14.
- ISBN 031331957X.
- ^ "Sheldon S Wolin", Bios, Lannan, archived from the original on 2013-09-21, retrieved 2013-07-22.
- ^ Grimes, William (28 October 2015). "Sheldon S. Wolin, Theorist Who Shifted Political Science Back to Politics, Dies at 93". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2015-11-01.
- ^ "Sheldon S. Wolin". Contributors. The New York Review of Books. Archived from the original on April 13, 2012. Retrieved March 24, 2012.
- ^ Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision, Expanded Edition (Princeton University Press, 2004), 26
- ^ Corey Robin has referred to Wolin as "one of the great readers of the twentieth century:" Robin, Corey (23 October 2014). "Sheldon Wolin's the reason I began drinking coffee". Archived from the original on 2015-08-16.
- ^ Nicholas Xenos, "Sheldon S. Wolin," The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought
- ^ Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 1
- ^ Cornel West, “Afterword,” Theory & Event 10.1 (2007)
- ^ Xenos, "Sheldon S. Wolin"
- S2CID 149609543.
- ^ Wendy Brown, "Democracy and Bad Dreams" Theory & Event 10.1 (2007).
- ^ Nicholas Xenos, "Momentary Democracy," in Democracy and Vision (Princeton University Press, 2001)
- ^ "Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? Part 5, interviewed by Chris Hedges". Dandelion Salad. Archived from the original on 2014-11-02. Retrieved 2014-11-04.
Further reading
- 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.
- Cane, Lucy (2020), Sheldon Wolin and Democracy: Seeing Through Loss, New York: Routledge.
- Miller, Joshua I (2002), "Sheldon S. Wolin", in Utter, Glenn H; Lockhart, Charles (eds.), American Political Scientists: A Dictionary (2nd ed.), Westport, CT: Greenwood.
External videos | |
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Pt 1/8 Hedges & Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? on YouTube |