Sheldon Wolin

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.

• Region — Western philosophy • Era — Contemporary philosophy • Name — Sheldon Wolin • Birth Name — Sheldon Sanford Wolin • Born — 4 August 1922 • Birthplace — Chicago, Illinois, U.S. • Place of death — Salem, Oregon, U.S. • Died — 21 October 2015 • School Tradition — Continental philosophy • Main Interests — Democracy, political philosophy • Notable Ideas — Inverted totalitarianism • Alma Mater — Oberlin College, Harvard University • Spouse — Emily Purvis • Institutions — Princeton University • Doctoral Students — Cornel West

After graduating from Oberlin College, Wolin received his doctorate from Harvard University 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, 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 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. 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.

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 & Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, John Dewey, Michel Foucault, Leo Strauss, Harvey C. Mansfield, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michael Oakeshott, Karl Popper, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, 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.

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.

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 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, during World War II. Wolin's team were tasked with Douglas MacArthur's strategy of conducting raids against the Japanese Navy, which required flying low over Japanese destroyers in order to bomb them. This tactic was incredibly risky, as the B-24 was a "big, lumbering aircraft" which was hard to manoeuvre, and not infrequently "proved disastrous" for the crews of these planes, costing the lives of many of Wolin's fellow airmen. 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.

* • Sheldon Wolin (July 18, 2003). "A Kind of Fascism Is Replacing Our Democracy". Newsday, archived at Axis of Logic. • Sheldon Wolin (December 1969). "Political Theory as a Vocation". American Political Science Review, Vol. 63, No. 4, pp. 1062–82. (Spanish translation: "La teoría política como vocación". Foro Interno, vol. 11 (Diciembre 2011), pp. 193–234]).