Introduction

The 2004 publication of the expanded edition of Sheldon S. Wolin’s Politics and Vision by Princeton University Press was a much-celebrated event in the world of political theory. Even as successive generations of political theorists continued to study and consult the text, the original, published in 1960, had been out of print for two decades, and most library copies had been appropriated or battered beyond repair. But the new and expanded edition did more than fill an absence. Just as the original Politics and Vision was at once a study of canonical texts and a critical political theory of its time, so the new work reiterates this dual purpose with added chapters on Marx, Nietzsche, and Rawls as well as chapters on the nature of contemporary power, the state, democracy, and empire. Like the original, the expanded edition is an articulation of the riches of thinking through the history of political theory in order to grasp a political present. Yet the new edition registers and responds to a present of markedly different contours, possibilities, and perils for political life than the one which shaped the first edition.

It is rare, of course, to have in one work a novel set of readings in canonical theory, a powerful critique of contemporary intellectual and political formations, a model of original theoretical work, and a subtle and forceful articulation of an alternative to the current intellectual and political order of things. It is this multiple accomplishment that made Politics and Vision unique when it first emerged and that leaves it without peer today. As academic professionalization and specialization continue to press aspiring young scholars of political theory into choosing between conducting passionless historicist re-readings of canonical works or making nearly imperceptible adjustments within analytic liberal thought, Wolin’s text stands as compelling reminder of other possibilities for the vocation of theory, for the use of the political theory canon, and for the conduct of political life in the twenty-first century.

It was for these reasons that Joshua Miller and I proposed to Jill Locke, the political theory section program chair for the 2005 Western Political Science Association Meetings, an afternoon-long symposium focused on the expanded edition of Politics and Vision. Despite the burden this imposed on her commitments to other proposals, Jill quickly endorsed the idea and helped arrange the logistics. Josh and I then invited seven scholars to comment on the text, six of whom accepted immediately. Wolin was asked to offer concluding remarks, and Cornel West agreed to join me in moderating the symposium.

The resulting symposium on March 18, 2005 at the Marriott Hotel in Oakland, California was remarkable in its difference from what goes on in most American political science meetings. For more than four hours, hundreds of scholars, ranging in age across seven decades, packed a hotel ballroom to reflect on Politics and Vision and to hear and respond to Wolin’s current theoretical reflections on power and democracy. The version of the symposium published here cannot capture what one young scholar of political theory referred to as the “heat, sweat, and thinking” of that afternoon nor what another called its “incitational and inspirational” effects. But it does permit the event a modest afterlife and also permits those who were not there to partake in its riches.

What follows are slightly revised versions of presentations at the symposium by William Connolly, J. Peter Euben, Joshua Miller, Anne Norton, and Nick Xenos. Carey McWilliams’ paper appears unrevised — his death one week after the symposium sent waves of shock and sadness across the political theory world and made all who attended the symposium grateful to have heard his singular thinking delivered in his resonant voice one last time. Cornel West penned an Afterword for this collection that follows the contour of his opening remarks. Also published here for the first time is a short paper I authored for an earlier event on Wolin’s work.

For their labor in editing the symposium papers, thanks are due to Nick Xenos and Ivan Ascher.