Afterword

Sheldon Wolin is the greatest political theorist of and for democracy in our time. He also is the towering humanist intellectual in America who best exemplifies a classic sense of vocation and a modernist allegiance to invocation. In other words, Wolin is first and foremost a courageous thinker whose imaginative vision and magisterial scholarship are shaped by the social misery of ordinary people. Hence, he is attuned to the conformist seductions of professional methods and the tacit biases of technocratic rigors. His bold defense of political theory over thirty-six years ago remains a beacon call for Socratic energy and intellectual integrity in our work. His magnificent corpus — including the canonical parts I and II of Politics and Vision: Tradition and Innovation in Western Political Thought (1960, 2004) that span forty-four years, the transgressive work, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and The Constitution (1989), his fascinating text, Hobbes and The Epic Tradition of Political Theory (1970), his masterpiece, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (2001) as well as a vast number of scholarly and journalistic essays in books, periodicals and his own political quarterly, democracy — has yet to be fully appreciated and appropriated for the challenge it is, despite Wolin’s high stature in political theory. And his reputation as a masterful teacher is legendary. My own experience confirms this grandiloquent claim. His graduate seminar at Princeton in 1974 on Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Tocqueville transformed my life. And his thesis advising for my dissertation on Marx taught me what it means to be a mentor. Let us hope that one day someone begins to do justice to the intellectual and pedagogical biography of this wise, generous and committed man (with crucial stops in Buffalo, Oberlin, World War II, Harvard, Berkeley and Princeton) so many of us love and cherish the same way he did justice to Tocqueville. Wolin’s writings not only constitute a crucial part of the civic conscience of our society, but his students also are a part of the living legacy of his work. For us, democracy matters in a deep way. We also should not overlook Wolin’s style of writing — a democratic form of expression that infuses epic ambition and highbrow learning with an informal tone and comic understatement. When he writes, “one is tempted to say that ours is a century unable to turn, except linguistically” we witness a wit that refers to the antidemocratic realities of the barbaric 20^th century and indicts the apolitical preoccupation with language of much of 20^th century philosophy and theory. Or when he claims, “In order to make objectivity possible the Cartesian must suspend historicized time and politicized space,” he ingeniously captures in one sentence his own historicist interpretation of political theory in stark contrast to dominant conceptions of modern thought. In short, Wolin is a stylist attentive to his form alongside his commitment to democratic informality.

For us, Wolin-influenced intellectuals, to be a political theorist is to make a choice to be a certain kind of human being — one who chooses out of deep convictions to pursue fundamental criticisms of power-laden circumstances and value-laden paradigms in order to reveal and renew the wayward ways in which ordinary people forge cultural patterns of shared concerns. For Wolin, democracy is more a verb than a noun — a form of political action, a kind of cultural practice, a mode of being prone to defeat owing to the dominant powers that be. To put it crudely, democracy is to history what blues is to music: the powerful and poignant overflow of the dissonant, defiant and dignified voices of ordinary people in the face of overwhelming odds.

Wolin’s modernist allegiance to invocation complements his classic sense of vocation because of his rich conception of the tragicomic plight of democracy in history. He wisely discerns that the capacities of ordinary people to take back power in the face of elite abuse of power is always limited and usually doomed to fail in the long run. So democracy is more a moment in history — the political moment — than a form of government...