Sheldon Wolin facts for kids

Sheldon Sanford Wolin (August 4, 1922 – October 21, 2015) was an American political thinker and writer. He studied how politics works in modern times. For many years, Wolin was a professor at Princeton University. He taught there from 1973 to 1987.

Sheldon Wolin taught for over forty years. He worked at many universities, including Berkeley, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Oberlin College. He was known for being a great teacher, especially to college students studying political theory. Many of his students became important scholars themselves.

Sheldon Wolin's Career

After finishing college at Oberlin College, Wolin earned his highest degree from Harvard University in 1950. His main paper was about how ideas of government changed in England.

Teaching and Writing

From 1954 to 1970, Wolin taught political theory at the University of California, Berkeley. He helped build a strong political theory program there. He brought in other smart teachers like Norman Jacobson and Hanna Fenichel Pitkin.

One of Wolin's main goals was to use history to understand today's political problems. He was involved in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. He helped explain what that movement was about to people around the world.

During the 1970s and 1980s, he often wrote for The New York Review of Books. He also shared his thoughts and wrote reviews for The New York Times. In 1980, he started a journal called democracy. It was short-lived but had a big impact on ideas. At Princeton, Wolin helped lead an effort to get the university to stop investing in companies that supported apartheid in South Africa.

Wolin left Berkeley in 1970 and taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz for a few years. From 1973 to 1987, he was a professor at Princeton University. He also served on the boards of many academic journals. These included Political Theory, a leading journal in his field. He also advised groups like the Peace Corps.

Understanding Political Ideas

Wolin helped create what is known as the Berkeley School of political theory. This way of thinking looked at how political ideas developed over time.

Studying Political History

In his book Politics and Vision, Wolin showed how to study the history of political thought. He looked closely at different ways of thinking about politics. He paid attention to how words like authority, power, and justice changed their meanings over time. Wolin believed that studying political history was a way to learn about politics itself.

Wolin's method was to look at the past to understand the present. He carefully studied old texts. He thought about the time and place an author lived in. He also considered how their writing style helped explain a political problem. He saw this as a way to connect past understanding with current issues.

In his essay "Political Theory as a Vocation," Wolin criticized how some studies ignored big problems. He wrote this during the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement. He believed political theory was important for understanding these crises. He later said that studying political thought was mainly a "civic" activity. This means it helps citizens understand their world.

His 2001 book, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, is considered one of his most important works. Scholar Cornel West called it Wolin's masterpiece. He said Wolin was "the greatest political theorist of and for democracy of our time."

Ideas on Modern Thinkers

Wolin wrote essays about many important thinkers of the 20th century. He explored different ways of understanding political ideas. He always looked at these ideas from the viewpoint of participatory democracy. This means he believed ordinary people should be active in politics.

Wolin discussed the ideas of thinkers like Hannah Arendt, John Dewey, and Michel Foucault. He also wrote about political topics like terrorism and conservatism. His book The Presence of the Past looked at the ideas behind Ronald Reagan's presidency. It also reflected on the 200th anniversary of the American Constitution.

His last book, Democracy Incorporated (2008), strongly criticized the George W. Bush administration. It also called for a return to democratic values and practices.

The Future of Democracy

Wolin offered a unique way to criticize capitalism. He also thought deeply about the future of democracy today. He developed new ideas about how modern power works. He explored how this power shaped political life in recent times.

Wolin believed that democracy is not a fixed system. Instead, it is an experience where ordinary people are active in politics. He used the term "fugitive democracy." This means that in today's world, this active political experience can be fleeting.

His ideas of "inverted totalitarianism" and "fugitive democracy" are well-known. "Inverted totalitarianism" describes a system where powerful corporations and the government control society. But they do it in a way that seems democratic. It's not like old dictatorships.

Sheldon Wolin's Life

Wolin was born in Chicago and grew up in Buffalo, New York. When he was nineteen, he paused his college studies. He joined the US Army Air Forces during World War II. He became a bombardier/navigator.

He flew 51 combat missions in the South Pacific. He served around the Philippines. His team had to fly low over Japanese ships to bomb them. This was very dangerous. The B-24 plane he flew was large and hard to move. Many of his fellow airmen lost their lives. Wolin remembered that his flight mates were very young, between 19 and 24 years old. He also said that many of them suffered psychological problems from the war.

He was married to Emily Purvis Wolin for over sixty years.

Awards and Honors

• 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 for "Politics and Vision."
• 1985 American Political Science Association's Lippincott Award for "Politics and Vision."
• David Easton Award for "Tocqueville Between Two Worlds."
• 2008 Lannan Award for "Democracy Incorporated."

Books by Sheldon Wolin

• Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded ed. (1960; Princeton University Press, 2004).
• The Berkeley Student Revolt: Facts and Interpretations, edited with Seymour Martin Lipset (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1965).
• The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond: Essays on Politics & Education in the Technological Society, with John H. Schaar (Vintage Books/New York Review of Books, 1970).
• Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory (William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970).
• 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).
• Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2008).
• Fugitive Democracy and Other Essays. Edited by Nicholas Xenos (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Articles by Sheldon Wolin

• 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.