FOREWORD to the PRINCETON CLASSICS EDITION Politics And

FOREWORD TO THE PRINCETON CLASSICS EDITION ••• Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Political Thoughtis both one and two books, written by both one and two political theorists. A changed world and changed thinker divides the 1960 edition from the 2004 expanded edition, the latter now ap- pearing as a Princeton Classic. First published when Sheldon S. Wolin was a young Berkeley professor, Politics and Vision quickly rose to prominence for its luminous interpretations of canonical theorists and probing reflections on the shifting meaning and status of politics and political theory across Western history. A scholarly work of breathtaking scope composed in accessible literary cadences, it was exemplary of what Wolin would term “political theory as a vocation” in his 1969 essay by that name.1 Intentionally recalling Max Weber’s stipulations for scholarship and political leadership in his “Vocations” essays, and especially Weber’s contrast between career and calling, Wo- lin’s formulation of theory as a vocation distinguished political theory’s classic value from current disciplinary conventions. He sought especially to reestablish political theory’s longstanding concerns with res publicae and res gestae—concerns he termed as “irreducible and natural to the political theorist as a concern for health is to the physician.”2 With its immense erudition and close readings trained on the problematic of “the political,” Politics and Vision embodied Wolin’s insistence on political theory as “primarily a civic and secondarily an academic activity…a critical engagement with collective existence and with the political experiences of power to which it gives rise.”3 This tasking of political theory invites the sort of reading Wolin frequently performed when he taught. Here is how we might open up that formulation as Wolin did with phrases from Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes: Political theory is primarily civic, meaning “of or belonging to a city,” and “related to citizenship.” It is thus not only about but for the polity, informing citizenship and itself a certain practice of citizenship. Political theory does not describe, quantify, model, or predict behaviors and makes no pretense to objectivity. Rather, it is critically engaged with its particular object, “collective existence and the political experiences of power to which it gives rise.” Here power is not an independent substrate, reducible to a unified, let alone consistent, concept, nor is it simply won or lost, held or wielded. Rather, power is generated by particular xvi FOREWORD TO THE PRINCETON CLASSICS EDITION (historical) human collectivities and, for that reason, has protean and diverse forms and faces. More than a tool or force, power is also politically experienced—whether as order, democracy, authority, subordination, capacity, possibility, or containment. Wolin’s performative account of political theory thus moves against dominant scholarly trends by staking its engaged nature and emphasizing the historically molten and power-saturated qualities of its object, political life.4 Only against the backdrop of political theory’s predicaments in the two eras in which Wolin authored both the original and the expanded edition of Politics and Vi- sion can we fathom the radicalism of this brief for political theory as a shape-shifting activity—critically, actively engaging the historically generated and generative powers of organized collective life. The first edition led political theory back to politics; the second back to critique. Both sought to renew the vitality, complexity, historical illumination, and poetics of political theory for students, teachers, scholars, and educated citizens. In 1960, political theory as a domain of inquiry and approach to political understanding was a candidate for the dustbin of history. In the social sciences, its bid for knowledge through historical and philosophical reflection was displaced if not disputed by growing positivism, empiricism, and behaviorism in the social sciences. Philosophy was speedily consolidating into its analytic and Continental branches, and the former—which governed in the English-speaking world—withdrew sharply from inquiry that was either historically conscious or concerned with the distinct problematic of political power rather than morality. The quivering remains of a genre of in- sight fundamentally oriented by canonical political theory could be found only in the cloistered hermeneutics of Leo Strauss and the dry history of ideas of George Sabine. Onto this parched landscape came Politics and Vision, with its insistence that “political theory is not so much interested in political practices, or how they operate, but in their meaning” (7), that it posts “warnings” rather than “predictions” (14), and that it is at once a theorist’s interpretation of the world and an imaginative project of seeing beyond facticity in order to build a complex “political metaphysic” (16). Imagination, Wolin argued, “is the theorist’s means for understanding a world he can never ‘know’ in an intimate way” (19). In addition to challenging the reigning proposition that such a world could be understood through quantitative measurement, Wolin took aim at the fact/norm distinction governing political science: imagination is also “the medium for expressing the fundamental values of the theorist…the means by which the political theorist has sought to transcend history” (19). Above all, Politics and Vision insisted on political theory as characterized by the perennial yet always historically configured problematics of power, order, authority, political change, conflict, law, and citizenship. When, forty-five years later, the revised and expanded edition of Politics and Vision appeared, political theory was a robust but almost wholly academic industry.5 Rescued from neglect, now its promise of worldly illumination and radical critique was choked by scholastic professionalism and two dominant frames: Skinnerian historicism for FOREWORD TO THE PRINCETON CLASSICS EDITION xvii interpreting theorists of the past, and Rawlsian analytics for contemplating (and often muting) the challenges of the present. If Skinner insisted on adducing history to read theory rather than theory to read history, Rawls lifted political philosophy from historical, cultural, and socio-economic context altogether. Combined, the two schools severed the history of political thought from contemporary political theory and es- tablished a governing conceit of objectivity for interpreting works of the past (and a tacit bar against using them to illuminate the present) and of rational normativity for political theories of the present (and a tacit elimination of theory as critique). Histori- cism aimed to cage the political thought of other epochs in their time, and analytic liberal theory was resolutely unhistorical and detached from concerns with power in its pursuit of normative arguments bound to neo-Kantian moral justifications. Into this scholarly orbit came Wolin’s expanded Politics and Vision, now supplement- ing examinations of the ancients, Christians, early moderns, and utilitarians with new chapters on Marx, Nietzsche, Popper, Dewey, Rawls, and theorizations of novel breeds of power that Wolin took to generate the predicaments of the contemporary epoch. The expanded edition, however, offered more than splendid new objects of interpretation by one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century; Wolin’s own vision had changed, something that was evident in the tone as well as the arguments. If the original volume was meditative, measured, and even melancholy in the warning its final chapters sound- ed about citizenship and political society disappearing into the “age of organization,” there was no such diagnostic restraint or mute on his warning bell in the 2004 volume. We are now, he insisted, in the era of Superpower, inverted totalitarianism, democracy destroyed by the corporate state, empire, the dangling citizen, deregulated markets combined with scandalous incarceration rates, a demos massively manipulated and “ham- mered into resignation” (578), all sealed with the irony of the ascent of Rawlsian liberal thought “just as the political fortunes of liberalism began to wane” (538). Here we are reminded that the original and expanded versions of Politics and Vision were distinguished not only by the scholarly paradigms they contested or the thinkers and problems they studied. They emerged from and spoke to disparate political eras, especially in the United States, which endured as Wolin’s main and unabashed political referent notwithstanding his familiarity with European languages, literatures, and histories. There was the Cold War versus the war on terrorism, the bureaucratic- administrative state versus the corporate-imperial state, a complacent citizenry versus a managed electorate, anxiety about a recent totalitarian past versus the “ingrafting of elitism and empire upon popular sovereignty” (599, 600). Yet there was also Wolin’s own marked intellectual-political shift between the two volumes, which he termed “a journey from liberalism to democracy” and from a concern with “interpreting the past… [to] analyzing the present,” but which also might be characterized as a journey from political theory as interpretation to political theory as critique. This journey, echoing faintly that of Tocqueville between the two volumes ofDe - mocracy in America, is as profound as it is understated by Wolin himself. Wolin re- xviii FOREWORD

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