WOLIN, Sheldon S. 1922-

PERSONAL: Born August 4, 1922 in Chicago, IL; married, 1944; three children. Education: Oberlin College, B.A., 1946; Harvard University, M.A., 1947, Ph. D., 1950.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of Political Science, Princeton University, 308 Corwin Hall, Princeton, NJ 08540.

CAREER: Political scientist, author, and educator. Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, instructor of political science, 1950; Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, assistant professor, 1950-54, Jaszi memorial lecturer, 1962; University of California, Berkeley, instructor, 1954-58, assistant professor, 1958-61, professor of political science, 1961-71; Princeton University, professor of political science, 1961—. United States Air Force War College, lecturer, 1961. Military service: U.S. Army Air Forces, 1942-45, became first lieutenant.

MEMBER: American Political Science Association.

AWARDS, HONORS: Harvard University fellow, 1948-49, Sheldon fellow, 1949; Fulbright fellow, Magdalen College, Oxford, 1949-50; Rockefeller fellow, 1954-55.

WRITINGS:

Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1960.

(Editor, with Seymour Martin Lipset) The Berkeley Student Revolt: Facts and Interpretations, Anchor Books (Garden City, NY), 1965.

(With John H. Schaar) The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond: Essays on Politics and Education in the Technological Society, New York Review (New York, NY), 1970.

Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, introduction by Richard E. Ashcraft, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (Los Angeles, CA), 1970.

The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1989.

Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2001.

Contributor and editor of Democracy; contributor to volumes such as Reassessing the Sixties, edited by Steven Macedo.

SIDELIGHTS: Sheldon S. Wolin is a prominent political scientist and social critic. Born on August 4, 1922 in Chicago, Illinois, Wolin served as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II. Wolin married in 1944 and has three children. A career academic with a Ph.D. from Harvard University, Wolin has taught at Northwestern University, Oberlin College, University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University. Highly regarded as a political thinker, Wolin is considered "our foremost theorist of the political" by critics such as Nancy L. Schwartz, writing in American Political Science Review.

Wolin's 1960 book Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought has influenced generations of political science students. "As an undergraduate seeking enlightenment, I asked my professor to explain to me what political theorists do," commented Steven M. Dworetz, writing in Journal of Politics. The professor handed Dworetz a "wellthumbed copy of Sheldon Wolin's Politics and Vision" and encouraged him to read it. "For once I did as I was told," Dworetz commented, "and, in awe, I began to understand."

Dworetz's reaction to Wolin's 1989 volume, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution evoked a similar sense of awe, he said, but "there is also a chilling quality to an otherwise exhilarating experience, for here the enlightenment so generously supplied by Wolin reveals a grim view of the American Republic in the wake of its Bicentennial celebrations."

A collection of eleven essays spanning several years, The Presence of the Past provides a detailed critique of the American state, from the ideas of democracy promulgated by Alexis de Tocqueville to the American political culture of the 1980s. "A majority of the essays display an originality and wisdom that give new and exciting insights into the art and science of political organization as they affect the U.S. experience," wrote R. J. Steamer in Choice. Wolin argues that the fundamental ideas behind the U.S. Constitution and democracy, and the concomitant mechanisms for limiting political power and holding it accountable, are endangered because of a decentering of power related to "privatization of public functions," he wrote, which "immunizes power against public scrutiny and democratic control," Dworetz remarked. Privatization has created forms of power that "far exceed the power capacity envisioned in the Constitution," Wolin wrote. Although privatization is assumed to bring about the reduction or elimination of state power, that is not its ultimate result, Dworetz said. What occurs instead, observed Wolin, "is not the elimination of power but the elimination of politics, that is, the public discussion and argument" that debates the uses and goals of power. Dworetz concluded, "Privatization of public functions—especially of coercive functions—must therefore be seen as enhancing power precisely by rendering it publicly unaccountable."

Other essays in The Presence of the Past provide intellectual analysis of a variety of texts in political theory. These include works by Locke, Tocqueville, Montesquieu, and even the Old Testament. "Here Wolin is graceful and illuminates old texts with new questions," Schwartz observed. "The analyses of Tocqueville on time and municipal spirit and Montesquieu on intermediary bodies . . . are brilliant." Reviewer Bin Ramke, writing in Bloomsbury Review, commented, "The book is elegantly written, with an awareness and investment in the theory and the practice of living in the United States of America and the world at large today. It is, in other words, a book of intelligence and passion, which, at its heart, is trying to save us."

In Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life Wolin presents a detailed biographical, political, and theoretical examination of Tocqueville, a French intellectual considered by many to be the most influential political thinker in American history. "Almost two centuries after it was written, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America exerts an extraordinary grip on the American imagination," wrote Alan Ryan in New York Review of Books. "Tocqueville is so frequently invoked in contemporary political arguments that it is hard to appreciate how extraordinary his authority is." A visitor to the newly minted United States of America, Tocqueville was a twenty-five-year-old French aristocrat when he wrote Democracy in America, a two-volume study of America and its political structure and institutions.

"For many, Tocqueville is primarily the French observer who traveled to America in 1830-31 and recognized the superiority of our institutions and way of life," wrote Daniel J. Mahoney in First Things. Tocqueville's trip to America was ostensibly to observe the American penal system, but instead it was the American system of a democratic republic that appealed to him. Tocqueville "celebrated the success of Americans in creating and sustaining a democratic republic, praised their morals and religion, and left his French readers in no doubt that while much of this American success was fortuitous, most was not." Ryan wrote. French attempts to establish a republican government "had collapsed in bloodshed and the Terror," Ryan wrote, while the American attempt succeeded. The United States "certainly raised the question of how Americans had achieved what the French could not," Ryan remarked.

Despite Tocqueville's profound influence on American politics, however, he was not a wholehearted advocate of all concepts of democracy. In Wolin's book, he "offers a Tocqueville who is extraordinarily complex, deeply conflicted and by no means the uncritical booster of democratic possibility he is sometimes made out to be," wrote Jean Bethke Elshtain in Washington Post Book World. Tocqueville, wrote Mahoney, "was an observer and practitioner of politics who tried to mediate between two sets of oppositions—on the one hand, theory and practice, and on the other, democracy and what he somewhat capaciously called aristocracy (encompassing all the worlds that came before the New World of democratic consent)."

Wolin, Elshtain observed, "engages the entire body of Tocqueville's work, displaying both the historical context of his writings and their biographical urgencies; indeed, at points, Tocqueville between Two Worlds is as much an intellectual biography as it is a work of more abstract political thought." Stephen Holmes, writing in New Republic, commented that "Wolin's lengthy paraphrases, generous citations, and pungent commentaries make this a useful book for all those seeking to deepen their understanding of Tocqueville." Delba Winthrop, writing on the Claremont Institute Web site, observed, "Most books on Tocqueville are either biographies or studies of one, or at most a few, of his writings. Sheldon Wolin's Tocqueville between Two Worlds is an attempt to arrive at a coherent, comprehensive understanding of Tocqueville's political theory by analyzing and evaluating his political life and writings as a whole. It raises all the important questions, takes texts seriously—Tocqueville's as well as those of other political theorists—and is full of original and provocative readings of these texts."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, June, 1974, William L. O'Neill, review of The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond: Essays on Politics and Education in the Technological Society, pp. 911-912.

American Political Science Review, December, 1990, Nancy L. Schwartz, review of The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution, pp. 1366-1367.

Bloomsbury Review, Bin Ramke, review of The Presence of the Past, p. 5.

Choice, June, 1990, R.J. Steamer, review of The Presence of the Past, p. 1755.

First Things, March, 2002, Daniel J. Mahoney, review of Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, pp. 60-63.

Georgia Review, Summer, 1997, Sanford Pinsker, review of Reassessing the Sixties, pp. 362-364.

Journal of Politics, November, 1990, Steven M. Dworetz, review of The Presence of the Past, pp. 1283-1286.

Legal Studies Forum, winter, 1990, Lorraine K. Koc, review of The Presence of the Past, pp. 89-94.

Library Journal, January 15, 1971, Fay M. Blake, review of The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond: Essays on Politics and Education in the Technological Society, p. 182; September 1, 2002, Thomas A. Karel, review of Tocqueville between Two Worlds, p. 209.

National Review, April 12, 1982, Charles R. Kesler, "Conservatism and the Founding Fathers," pp. 350-351, 375.

New Left Review, January-February, 2002, Gopal Balakrishnan, review of Tocqueville between Two Worlds, pp. 151-160.

New Republic, December 23, 1981, Peter Shaw, "The End of the Seventies; You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know That the Climate Has Changed," pp. 21-23; March 4, 2002, Stephen Holmes, review of Tocqueville between Two Worlds, p. 31.

New Yorker, October 15, 2001, Adam Gopnik, "The Habit of Democracy: Alexis de Tocqueville and the Pleasures of Citizenship," pp. 212-216.

New York Review of Books, June 27, 2002, Alan Ryan, "Visions of Politics," review of Tocqueville between Two Worlds, pp. 35-38.

New York Times, September 26, 1982, "The American Left Still Searches for a Clear Political Direction," p. E5.

Philological Quarterly, July, 1971, Craig Walton, review of Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, p. 441.

Political Communication, April-June 1992, Gordon Lloyd, review of The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution, pp. 143-150.

Political Science Reviewer, fall, 1981, Joseph E. Goldberg, "Sheldon Wolin's Vision of Politics: A Critical Examination," pp. 83-132.

Political Theory, November, 1990, Sanford Levinson, review of The Presence of the Past, pp. 701-705.

Texas Law Review, April, 1991, James M. O'Fallon, review of The Presence of the Past, pp. 1253-1257.

Times Literary Supplement, March 8, 2002, Biancamaria Fontana, "A Craving for New Certainties," p. 10.

Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2001, Thomas Pavel, review of Tocqueville between Two Worlds, p. 4.

Washington Post Book World, November 11, 2001, Jean Bethke Elshtain, review of Tocqueville between Two Worlds, p. 13.

ONLINE

Claremont Institute Web site,http://www.claremond.org/ (December 12, 200), Delba Winthrop, review of Tocqueville between Two Worlds.

Foundations of Political Theory Web site,http://www.political-theory.org/ (December 12, 2002), review of Tocqueville between Two Worlds.

Princeton University Press Web site,http://www.pup.princeton.edu/ (December 12, 2002).*