Sheldon S. Wolin Quotes

Sheldon Sanford Wolin was an American political theorist and writer on contemporary politics. A political theorist for fifty years, Wolin became Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, where he taught from 1973 to 1987.During a teaching career which spanned more than forty years, Wolin also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Santa Cruz, Oberlin College, Oxford University, Cornell University, and University of California, Los Angeles. He was a notable teacher of undergraduate and particularly graduate students, serving as a mentor to many students who themselves became prominent scholars and teachers of political theory. Wikipedia

✵ 4. August 1922 – 21. October 2015

Sheldon S. Wolin: 3 quotes 0 likes

Famous Sheldon S. Wolin Quotes

“While the versions of totalitarianism represented by Nazism and Fascism consolidated power by suppressing liberal political practices that had sunk only shallow cultural roots, Superpower represents a drive towards totality that draws from the setting where liberalism and democracy have been established for more than two centuries. It is Nazism turned upside-down, “inverted totalitarianism.” While it is a system that aspires to totality, it is driven by an ideology of the cost-effective rather than of a “master race” (Herrenvolk), by the material rather than the “ideal.””

Sheldon S. Wolin

Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (1960, revised 2004), p. 591

“Weber… formulated the idea of methodology to serve, not simply as a guide to investigation but as a moral practice and a mode of political action.”

Sheldon S. Wolin

Sheldon Wolin, “Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory,” Political Theory (1981)

“Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash.”

Sheldon S. Wolin

Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008), p. 66

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