This is a significantly expanded edition of one of the greatest works of modern political theory. Sheldon Wolin's Politics and Vision inspired and instructed two generations of political theorists after its appearance in 1960. This new edition retains intact the original ten chapters about political thinkers from Plato to Mill, and adds seven chapters about theorists from Marx and Nietzsche to Rawls and the postmodernists. The new chapters, which show how thinkers have grappled with the immense possibilities and dangers of (...) modern power, are themselves a major theoretical statement. They culminate in Wolin's remarkable argument that the United States has invented a new political form, "inverted totalitarianism," in which economic rather than political power is dangerously dominant. In this new edition, the book that helped to define political theory in the late twentieth century should energize, enlighten, and provoke generations of scholars to come. Wolin originally wrote Politics and Vision to challenge the idea that political analysis should consist simply of the neutral observation of objective reality. He argues that political thinkers must also rely on creative vision. Wolin shows that great theorists have been driven to shape politics to some vision of the Good that lies outside the existing political order. As he tells it, the history of theory is thus, in part, the story of changing assumptions about the Good. In the new chapters, Wolin displays all the energy and flair, the command of detail and of grand historical developments, that he brought to this story forty years ago. This is a work of immense talent and intense thought, an intellectual achievement that will endure. (shrink)

In his new introduction, "Note on a Missing Text," Richard Wolin uses the absence from this edition of an interview with Jacques Derrida as a springboard for ...

This book explores how four of Heidegger's most influential Jewish students came to grips with his Nazi association and how it affected their thinking.

Studies the politics of Heidegger in terms of "thrownness" or "existential contingency". Attempts to think through Heidegger's philosophy in a manner that parallels his own dialogue with other key western thinkers.

There is no grander topic for us today, and Wolin's treatment is penetrating, thorough, and authoritative. This is a major work of political theory.

_What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century’s most important philosopher?_ Martin Heidegger’s sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement’s philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” (...) Yet for years, Heidegger’s defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger’s _Black Notebooks_, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger’s philosophy was suffused with it. In this book Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised. (shrink)

Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the (...) unfinished _Arcades Project_, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity. (shrink)

This anthology is a significant contribution to the debate over the relevance of Martin Heidegger's Nazi ties to the interpretation and evaluation of his philosophical work. Included are a selection of basic documents by Heidegger, essays and letters by Heidegger's colleagues that offer contemporary context and testimony, and interpretive evaluations by Heidegger's heirs and critics in France and Germany.In his new introduction, "Note on a Missing Text," Richard Wolin uses the absence from this edition of an interview with Jacques Derrida (...) as a springboard for examining questions about the nature of authorship and personal responsibility that are at the heart of the book.Richard Wolin is Professor of Modern European Intellectual History and Humanities at Rice University. He is the author of Walter Benjamin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger, and The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism and Poststructuralism. (shrink)

An intellectual genealogy of the postmodern spirit, this book shows that postmodernism's infatuation with fascism has been widespread and not incidental. It calls into question postmodernism's claim to have inherited the mantle of the left - and suggests that postmodern thought has long been smitten with the opposite end of the political spectrum.

To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions. Thoreau.

Despite their differences in origin, the three influential schools of twentieth-century continental cultural criticism--the Frankfurt School, existentialism, and poststructuralism--have long been treated as an ensemble and with critical hesitancy. Examining these schools as responses to the apparent collapse of Western civilization in the twentieth-century and as formidable intellectual challenges to the cultural legacies of the Enlightenment, this book provides a productive base for criticism and broadens our understanding of their histories and reception.

Carl Schmitt's polemical discussion of political Romanticism conceals the aestheticizing oscillations of his own political thought. In this respect, too, a kinship of spirit with the fascist intelligentsia reveals itself. Jürgen Habermas, “The Horrors of Autonomy: Carl Schmitt in English”The pinnacle of great politics is the moment in which the enemy comes into view in concrete clarity as the enemy.Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1927).

Political Theory as a Vocation -- Transgression, Equality, and Voice -- Norm and Form : The Constitutionalizing of Democracy -- Fugitive Democracy -- Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory -- Hobbes and the Culture of Despotism -- On Reading Marx Politically -- Max Weber : Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory -- Reason in Exile : Critical Theory and Technological Society -- Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political -- Hannah Arendt and the Ordinance of Time -- The (...) Liberal/Democratic Divide : On Rawls's Political Liberalism -- On the Theory and Practice of Power -- Democracy in the Discourse of Postmodernism -- Postmodern Politics and the Absence of Myth -- The Destructive Sixties and Postmodern Conservatism -- From Progress to Modernization : The Conservative Turn -- Editorial -- What Revolutionary Action Means Today -- The People's Two Bodies -- The New Public Philosophy -- Democracy, Difference, and Re-Cognition -- Constitutional Order, Revolutionary Violence and Modern Power -- Agitated Times. (shrink)

Ten essays on issues in philosophy, literary theory and intellectual history. The question of radical imperialism of the postmodern turn, the unstated agenda of neoconservative cultural theory and a discussion of Walter Benjamin's place in cultural studies are included in the text.

It is well known that in his “Author's Introduction” (1920) to the “Collected Essays on the Sociology of World Religions” Max Weber grapples with the problem of the cultural specificity of the West. He phrases his inquiry in the following way: Why is it “that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value”? He continues to cite a wealth of (...) cultural phenomena — systematic theology, the rational concept, standardized methods of scientific experimentation, rational harmonious music, extensive utilization of perspective in painting, bureaucratic conduct of the organizational sphere, and the systematic rational pursuit of economic affairs — that are unique to the West and illustrative of its self-avowed universality. (shrink)

It has been almost half a century since Horkheimer and Adorno formulated their analysis of mass culture in the “Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment. This special issue on “Debates in Contemporary Culture” is an attempt to evaluate the relevance of this legacy in the mid-eighties. It has become part of the left conventional wisdom that the critical theory analysis of late capitalism, focusing on concepts such as the “totally administered world” (Adorno) or “one-dimensional society” (...) (Marcuse), was overly resigned and it remained unable to identify inchoate oppositional tendencies within the ‘iron cage’ of capitalist totalization. (shrink)

With the end of the Cold War the world approached the prospect of realizing what one might call the ‘Kantian moment’ in international relations. Auspiciously, 1995 marked both the 50th anniversary of the establishment of UN Charter, in which human rights guarantees prominently figured, as well as the 200th anniversary of Kant’s celebrated text on ‘Perpetual Peace.’ During the era of the EastWest political stalemate, the idea of effective world governance remained a chimera, as both political camps willfully exploited international (...) governmental organizations (IGOs), such as the UN and UNESCO, for the self-serving ends of Realpolitik. Human rights claims were brazenly politicized. The Soviets lambasted American racism and the inadequacy of social rights. The USA and its allies, conversely, pilloried their opponent’s failure to minimally respect basic, first-generation civil and political liberties. (Published: 26 May 2010) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2010, pp. 143-153. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v3i2.5213. (shrink)

In his “The Politics of Redemption” Whitebook cites Feher in support of his suspicions concerning the redemptive paradigm: “Redemption of this world, not improvement, was the overt or covert, positive or negative focal point, the historical-philosophical central thesis on which all relevant theories of the left were based on in the pre-World War I era and the period between the wars. Three distinct experiences forced an eschatological radicalism of this kind in [Benjamin] and in others who belonged to the same (...) generation. The first was the ultimate disillusionment in the age and in ‘progress.’ The second was World War I and the new century born out of the promise of its carnage. (shrink)