Sheldon Wolin

Sheldon Sanford Wolin (/ˈwoʊlɪn/; August 4, 1922 – October 21, 2015) was an American political theorist and writer on contemporary politics. A political theorist for fifty years, Wolin became a Professor of Politics, Emeritus at Princeton University, where he taught from 1973 to 1987.

During a teaching career that spanned more than forty years, Wolin also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Santa Cruz, Oberlin College, Oxford University, Cornell University, and the 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.

After graduating from Oberlin College, Wolin received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1950 for a dissertation entitled Conservatism and Constitutionalism: A Study in English Constitutional Ideas, 1760–1785. After teaching briefly at Oberlin, Wolin taught political theory at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1954 to 1970 and built a political theory program by bringing Norman Jacobson, John H. Schaar, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, and Michael Rogin into the department.

One of Wolin's central concerns was how the history of political thought could contribute to understanding contemporary political dilemmas and predicaments. He played a significant role in the Free Speech Movement and, with John Schaar, interpreted that movement to the rest of the world. He published frequently for The New York Review of Books during the seventies and eighties.

He also wrote opinion pieces and reviews for The New York Times. In 1980, he was the founding editor of the short-lived but intellectually influential journal democracy (1980–83), funded by Max Palevsky. At Princeton, Wolin led a successful faculty effort to pass a resolution urging university trustees to divest from endowment investment in firms that supported South African apartheid.

Wolin left Berkeley in the fall of 1970 for the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught until the spring of 1972. From 1973 through 1987, he was a professor of politics at Princeton University. Wolin served on the editorial boards of many scholarly journals, including Political Theory, the leading journal of the field in the Anglo-American world. 

He consulted for various scholarly presses, foundations, and public entities, including the Peace Corps, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council. Wolin also served as president of the Society for Legal and Political Philosophy. Wolin was instrumental in founding what came to be known as the Berkeley School of political theory.

In his work Politics and Vision, Wolin formulates an interpretative approach to the history of political thought based on the careful study of different theoretical traditions. He pays particular attention to how the latter contribute to the changing meanings of a received political vocabulary, including notions of authority, obligation, power, justice, citizenship, and the state. Wolin's approach also had a bearing on contemporary problems and questions. He notoriously defined the inquiry into the history of political thought and the study of different traditions and forms of theorizing that have shaped it "as a form of political education."

Wolin's approach to the study of political theory consisted of a historical-minded inquiry into the history of political thought to inform the practice of political theory in the present. A consummate reader of texts, he carefully combined attention to both the intellectual and political contexts in which an author intervened and the genres of writing he deployed, with an eye to understanding how a particular body of work shed light on a specific political predicament. 

But this was no antiquarian exercise. It rather consisted of an attempt to "understand some aspect of the historical past is also conscious of the historical character and locus of [the inquirer's] own understanding. Historicity has to do with the convergence of the two, and the inquirer’s contribution of his presence is crucial."

Similarly, his essay "Political Theory as a Vocation," written in the context of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement, mounted a seething critique of Behaviorism and how it impaired the ability to grasp the crises of the time. Thirty years later, he explicitly formulated the importance of political theory and the study of political thought as “primarily a civic and secondarily an academic activity.” 

Wolin's 2001 study of Alexis de Tocqueville, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, constitutes his second summum opus. Cornel West has called it Wolin's masterpiece, the crowning achievement of “the greatest political theorist of and for democracy of our time.”