Theory & Event

The new edition of Politics and Vision is, as holding it in one hand makes clear, a greatly expanded one. But is it also a revised edition, one that offers or outlines a revisioning of politics, of political theory, and of the polymorphous relations between them? If vision is, as the book’s opening chapter argues, the imagined anticipation of what is not yet present, an excess unintimidated by the supposedly sovereign facticity of the moment, with whom and where in our time and place does the political and theoretical imagination reside? The question is all the more urgent and the answer all the more uncertain because Wolin talks about the contemporary failure of that imagination. More specifically, he refers to a political and theoretical surrender and to the possible exhaustion of the tradition of discourse that had defined political theory and the first edition of Politics and Vision. Politically, he writes of a demos “hammered into resignation” and “crushed” by the corporate state; of democracy co-opted into an anti-democratic imaginary that writes over loss by parading as utopia; and of the “evisceration” of citizenship.

One thing that dramatizes this urgency is his invocation of totalitarianism, however inverted, as a label for America. That urgency is enacted more fully in the tone and texture of the final chapters: intense and prophetic, they are driven by outrage and loss, a sense of disappointment and dashed hopes, especially for ordinary men and women. These men and women are, as Wolin puts it in his Invocation essay, just trying to “gain a modest purchase on the world” against threatening forces over which they have no control and the fate of their children just out of high school whose lives are over almost before they begin, “most of them doomed, having little idea of making a living, only of outwitting death.”

Yet for all this, Wolin’s ultimate vision is not one of unrelieved darkness; indeed, no political vision could be. Rather, his vision incorporates ironic reversals and paradoxes — in the Greek sense of a claim that is discordant with what is held to be sensible or true — in a way that opens spaces and possibilities for democratic renewal and a recasting of the theoretical vocation. While there may be no redemptive teleology in the new edition, there is the constant possibility of redemptive moments, providing we do not ask too much or the wrong things of history.

For Wolin, we live in a political and theoretical world that is simultaneously turning in upon itself and witnessing the development of a superpower that accepts no boundaries or limits. In this world, political economy becomes the public philosophy and the free market our determinism of choice. Fascinated and driven by unrelenting change mandated by corporate capitalism and marketed under the sign of progress, we lack the time and spaces to mourn our losses and to recognize who is losing most. Finally, in this world democracy is hijacked by its critics, folded into a utopian vision that denies the dystopia that is the condition of so many of our fellow citizens. If we are what democracy can be, the argument goes, then nothing in the future and no outrages in the past can generate anything but an extension of the achievement we already are.

How do we proceed, politically and theoretically, when everyone is a critic, everyone is a theorist, democracy has become what John Dunn calls the moral esperanto of the nation-state system, and everything is political? How is it possible to restore the critical edge of theory so, as Wolin quotes Adorno, it keeps present and honors things and people who have fallen by the wayside, the waste products and blind spots, the defeated and eccentric, the cross-grained, opaque and unassimilated materials which refuse the silence imposed by the rectilinear succession of victory and defeat? How does one find place and opportunity for democracy that is not instantly co-opted by corporate capitalism? Where do we find the voice and the courage to call the plutocracy we have by its rightful name? And how can we restore the distinctiveness of politics as an activity...