Theory & Event

. . .the democratic road is the hard one to take. It is the road which places the greatest burden of responsibility upon the greatest number of human beings.

— John Dewey

In the preface to the expanded edition of Politics and Vision, Sheldon Wolin refers to what he calls “certain usages that now appear anachronistic” in the original text and asks that they serve as “a general reminder of how common understandings have changed” in the forty-four years separating the first ten chapters from the newly published final seven. These anachronisms “also alert the reader to the evolution in the author’s own understandings and political commitments. These might be summarized as the journey from liberalism to democracy” (xiv).¹ As Wolin has reminded us many times, most recently in his book on Tocqueville, the Greek sense of theoria entails a journey undertaken on behalf of his city by the theoros.²

One mark of the distance he has traveled since Politics and Vision first appeared is that this notion of theory and the theorist is absent from the original text, where “political philosophy” is the preferred locution for the activity interpreted in it. Wolin points out that, “with the exception of Chapter X, which focused on the modern corporation, the preceding chapters were primarily concerned with interpreting the past rather than analyzing the present. The new chapters do not disavow those interpretations but rather try to put them to work by engaging the contemporary political world” (xiv). Significantly, it is in Chapter Ten that Wolin deploys the term “theory” exclusively. Though Wolin occasionally used the terms “political philosophy” and “political theory” interchangeably in the early 1960s, by 1968 he had settled permanently on the latter term. So “political philosophy,” it appears, is one of the anachronisms we discover in the encounter with this expanded edition. It signifies a change in Wolin’s attitude toward his subject, a change that I believe was implicit in the original edition and that marks the distance between it and the new material. It also bears on the sense in which Wolin describes the starting point of his journey as liberalism and its conclusion as democracy.

Political philosophy as described by Wolin in the first chapter of Politics and Vision is a tradition focused on “reflection on matters that concern the community as a whole” (4). The tradition entails a continuous effort to define those matters, which are never simply given. In the process, political philosophy imparts order to what otherwise appears as the everyday chaos of activities within a community (7). Indeed, Wolin notes that,

most of the great statements of political philosophy have been put forward in times of crisis; that is, when political phenomena are less effectively integrated by institutional forms. Institutional breakdown releases phenomena, so to speak, causing political behavior and events to take on something of a random quality, and destroying the customary meanings that had been part of the old political world. . . Although the task of political philosophy is greatly complicated in a period of disintegration, the theories of Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, for example, are evidence of a ‘challenge and response’ relationship between the disorder of the actual world and the role of the political philosopher as the encompasser of disorder.

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Since politics is understood as entailing conflict, Wolin summarizes his understanding of the tradition of political philosophy by suggesting that it “has consisted in large measure of the attempt to render politics compatible with the requirements of order” (12). This does not mean that the tradition is inherently conservative, exactly, since the “vision” of a political philosopher more often than not compels him toward the construction of an order at odds in some important respects with the one that has been thrown into crisis. But what happens if the problem is no longer making order out of disorder, of “encompassing disorder,” or even of proposing an alternative order to an existing one? What happens if order becomes the problem to which theory must respond?

There is one author who bridges the original text of Politics and Vision and the expanded edition: Karl Marx. Marx is also one of...