Citation
Wolin, Sheldon S. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought - Expanded Edition. Princeton University Press, 1960. Google Books Link
Excerpts
| Page | Quote | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 40 | ”Plato’s fascination with the art of medicine leads to a quite misleading analogy: the body politic does not experience ‘disease’, but conflict; it is beset not by harmful bacteria but individuals with hopes, ambitions, and fears that are often at odds with the plans of other individuals.” | |
| 59 | ”The basic political importance of unity is that it is economical of a society’s energies. An area of unity, such as in religion, economic arrangements, or political rights, symbolizes an area of agreement, or at least of acceptance, which no longer troubles a society.” | |
| 82 | ”The Romans had learned the hard truth of Aristotle’s dictum that when particular ‘ideologies’ prevail, when public meanings appear determined exclusively by the interests of those having sufficient power to impose their particular interpretations, then it becomes extremely difficult to maintain a consensus.” | |
| 624 (fn, 101) | “the translation of the Old Testament into the Septuagint introduced the politically charged overtones inevitable in Greek” | |
| 124 | Struggle btwn Christianity and secularism: “a situation where one political theory, which often frantically sought to bolster its cause by borrowing religious ideas from its opponents, was pitted against another political theory which spoke in the name of an organized religion that had become deeply politicized in thought and structure.” | |
| 150 | In response to Lutheranism and Anabaptism, “Calvin produced a political theory of church government.” He emphasized “structure and organization, controlling the impulses liberated by the reformation.” | |
| 186 | Quote from Machiavelli on… maybe the church: “so much the more are these vices detestable [in] those who sit on the judgement seat, prescribe rules for others, and expect from them admiration.” | |
| 188 | Guicciardini quote: “The effects of the French invasion spread over Italy like a wildfire or like a pestilence […] In looking around and noticing how cities, dukedoms, and kingdoms were shattered, each state became frightened and began to think only of its own security, forgetting that fire in the house of a neighbor could easily spread and bring ruin to himself.” | |
| 261 | ”The classical economists of the eighteenth century […] exhibited an abiding interest in the ways that regularized economic behavior created order in human relationships […] without relying on compulsion. It was this last quality, the relative absence of coercion in economic transactions, that tinted the economists’ model of society with anti-political tones and ultimately made it an alternative to the older conception of a politically directed system” | |
| 264 | ”the sense of opportunity [which] had infected the political theories of the period [Locke’s generation]. The reading public had been bombarded with prescriptions for the wholesale renovation of society, ranging from Winstanley’s communist utopia to Harrington’s blueprint for republicanism.” | |
| 278 | In Locke’s theory: “What allows the act of appropriation to issue in ‘private’ possession is that others will recognize the validity of the act. In other words, appropriation is individual in character, but the recognition which converts it into an effective right is social.” | Private_Property Rights |
| 380 | ”Weber’s endlessly labored and refined distinction between the scientifically knowable realm of ‘facts’ and the subjective, nonscientific realm of ‘values’.“ | |
| 380 | To Lenin, “Revolution, far from being the ‘spontaneous’ uprising of an oppressed and exasperated mass, was an ‘art’ requiring delicate timing” | |
| 382 | Lenin quote: “Our problem here is only to lop away that which capitalistically disfigures this otherwise excellent apparatus” | |
| 394 | ”it is a commonplace among many who have written about the Holocaust that the mind feels helpless in seeking the terms to understand and convey the horrors of a recent past. Yet the mind apparently had little difficulty in finding the terms for constructing the powers that could produce the Holocaust and Hiroshima.” |
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Abstract
Politics and Vision is a landmark work by one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. 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. Substantially expanded for republication in 2004, it is both a sweeping survey of Western political thought and a powerful account of contemporary predicaments of power and democracy. In lucid and compelling prose, Sheldon Wolin offers original, subtle, and often surprising interpretations of political theorists from Plato to Rawls. Situating them historically while sounding their depths, he critically engages their diverse accounts of politics, theory, power, justice, citizenship, and institutions. 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 expanded 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. Acclaimed as a tour de force when it was first published, and a major scholarly event when the expanded edition appeared, Politics and Vision will instruct, inspire, and provoke for generations to come.
Metadata
FirstAuthor:: Wolin, Sheldon S.
Title:: Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought - Expanded Edition ShortTitle:: Politics and Vision Year:: 1960
Citekey:: wolin_politics_1960
itemType:: book
Publisher:: Princeton University Press
ISBN:: 978-1-4008-8353-0