Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought - Expanded Edition

Sheldon S. Wolin

ISBN 10: 0691126275 / ISBN 13: 9780691126272

Published by Princeton University Press, 2006

About this Item

Former library book; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.

Seller Inventory # G0691126275I3N10

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought - Expanded Edition
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691126275
• ISBN 13: 9780691126272
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Weight: 2.45 pounds

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Sheldon S. Wolin is Professor of Politics Emeritus at Princeton University. He taught political theory for forty years at Oberlin College, the Universities of California, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Los Angeles, Princeton University, Cornell University, and Oxford University. He was the founding editor of the journal democracy. The first edition of Politics and Vision received the American Political Science Association's Benjamin E. Lippincott Award. Wolin's other books include Tocqueville between Two Worlds (Princeton) and The Presence of the Past.