Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought is a work of political theory by Princeton Emeritus Professor Sheldon S. Wolin. Part One, consisting of ten chapters and first published in 1960, distinguishes political philosophy from philosophy in general and traces political philosophy from its Platonic origins to modern day. Part Two, consisting of seven chapters and published (along with Part One) in a 2004 expanded edition, traces the development of political thought from Marx, Nietzsche, and others up to the late 20th century. Wolin left Part One unaltered in the expanded edition, confining the expressions of his changes in thought about political theory to those sections of Part Two that overlap with Part One.
One sign of the significance of the work is the large number of graduate students and professors who for three decades used it as a primary source of guidance in the field of political theory.
In revising the work, Wolin cites three major changes in political theory and politics between 1960 and 2004: (1) the aftermath of Fascism's fall in Europe and Communism's fall generally, with an intervening constant "semi-mobilization" by liberal democracies, (2) an increase in the rights of citizens against the tendencies of regimentation by the state (e.g. anti-discrimination laws), and (3) an increase in the ability of nations to "control, punish, survey, direct, and influence citizens." Wolin states that the first change necessitated the latter two changes, leading to an "inverted totalitarianism" where increased rights exist alongside a less participatory citizenry under more pervasive governmental control.
Wolin states that an inquiry is a process, a tool to find truths. Philosophy is distinguished from other forms of inquiry in that "philosophy claims to deal with truths publicly arrived at and publicly demonstrable." Contrasted with this are revealed truths dealing with sacred rites, religion, and private findings of conscience or feelings. Political philosophy hews close to this characteristic of philosophy as a whole, with the public ("demos") at times in history demanding that laws be publicly demonstrated and accessible, even if their origin was supposedly revealed truth. For Wolin, it is the nature of politics that common concerns are brought before the political process, because the political is best equipped both to confront those concerns and to do so in a public, demonstrable, and thus philosophical manner.
The discernment of what within philosophy exactly is political and what is not is confused by two factors: (1) the line can be blurred due to the interaction of political factors with other influences and (2) the language used to describe political ideas is often used in other contexts, and vocabulary from other areas is often applied to the political.
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“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self- Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted by audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator’s lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.”
—Herbert J. Gans (b. 1927)
“The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self.... The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.”
—Harold Bloom (b. 1930)
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)
“The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)