Brown Wendy - Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought

POLITICS AND VISION

politics and vision

Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought

Expanded Edition

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 1960, 2004 Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wolin, Sheldon S.
Politics and vision : continuity and innovation in Western political thought / Sheldon S.
WolinExpanded ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN: 978-1-40082-610-0
1. Political scienceHistory. 2. Political sciencePhilosophyHistory. I. Title.
JA81.W6 2004
320'.09dc222003064107

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond with Helvetica Neue display.

Printed on acid free paper.

pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

13579108642

Dedicated to

EMILY PURVIS WOLIN

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE EXPANDED EDITION

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,And for a hundred visions and revisions.

T. S. Eliot

Nearly a half-century has elapsed since Politics and Vision first appeared, making it difficult, perhaps impossible, for the present volume seamlessly to resume where the original left off. Not surprisingly, the public events and my own experiences of the intervening decades have substantially affected my thinking about politics and political theory. Accordingly the new material is confined to Part Two while the original chapters have been left untouched. This should in no way be viewed as dismissive of the many fine historical studies that have added much to our knowledge of the topics treated.

Changes to the original edition have been confined to corrections of printing errors. I have let stand certain usages that now appear anachronistic, e.g., man as a comprehensive term denoting human beings generally. These embarrassments can serve as a general reminder of how common understandings have changed and also alert the reader to the evolution in the authors own under-standings and political commitments. These might be summarized as the journey from liberalism to democracy. The first editions subtitle pretty well summarizes an outlook of four decades ago where the parameters of politics and theory were set by continuity and innovation. 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. The basic conviction that unites the expanded and the original editions is that a critical knowledge of past theories can contribute immeasurably to sharpening our thinking and cultivating our sensibilities should we choose to engage the politics of our own day.

This, then, is not a revision but an envisioning of strikingly different forms of politics and theorizing from those discussed in the original. It is also, however, an attempt to bring to bear upon contemporary politics what I have learned from studying and teaching about the history of political theory. Far from being a handicap, a familiarity with the varied forms that, historically, political theory has taken may aid in the recognition of radically different recent and contemporary conceptions of the political and politics when they emerge.

Viewed retrospectively, Politics and Vision first appeared midway between the Allies victory over one totalitarian regime and the collapse of another. The defeat of Soviet communism was one of several endgames in an era rich with them. Less obvious were the consequences for the victors of the vast mobilization of resources and of those tightened, systematic domestic controls defended as necessary to the war effort. One question that forms the underlying theme to the new chapters is this: Was it possible for liberal democracy to wage a total war and remain semi-mobilized for almost a half-century, confronting what were widely perceived as the most highly concentrated systems of power in human history, without itself undergoing profound changes, even a regime-change?

My belief is that the experience of combatting totalitarian regimes had sunk more deeply into the practices and values of American political elites than observers have acknowledged, and that, if anything, this influence has intensified today. Similarly, the demos has changed, from citizens to occasional voters. Without claiming that the American political system is a totalitarian regime, I employ totalitarianism as an extreme ideal-type in order to identify certain tendencies towards totalizing powerwhich I group under the notion of inverted totalitarianism that have culminated in a new but still tentative regime, Superpower.

I am not claiming that Superpower has been fully realized in the emergence of an unabashed American empire, any more than Nazi Germany was a perfectly realized totalitarianism. In both cases the terms totalitarianism and Superpower refer to aspirations that negate the ideals of the regimes which they supersedethe Weimar parliamentary system in Germany and the American liberal democracy. Yet, as Max Weber noted, an ideal type can appear in reality and in historically important ways, and they have.

I have coined the phrase inverted totalitarianism in order to underscore the peculiar combination of two contrasting, but not necessarily opposing, tendencies. In the post-war United States, as well as in many Western European countries, the powers of government to control, punish, survey, direct, and influence citizens have increased, but at the same time there have been liberal-democratic changes that appear to work against regimentation, e.g., measures against discriminatory practices based on race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. However, if these and other reforms help to empower, they may also contribute to splintering and fragmenting opposition, making it difficult to form effective majorities and easier to divide and rule.

As an ideal-type, Superpower might be defined as an expansive system of powers that accepts no limits other than those it chooses to impose on itself. Its system blends the political authority of the democratic state, de jure power, with the powers represented by the complex of modern science-technology and corporate capital. The distinctive element that these de facto powers contribute to Superpower is a dynamic (from the Greek dynameis, or powers), a driving force. They are cumulative, continually evolving into new forms, self-revivifying. Their effect is to change significantly the lives not only in the homeland but in near and distant societies as well.

In recognition of that character historians commonly describe the history of these powers as a sequence of revolutions, scientific or technological or economic. These powers have also furnished governments with unprecedented means of waging war, controlling their populations, and improving the well-being of their citizens. Although they are as old as civilization itself, it is only in our time that the methods of organizing and systematically interrelating these powers are being perfected. The result is a distinctive capability for generating powers virtually at will and of speedily projecting them anywhere in the world and beyond. As such they present a suggestive contrast with political revolutions. Instead of cumulative power, modern political revolutions have tended to represent an accumulation of grievances, of negativities.