Politics and vision

Princeton University Press

2004

xxiv, 761 p.

Political philosophy and philosophy ; Plato : political philosophy versus politics ; The age of empire : space and community ; The early Christian era : time and community ; Luther : the theological and the political ; Calvin : the political education of Protestantism ; Machiavelli : politics and the economy of violence ; Hobbes : political society as a system of rules ; Liberalism and the decline of political philosophy ; The age of organization and the sublimation of politics ; From modern to postmodern power ; Marx : theorist of the political economy of the proletariat or of uncollapsed capitalism? ; Nietzsche : pretotalitarian, postmodern ; Liberalism and the politics of rationalism ; Liberal justice and political democracy ; Power and forms ; Postmodern democracy : virtual or fugitive?

Seldon 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.

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