Theoria

The first I read of Sheldon Wolin was his paper on Foucault. When and why I can’t remember, but, even as an undergrad, I knew this was a rather poor – and rather Anglo-American – reading of Foucault. I therefore never read any more of his work and was consequently confused when people would speak highly of him – as, for instance, an endorsement (or editorial review?) on the back of the revised/expanded edition of Politics and Vision, “… the book that influenced a generation” or something. And, when people who I otherwise respected profusely thanked him in their acknowledgements, I was even more confused.

Although he perseveres in saying strange things about Foucault in the book, I found his book on Tocqueville to be quite good. Possibly the best written by an Anglo-American political theorist. I opened up to him, I suppose, and now I am reading the original edition (the library didn’t have the revised edition) of Politics and Vision for the first time. It’s much better than I expected and he is quite attuned – albeit with an excessively formal and possibly transhistorical or essentialist definition – to the political and the series of depoliticizations and repoliticizations and theologizations and detheologizations that it undergoes. Plus, there’s a long chapter on the depoliticization of liberalism (has anyone written on him and Schmitt?), which I have yet to get to.

My question about the book is as follows: is his discussion of Luther and Calvin regarded as definitive? For some reason, a number of years ago, someone (an undergrad, I assume) highlighted nearly every single sentence (and nothing from the other three hundred pages of the book) of those two chapters. Weird. Sure, the discussion is interesting, but I doubt that it is absolutely fundamental!