Sheldon S. Wolin
| Sheldon Wolin | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 4, 1922 Chicago, Illinois |
| Died | October 21, 2015 (aged 93) Salem, Oregon |
| Alma mater | Oberlin College, Harvard University |
| Spouse(s) | Emily Purvis |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Political philosophy |
|
Main interests
|
Democracy, political philosophy |
|
Notable ideas
|
Inverted totalitarianism |
|
Influenced
|
|
Sheldon S. Wolin (/ˈwoʊlɪn/; August 4, 1922 – October 21, 2015) was an American political theorist and writer on contemporary politics. A political theorist for fifty years, Wolin became Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, where he taught from 1973 to 1987.
During a teaching career which spanned more than forty years, Wolin also taught at University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Santa Cruz, Oberlin College, Oxford University, Cornell University, and University of California, Los Angeles. He was a notable teacher of undergraduate and particularly graduate students, serving as a mentor to many students who themselves became prominent scholars and teachers of political theory.
After graduating from Oberlin College, Wolin received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1950, for a dissertation entitled Conservatism and Constitutionalism: A Study in English Constitutional Ideas, 1760–1785. After teaching briefly at Oberlin, Wolin taught political theory at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1954 to 1970, and built a political theory program by bringing Norman Jacobson, John H. Schaar, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, and Michael Rogin into the department.
One of Wolin's central concerns was how the history of political thought could contribute to understanding contemporary political dilemmas and predicaments. He played a significant role in the Free Speech Movement and with John Schaar interpreted that movement to the rest of the world. During the seventies and eighties he published frequently for The New York Review of Books. He also wrote opinion pieces and reviews for The New York Times. In 1980, he was the founding editor of the short-lived but intellectually influential journal democracy (1980–83). At Princeton, Wolin led a successful faculty effort to pass a resolution urging university trustees to divest from endowment investment in firms that supported South African apartheid.
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