Sheldon Wolin’s (In)Vocations: Dichotomies, Paradoxes, and the Mystery of Politics In memoriam Facundo Vega1 Cornell University, New York (Estados Unidos) Recibido: 17-04-16 Aprobado: 06-09-16
Sheldon Wolin, one of the most influential contemporary political theorists, died in 2015 at the age of 93. His remarkable legacy within political thought includes written works such as Politics and Vision and lives on as well in a variety of his former students, for instance, Cornel West and Wendy Brown. Wolin’s intellectual heritage is sure to persist, given that he “lived in the presence of time past, time present, and time future”2.This brief essay, however, does not seek an obituary tone3. Rather, I will comment on particular topics inherent to Wolin’s 1 (fhv3@cornell.edu). Facundo Vega is a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University as well as a visiting scholar in the Institut für Philosophie at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Johann Wolfgang GoetheUniversität Frankfurt am Main. This essay owes a great deal to conversations with Étienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Wendy Brown, Jason Frank, Carlos Forment, Andreas Kalyvas, Diego Rossello, and Geoff Waite. I am also deeply indebted to Janet Hendrickson for her valuable comments on an earlier draft. Finally, I am grateful to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung for financial support. 2 Norton, Anne, “In Memory of Sheldon Wolin (1922–2015)” in Boston Review, November 2, 2015, N/A: https://bostonreview.net/blog/sheldon-wolin-ann-norton 3 See, among others: Hedges, Chris, “Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism,” in Truthdig. Drilling Beneath the Headlines, November 1, 2015, N/A: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/ sheldon_wolin_and_inverted_totalitarianism_20151101; Norton, Anne, op. cit.; Robin, Corey, “The Theorist Who Reached Across Time,” in Jacobin, October 24, 2015, N/A: https://www.jacobinmag. com/2015/10/wolin-politics-and-vision-berkeley-machiavelli-democracy/; Kreitner, Richard, “Sheldon Wolin, 1922-2015,” in The Nation, October 30, 2015, N/A: http://www.thenation.com/ article/sheldon-wolin-1922-2015/; Grimes, William, “Sheldon S. Wolin, 93, Dies; Political Theorist Saw Limits of Popular Democracy,” in The New York Times, October 28, 2015, N/A: http://www. nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/politics/sheldon-s-wolin-theorist-who-shifted-political-science-back-topolitics-dies-at-93.html. See, also: Markell, Patchen, “Unexpected Paths: On Political Theory and
Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades, año 18, nº 36. Segundo semestre de 2016. Pp. 485-496. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 doi: 10.12795/araucaria.2016.i36.21