Democracy and Vision

by Botwinick, Aryeh; Connolly, William E.

• ISBN13: 9780691074665
• ISBN10: 0691074666
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-07-02
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

American democracy faces severe challenges today, as everyday life gathers pace, national borders become increasingly porous, and commodity culture becomes more dominant.Democracy and Visionassembles a cast of prominent political theorists to consider the problems confronting political life by reviewing, assessing, and expanding on the ideas of one of the most influential political thinkers of the past forty years, Sheldon Wolin. The book consists of three sections linked by the underlying theme of Wolin's monumental effort to define ''the political'' and the conditions of democratic life. In the first, Nicholas Xenos, George Kateb, Fred Dallmayr, and Charles Taylor focus, in particular, on whether mass political participation, sustainable in times of upheaval as what Wolin aptly termed ''fugitive democracy,'' can be buoyed by political institutions during periods of stability. In the second section, Wendy Brown, Aryeh Botwinick, Melissa A. Orlie, and Anne Norton examine the relevance of Wolin's ideas to current debates about, for example, social diversity and the commercialization of culture. In the last, Stephen K. White, Kirstie M. McClure, Michael J. Shapiro, and J. Peter Euben address globalization and temporality in relation to Wolin's narrative of decline, asking, among other things, whether citizenship today must incorporate a cosmopolitan dimension. These essays--and an introduction by William Connolly that lucidly outlines Wolin's thought and the deep uncertainty about political theory in the 1960s that did much to inspire his work--offer unprecedented insights into Wolin's lament that modernity has meant the loss of the political.

Author Biography

Aryeh Botwinick is Professor of Political Science at Temple University William E. Connolly is Professor of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Politics and Vision	3	(22)
William E. Connolly
PART I: DEMOCRATIC ENERGY AND INSTITUTIONAL DEFINITION
Momentary Democracy	25	(14)
Nicholas Xenos
Wolin as a Critic of Democracy	39	(19)
George Kateb
Beyond Fugitive Democracy: Some Modern and Postmodern Reflections	58	(21)
Fred Dallmayr
A Tension in Modern Democracy	79	(20)
Charles Taylor
PART II: CAPITALISM, DIFFERENCE, AND DEMOCRACY
Reflections on Tolerance in the Age of Identity	99	(19)
Wendy Brown
Wolin and Oakeshott: Similarity in Difference	118	(20)
Aryeh Botwinick
Political Capitalism and the Consumption of Democracy	138	(23)
Melissa A. Orlie
Evening Land	161	(12)
Anne Norton
PART III: TIME AND CONSMOPOLITANISM
Three Conceptions of the Political: The Real World of Late Modern Democracy	173	(20)
Stephen K. White
Between the Castigation of Texts and the Excess of Words: Political Thoery in the Margins of Tradition	193	(39)
Kirstie M. McClure
Time, Disjuncture, and Democratic Citizenship	232	(24)
Michael J. Shapiro
The Polis, Globalization, and the Politics of Place	256	(35)
J. Peter Euben
The Contributors	291	(2)
Index	293