In this excellent book, Lucy Cane gives us an overview of Wolin's whole career, stretching from two essays of his on Richard Hooker and David Hume culled from his doctoral dissertation done under the supervision of Louis Hartz at Harvard in the late 1940s to his last published works, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2008) and (with Christopher Hedges) “Can Capitalism and Democracy Co-exist?” (The Real News Network, Oct./Nov. 2014). The great advantage in viewing the Wolin corpus holistically is that one sees more sharply than was previously possible the continuities, discontinuities, elisions, and circumventions that mark the work. For example, one is able to emphatically see that the central category of “the political” in Wolin's thought is Heideggerian in inspiration and Arendtian in implementation. “The political” in Wolin is an invented phenomenological category fashioned to capture what has been lost with the advent of modernity: the face-to-face contact with other people, and the sense of belonging to a community consisting of other people driven by the same concerns and plagued by the same anxieties as ourselves.
According to Cane, Wolin was convinced early in his career that the radical individualism and personal isolationism bred by liberalism was a key factor responsible for the spread of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in the world. He also drew a connection between the dearth of political participatory forums in Western societies and the disrepute into which political theory had fallen among lay citizens as well as academic professionals in the fifties and early sixties. Because politics was no longer able to offer the consolations that average citizens craved, there was no space for creative reimagining of the political realm except in the manner that Wolin himself was reenacting it—of mourning for the loss of political participation and retrieving and reaffirming at least theoretically its relevance and value.
Given Wolin's overall allegiances, there is a tension (if not an overt contradiction) between his embrace of participatory democracy as a compensatory mechanism for the anomie induced by liberalism and his Marxism. At his death, Wolin left an unpublished, largely approbatory manuscript on Karl Marx. Many of his criticisms of American democracy in Democracy Incorporated begin from deepened and extended vantage points of criticism found in the works of Karl Marx. Wolin partially takes his idyllic vision of participatory democracy from Arendt, who looks to the democratically governed Athens as a model. One of the unique features of Athenian democracy was that citizenship was reserved only for the minority of citizens who were born in and resided in the state, and who enjoyed wealth and social status. Participatory democracy at its inception was therefore an elitist category.
It is of course possible to theorize participatory democracy in a more overtly Marxist manner. One would have to envision initiation into the mores of class struggle as part of the socialization process leading to the institutionalization of participatory democracy. Wolin was certainly sympathetic toward this approach, even if he did not devote much space to the question of how this outcome could be historically realized.
One further aspect to take account of is that participatory democracy might have represented an unconscious sublimation of another loss that Wolin felt but never fully articulated. Wolin's chapters on religious thinkers such as Luther and Calvin and his unpublished biblical commentaries are among his most impressive and thought-provoking writings. It is entirely plausible to think that the sense of loss he might have experienced in relation to the difficulty that modern men and women have in appreciating the vibrancy and intangible psychological rewards of the religious life produced in him a nostalgia for political participation, which confers upon its practitioners some of the same sense of taking charge of their lives and participating with others to ensure widespread fulfillment of their aspirations that religious devotion and commitment confer.
Cane also shows that Wolin addresses and corrects over time his almost exclusive preoccupation with participatory democracy and his dismissal of political representation and constitutionalism in the early and middle phases of his career. Cane says that “it is not until the twenty-first century that Wolin comes more fully to appreciate the democratic potential of constitutional rights and large-scale, representative institutions” (17). For a good part of his career, Wolin did not appreciate that pure majoritarianism (even when it is expressed in participatory frameworks) without the leaven of representative structures, institutions, and categories can easily degenerate into totalitarianism. Totalitarian democracy is not a contradiction in terms, as the Nuremberg rallies, and the Nazi regime as a whole, testify. Yet Wolin was antagonistic to representative institutions—and very pointedly and defiantly to constitutionalism. Wolin saw the brakes and filters introduced to safeguard the priorities assigned to democratic institutions as pretexts for limiting democratic expression, and he viewed constitutional and representative institutions as levers by which economic and corporate oligarchies could assert their control over democracy. He did not see them as channels by which democracy could protect itself against the excesses of democracy.
In political theory, you rarely are able to rationally justify and validate your recommendations based upon the premises from which they emerge. You can move from “ought” to “ought”—but not from “is” to “ought.” For Hobbes, Hume, Kant, and Rawls, every “is” is a disguised “ought.” Liberal formalisms are logically and epistemologically constrained. Substantive innovations can only be pragmatically supported and promoted. Wolin theorizes outside of this framework altogether. He responds to the recognition of loss. Hobbes and his successors are responding to the incompleteness of the human rationalist project. In politics, as in virtually all other spheres of human inquiry and discourse, we hardly ever transcend circularity.
Cane addresses the question of what implications follow from Wolin's political theory for the Trump phenomenon in American politics (60–62). I would like to add a postscript. To borrow an adjective from Wolin: Trumpism in American politics represents what we might call an inverted messianism. Many Americans see as the most promising exit from their stunted lives an institutionalization of the messianic exit itself. They crave universal acknowledgment of the magical character of human life—where the boundaries between wish fulfillment and reality are totally effaced—and the perspectives from which one could draw lines of demarcation between the real and the imagined have been exploded. This inverted messianism requires a rejection of the claims of intelligence—of critical discernment between the rationally acceptable and the rationally unacceptable. The characteristic practice of contemporary messianists is to rezone reason out of its topography of the human psyche. Whereas classical messianism sees the unprecedented cultivation of reason as one of the major elements of the messianic age, actual historical Jewish and Christian messianists see the excision of reason from the lives and culture of human beings as the most compelling symptom of messianic redemption. The most pervasive feature of the Trumpian constituency in the United States and elsewhere in the world is their rejection of reason as the most impressive and revealing human faculty, and the creation of a world in which the exchange of reason for the magical leveling of fantasy with reality (which exists only as a forgotten memory) becomes the new hallmark of the human.
Wolin's vocabulary helps us to see that under Trump's auspices, not only has totalitarianism been inverted to become integral to the theory and practice of democracy, but reality itself has been co-opted as a sphere of magical fantasy to become the chief source of solace and salvation for radically narcissistic and demented human beings.
