Democracy and the Politics of Scales in Sheldon Wolin’s Political Thought

Leaving aside the debate on its “fugitive” nature, this paper adds to the growing literature on Sheldon Wolin’s radical democratic project by questioning its politics of scale as well as its epistemic and emancipatory implications. Wolin was equally critical of Arendt’s seclusion of ‘the social’ from ‘the political’, of identity politics, and of the role assigned to voluntary associations and groups in contemporary political practice. He was also well aware of the shortcomings of his own penchants for localism, and concluded that it could not “surmount its limitations except by seeking out the evanescent homogeneity of a broader political”. Yet contrary to Rancière for whom “politics is the local and singular art of building instances of universality,” Wolin is more concerned with the element of commonality at the core of ‘true’ democratic practice, and he eventually claimed that “democratic possibilities depend upon combining traditional localism and postmodern centrifugalism”. The paper explores the possibilities and promise of this particular politicization of local knowledge, practices, and identities for political and democratic renewal. Drawing on Wolin’s later writings, especially on Tocqueville, the paper unpacks the particular notion of political community at the core of Wolin’s understanding of democracy. In doing so, the paper underscores the Aristotelian influence on Wolin's political thought, and it sheds new light on the originality of his radical political project.