Speaking Theory to Power: Sheldon Wolin’s Dialogues with Power and the Functions of Political Theory

The recent opening of the Sheldon Wolin papers at UC Berkeley allows for an in-depth delving into his unfinished, quasi-mythical manuscript on the Dialogues with Power, which he presented in a project statement as a “study of the historical relationship between political theorists and the possessors of political power”, and in another as aiming “to provide a new basis for thinking about political theory and for understanding the political world”. In many ways, the existing chapters, often present in multiple drafts in the archive, can be seen as an echo and a continuation of Wolin’s long-standing project concerning the role, status and function of political theory, initially begun in Politics and Vision (1960) and continued in several key texts such as “Political Theory: Trends and Goals” (1968), “Political Theory as a Vocation” (1969), “Political Theory and Political Commentary” (1980), and the first part of Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (2001), that last book having actually developed out of a planned chapter for the Dialogues. The aim of this presentation is thus to reconstruct Wolin’s vision of the role and position of the political theorist in light of the existing published texts enriched by the heretofore unavailable manuscripts. The presentation will argue that while the newly available material does not fundamentally alter our understanding of Wolin’s positions, it deeply enriches this understanding, by providing a texture and a density that his often lapidary comments in the existing texts do not always allow. What is more, the early chapters of the Dialogues, on the Hebrew Prophets, the Pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle, offer in-depth interpretations of authors mostly left aside in Politics and Vision (with the exception of Plato). The Dialogues with Power therefore allow for a fuller perception of Wolin’s own “theoretical journey” (to borrow from his account of Tocqueville) and provide new depth to existing texts, including the return to Ancient Greece in the mid-1990s in articles on democracy such as “Norm and Form” (1994). Finally, the presentation is also the occasion to interrogate the use of archival material and unpublished sources in political theory, and the status of these sources when discussing an author’s body of work.