“Modern Political Theory (Machiavelli to Smith) and Radical Political Thought (Paine to Foucault)”
“he read like a New Critic. The opening paragraph or page of every text was the site of an extended exploration and explication, as if the key to all of the Second Discourse was to be found in that arresting image of the statue of Glaucus which Rousseau mentions at the outset.”
“Chekhov has a line somewhere about how if you put a gun on the wall in the first act, you damn well better make sure it goes off in the second. Wolin paid attention to those guns, especially when they didn’t go off. He was endlessly curious about a theorist’s metaphors, asides, slips, and allusions, and mined them to great effect. Long before we were reading de Man and Derrida, he was reading like them. But without all the fuss. He just did it.”
“But then Wolin stepped back even further, asking us to think about that notion of perspective embedded in Machiavelli’s metaphor. Most theorists ask us to look upon the political world sub specie aeternitatis. To properly see things as they are, they ascend or exit to the view from nowhere. Plato leaves the cave, Rousseau (an imperfect example here, I know) is locked outside the gates of Geneva, Rawls removes himself to the original position, to a place where there are no positions.”
“Machiavelli, said Wolin, takes a different tack: the political art is to see things from multiple positions and places, to adopt the vantage of one, then the other, to see (and draw) the whole as a composite of perspectives. Perspectivalism is the fancy word for this, and it’s usually traced to Nietzsche (who, perhaps not coincidentally, in his notebooks described Machiavelli’s teaching as “perfection in politics”). But Wolin identified it with Machiavelli — and as a result, incidentally, came up with a far more interesting reading of the incommensurability of views in Machiavelli than that which we find in Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay on Machiavelli.”
“To understand what Machiavelli, Hobbes, or Locke is doing when he writes a text, you have to read the hundreds if not thousands of local interlocutors he is responding to. The Second Treatise is a response to Hobbes, who was dead by the time Locke started to write it. Political theory, like politics itself, is a situated enterprise. To understand it historically, we have to disaggregate it into a series of local, often disconnected enterprises. That’s what it means to recover the pastness of the past.”
“Wolin was called by a similar historical impulse as Skinner. He too sought to recover the discrete languages of the past, the situatedness of theory and action. But Wolin’s historicism was different. Without resorting to those thousands of interlocutors, he managed to contrive a much more radical and bracing sense of the past than most contextualists (it should be said that Skinner himself actually manages to do this with great aplomb), in part because he remains loyal to a notion of movement across time, of a dialogue across the ages.”
“As Bonnie Honig pointed out to me in an email, Wolin was the master of the in-between: he was at his best when he understood how political beings are located in these in-between modes. He was especially attuned to this in-between-ness when the in-between was temporal. When it became spatial, he tended to be more of a catastrophist, seeing the move from one space to another, or one mode of space to another, as absolute, the portent or picture of a complete loss.”
“And, again, the only reason Wolin can notice them is that he’s willing to do what the contextualists say you can’t do: reach across time, force thinkers who never knew each other (maybe never even heard of each other) into a conversation. That is the way we can get at the specificity of their language, through comparison and confrontation. That is the way we can understand the ruptures of historical experience. With the exception of Nietzsche and Hegel, maybe Lukács (those passages on the effect of the changing mode of warfare in The Historical Novel are pretty incredible), I can’t think of a single theorist who understood this, who did this, so well.”
“I can’t say how generative these notions of transposition and sublimation have been for me. In my first book, on fear, I looked at how later, more psychological approaches to fear were sublimations of earlier, more political understandings of fear. More recently, I’ve been fascinated by the idea that economics is a sublimation of an earlier political vocabulary of action, glory, and greatness, how even someone as mathematically inclined as Ricardo may, in his idea of the margin, be transposing and transforming Machiavelli’s ideas of the founding and time.”
“Politics, even the Grosse Politik of Nietzsche’s imaginings — which lurks, in a quieter, more quotidian vein, in the background of Wolin’s writing — never really goes away. It just assumes, as Wolin was the first to teach us, a new key. Always in-between.”