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Wolin, politics professor emeritus, dies at 93

Politics professor emeritusSheldon Wolin died on Oct. 21 in Salem, Ore. He was 93.

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Emeritus history professor Arno Mayer, a colleague and close personal friend of Wolin’s, said that Wolin could be described in three ways: a teacher, a scholar and a public intellectual.

“He was, in the Jean-Paul Sartre sense, a critical individual,” Mayer noted.

Wolin taught at the University from 1972 to 1987. Prior to coming to the University, he taught at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Oberlin College, Oxford University, Cornell and UCLA.

Wilson School professor Stanley Katz said that, while he remembers Wolin as shy and private, Wolin had a profound effect on the undergraduate and graduate students who shared his progressive political beliefs.

Andrew Polsky GS ’84, a professor of American politics at Hunter College who wrote dissertations under Wolin’s guidance, said that Wolin’s guidance forced his students to think at a deeper level, which made him an extraordinary dissertation adviser.

“I think that if you look at the ranks of leading scholars of political theory today, you would find a remarkable number who trained under Sheldon Wolin at Princeton and Berkeley, so he had a great influence on a generation of scholars,” Polsky said.

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Polsky noted that Wolin’s book “Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought,” which explored the theory of historical political thought, was responsible for important discussions of the use of power in the state.

Both Polsky and Katz described Wolin as intensely learned and serious, saying that he balanced this erudite comportment with a kindness and dedication that led his students to be fiercely loyal to him. One such student was professor of government and law at Lafayette College Joshua Miller GS ’84, who said he heard about Wolin during his time at Santa Cruz and consequently followed him to Princeton to pursue his graduate degree under the tutelage of Wolin.

“Wolin was a legend, sort of a leader of political theory for those of us who were doing it in Santa Cruz,” said Miller.

Miller said that Wolin’s ability to foster warm, intellectually close relationships with graduate students as well as his extensive knowledge of and interest for politics, books, elections and new ideas were what made him such an important mentor.

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Katz said he remembered Wolin as an intensely political figure who committed himself wholeheartedly to the study and theory of politics that led to engagement, and the way that this could improve the world.

“He really tried to call the field and call the world back to a consideration of the deep values that underlie political life and the ways in which those values can really challenge power structures that are taken for granted today,” politics professor Melissa Lane noted.

Katz noted that Wolin was a source of leadership and wisdom for progressive students who, in the 1970s, had fewer role models and mentors.

“He was a public intellectual at a time when there weren’t so many public intellectuals at Princeton,” Katz said.

In the post-Vietnam era when many intellectuals became anti-political, Wolin did not succumb to such discouragement and never gave up on politics, he added.

Mayer and Wolin were leading voices in the initiative amongst faculty to divest from firms that supported South African apartheid in the late 1970s, he said.

“The faculty cannot assume that the moral and education issues raised by divestiture will go away; and hence it cannot assume that it best serves the ends of either education or morality by unquestioning acquiescence,” Wolin and Mayer wrote in a letter to the chairman published by The Daily Princetonian on March 22, 1979 in response to former Dean of the Faculty Aaron Lemonick’s advisement that proposed strikes by professors to promote divestment should not take place.

Political science professor at Berkeley Wendy Brown GS ’83 noted that Wolin’s work was deeply rooted in the exploration and study of canonical texts by thinkers such as Machiavelli and Tocqueville, and that their works could illuminate the current study of political theory. As a teacher, his specific method was profoundly influential in inspiring his students to become meaningful contributors to society.

“He was building understandings of public life, political life and citizenship,” Brown said.

Wolin’s article “Political Theory as a Vocation,” published in 1969, crystallized for his contemporaries the elements of studying political theory, political science professor at Hunter College John Wallach GS ’81 said, an undergraduate and graduate student of Wolin, said.

“ ‘Political Theory as Vocation’ was something that was deeply rooted in the history of Western political thought and critical thought and philosophical thought that always addressed the actual concerns of citizens in collectivity,” Wallach said.

Wallach described him as generous and dedicated to political criticism of a searching kind that could have had the potential for pessimism. Despite this, Wolin never ceased in his work to optimistically promote the search for a better society, he added.

Wolin contributed frequently to the New York Review of Books during the 1970s and 1980s. He was a founding editor of the political journal “democracy,” which was published from 1980 to 1983, at which point financial support was pulled from the project.

“This journal was meant to, in some ways, revive a tradition of American political radicalism,” political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Nick Xenos GS ’84, who was a graduate student under Wolin and a managing editor at the journal, said.

Xenos is currently curating a collection of essays developed in conversations with Wolin, which will be published by Princeton University Press next year.

Wolin’s other published works include “Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory,” “Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life” and “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.”

Wolin was born on Aug. 4, 1922, in Chicago, Ill. and grew up in Buffalo, N.Y. He attended Oberlin College but after two years joined the Army Air Forces, serving as a bombardier and navigator in World War II. He returned to Oberlin to earn his bachelor’s degree in 1946 and received his Ph.D from Harvard University in 1950 on English constitutional thought.

Wolin was a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Foundation for the Humanities and was honored as a Fulbright Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.

He was married to Emily Purvis Wolin for 67 years. She died in 2011.

Wolin is survived by his daughters Deborah Wolin Olmon and Pamela Wolin Shedd, as well as his grandchildren Kari Olon and Ian Wolin Shedd.

Correction: Due to inaccurate information provided to The Daily Princetonian, an earlier version of this article misstated that Wolin refused the Nobel Prize for Literature. The 'Prince' regrets the error.