{"id":14078,"date":"2015-11-02T20:14:37","date_gmt":"2015-11-03T01:14:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14078"},"modified":"2015-11-02T20:14:37","modified_gmt":"2015-11-03T01:14:37","slug":"sheldon-wolin-and-inverted-totalitarianism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14078","title":{"rendered":"Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism<\/a><\/h3>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Sheldon Wolin discusses his ideas with Chris Hedges in this still from Hedges\u2019 interview with Wolin for The Real News Network.\u00a0(TRNN via\u00a0YouTube<\/a>)<\/small><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Sheldon Wolin, our most important contemporary political theorist, died Oct. 21 at the age of 93. In his books \u201cDemocracy Incorporated<\/a>: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism\u201d and \u201cPolitics and Vision<\/a>,\u201d a massive survey of Western political thought that his former student Cornel West calls \u201cmagisterial,\u201d Wolin lays bare the realities of our bankrupt democracy, the causes behind the decline of American empire and the rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate power he calls \u201cinverted totalitarianism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wendy Brown<\/a>, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and another former student of Wolin\u2019s, said in an email to me: \u201cResisting the monopolies on left theory by Marxism and on democratic theory by liberalism, Wolin developed a distinctive\u2014even distinctively American\u2014analysis of the political present and of radical democratic possibilities. He was especially prescient in theorizing the heavy statism forging what we now call\u00a0neoliberalism<\/a>, and in revealing the novel fusions of economic with political power that he took to be poisoning democracy at its root.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wolin throughout his scholarship charted the devolution of American democracy and in his last book, \u201cDemocracy Incorporated,\u201d\u00a0details our peculiar form<\/a>\u00a0of corporate totalitarianism. \u201cOne cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic,\u201d he writes in that book, \u201csurely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Sheldon Wolin discusses his ideas with Chris Hedges in this still from Hedges\u2019 interview with Wolin for The Real News Network.\u00a0(TRNN via\u00a0YouTube) Sheldon Wolin, our most important contemporary political theorist, died Oct. 21 at the age of 93. In his books \u201cDemocracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3602,9035,1471,204,6996,7644,10432,1213,8738],"class_list":["post-14078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-american-empire","tag-chris-hedges","tag-corporatism","tag-democracy","tag-neoliberalism","tag-political-theory","tag-sheldon-wolin","tag-totalitarianism","tag-truthdig"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14078"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14079,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14078\/revisions\/14079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}