Chris Hedges, who has written, "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug," is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and publishes a regular column on truthdig.com. Hedges spoke about Sheldon S. Wolin and his latest work, Democracy Incorporated.
Sheldon S. Wolin, born in 1922, is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He taught political theory for 40 years at Oberlin College, the Universities of California, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Los Angeles, Princeton University, Cornell University, and Oxford University. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Democracy and a former regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books include Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Thought [1960] and Tocqueville between Two Worlds [2001]. Wolin's propheticism about U.S. political life seeks to recognize the fugitive character of democracy in order to retain its reformative power, encouraging local and particular modes of political participation which can resist the totalizing tendencies of statist power. His newest book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, is a devastating critique of the contemporary government of the United States--including what has happened to it in recent years and what must be done if it is not to disappear into history along with its classic totalitarian predecessors: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia. "With his fundamental grasp of political theory and restless spirit to get at the essence of what threatens modern democracy," Rakesh Khurana writes, "Wolin demonstrates that the threats to our democratic traditions and institutions are not always from outside, but may come from within."
