Sheldon Sanford Wolin was an American political theorist and writer on contemporary politics.
19 Facts About Sheldon Wolin
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Sheldon Wolin was a notable teacher of undergraduate and particularly graduate students, serving as a mentor to many students who themselves became prominent scholars and teachers of political theory.
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Sheldon Wolin played a significant role in the Free Speech Movement and with John Schaar interpreted that movement to the rest of the world.
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Sheldon Wolin wrote opinion pieces and reviews for The New York Times.
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At Princeton, Sheldon Wolin led a successful faculty effort to pass a resolution urging university trustees to divest from endowment investment in firms that supported South African apartheid.
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Sheldon Wolin left Berkeley in the fall of 1970 for the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught until the spring of 1972.
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Sheldon Wolin served on the editorial boards of many scholarly journals, including Political Theory, the leading journal of the field in the Anglo-American world.
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Sheldon Wolin consulted for various scholarly presses, foundations and public entities, including Peace Corps, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council.
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Sheldon Wolin served as president of the Society for Legal and Political Philosophy.
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Sheldon Wolin was instrumental in founding what came to be known as the Berkeley School of political theory.
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Sheldon Wolin pays particular attention to how the latter contribute to the changing meanings of a received political vocabulary, including notions of authority, obligation, power, justice, citizenship, and the state.
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In essays dealing with major thinkers of the recent past, including some of the most formidable bodies of work of the twentieth century, Sheldon Wolin probed different approaches to both understanding the nature of theory and its bearing on the political from a perspective clearly aligned with the principles of participatory democracy.
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Politically, Sheldon Wolin penned essays on a variety of themes and figures, including terrorism, conservatism, Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan.
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Sheldon Wolin's political thought is particularly concerned with the fate of democracy at the hands of bureaucratic imperatives, elitism, and managerial principles and practices.
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Sheldon Wolin was born in Chicago and raised in Buffalo, New York.
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Sheldon Wolin flew 51 different combat missions serving in the South Pacific, specifically the islands surrounding the Philippines, during World War II.
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Sheldon Wolin's team were tasked with Douglas MacArthur's strategy of conducting raids against the Japanese Navy, which required flying low over Japanese destroyers in order to bomb them.
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Sheldon Wolin mentioned that several of his flight mates, both at the time and years later, suffered psychological problems as a result of their activities in the War.
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Sheldon Wolin was married to Emily Purvis Wolin for over sixty years.