Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism - New Edition
ISBN: 9781400888405
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Princeton University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter



Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated , Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"?


Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level.



Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come. Now with a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, Democracy Incorporated remains an essential work for understanding the state of democracy in America.

Sheldon Sanford Wolin was born in Chicago, Illinois on August 4, 1922. During World War II, he served as a bombardier and navigator in the Pacific for the Army Air Forces. He received a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1946 and a doctorate from Harvard University in 1950. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University before retiring in 1987.

He wrote several books during his lifetime including 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. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought was published in 1960, received the Benjamin E. Lippincott Award in recognition of its lasting impact in 1985, and was reissued in expanded form in 2004.

He also wrote frequently for The New York Review of Books on Watergate, Henry Kissinger, the presidency of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and American conservatism. Some of his essays on the Free Speech Movement and campus unrest at Berkeley were included with those written by John H. Schaar in The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond: Essays on Politics and Education in the Technological Society. He died on October 21, 2015 at the age of 93.

(Bowker Author Biography)


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