Sheldon S. Wolin is perhaps the most important American political theorist of the second part of the twentieth century, and arguably the first decade of the twenty-first, yet his body of work paradoxically constitutes one of the least understood. One reason for that is a false familiarity with his writings: for decades his Politics and Vision was required reading in preparation for comprehensive exams, thus becoming a manual of sorts on other political thinkers, rather than a major contribution in its own right. Other reasons are the different genres of his writing and the sense of history and nuance at work in the situational nature of his political theorizing. Neither a system builder nor a historical “Methodist” (to borrow the famous term from his influential essay, “Political Theory as a Vocation”), later in life Wolin also increasingly insisted on the difference between political philosophy and political theory. Addressing an audience at the 2001 APSA Annual meeting and responding to some critics, Wolin pithily described the difference as one of “philosophers” being “trained to think about politics philosophically, theorists to think about politics politically,” and “the question for me is not only about how to understand facts theoretically but how to understand them theoretically and politically.” Such a view put him at odds, and occasionally out of sympathy, with the increasingly professionalized world of academic political theory.

Arguably because his temper, politics, and thought forms are so out of sync with current theoretical discourses, there has not been a book-length treatment of Wolin’s political thought. Lucy Cane’s Sheldon Wolin and Democracy: Seeing through Loss changes that. A brave and confident undertaking, this is a thoroughly researched book that by turns acutely captures important aspects of Wolin’s work and fundamentally misreads his corpus.

A formidable challenge in writing on a thinker as fertile as Wolin, who sought to respond to political situations as they evolved and formulated many of his concepts in close proximity to them, is to find an entry point that unifies and sheds light on his works’ different layers—a thread through which the interpreter can weave together the different concerns found in his writings. Cane’s strategy is to zero in on the question of loss and vision in relationship to democracy. This is done by emphasizing what Cane calls a politics of mourning in Wolin—which she reads through Melanie Klein and the important insights yielded by David W. McIvor’s own reading of Wolin—to show both the import and the “risks” of Wolin’s politics of mourning in relationship to democracy. The book’s introduction is, accordingly, devoted to laying out the basis for the strong psychoanalytic interpretation of Wolin’s “politics of mourning.” By taking as her point of departure Wolin’s brief autobiographical comments in both “Political Theory: From Vocation to Invocation” and Tocqueville between Two Worlds, Cane sees Wolin’s writings in terms of a politics of mourning as both enabling and problematic. As Cane emphatically puts it, “While I am convinced that Wolin’s work continues to offer unique insights into the failings of liberalism in the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries, it equally illuminates the trap to which a left-politics of mourning can fall” (p. 19). This formulation captures in a nutshell an important part of Cane’s position vis-à-vis her subject and informs the structuring of the book, even if the overall tenor of the book is less sympathetic to Wolin’s thought.

Cane crafts her chapters thematically. The first chapter is concerned with Wolin’s critique of liberalism and his views on “totalitarianism” in his 2008 Democracy Incorporated. This is followed by the most critical chapter of the book, a reconstruction of the role of memory, identity, and the fugitive in Wolin’s political theory since the aftermath of the bicentennial of the US Constitution. The third chapter, more sympathetic to Wolin’s contributions, builds on his reflections on democracy during the last decade of the twentieth century and formulates what Cane theorizes as “a polymorphous democracy.” The last substantial chapter reflects on questions of political education and political theory, as well as the nature of the university as an institution: the first concern dates back to Politics and Vision and the second to the Berkeley protests in the 1960s, one of Wolin’s formative political experiences. The book closes with a stimulating interview Cane conducted with Wolin and a very helpful, almost exhaustive bibliography of Wolin’s published writings. Along the way, Cane offers insightful contrasts of Wolin’s positions with several contemporary leading lights, including Laclau and Mouffe, Lefort, Rancière, and Negri and Hardt.

In its industriousness and determination, this book is an important contribution to scholars interested in democratic thought and Wolin’s contribution to it in North Atlantic political theory. Yet for all the prodigious research involved, and except for the originality of Cane’s understanding of the politics of “polymorphous democracy,” the book ultimately amounts to a deepening and extended rehearsal of an old case made by liberal critics of Wolin since the early 1980s. The mournful, even pastoral Wolin can be traced to George Shulman’s 1983 essay, “The Pastoral Idyll of democracy,” which Cane uncritically embraces, and to the slanted views of George Kateb and Stephen Holmes. Moreover, Cane chastises Wolin’s nuanced critique of identity politics in platitudinous terms while simultaneously offering a psychologizing depoliticization of his reflections on loss that takes away from the element of political defeat that he formidably interpreted in Tocqueville.

Cane seems oblivious to the political animus involved in criticisms of Wolin made by Holmes and Kateb or others (say, Aurelian Craiutu). Even so, readers will naturally ask, What is the politics of Cane’s interpretation, and to what extent is it refracted in her choice of interlocutors and in the content of her critique? Casting Wolin—a supremely confident thinker who never suffered fools too gladly and met head-on the leading practitioners of his time (say, Arendt, Foucault, Rawls, and Rorty)—as an interpreter of Tocqueville who projected his own anxieties onto the French aristocrat and, if more tacitly, reducing his political vision to a mournful one are two of the consequences that ensue from Cane’s uncritical reliance on charges levied long ago by some of Wolin’s least friendly interpreters. In so doing, Wolin and Democracy betrays a deep ambivalence toward its subject that is detrimental to the accuracy of the interpretation it puts forward, unduly diminishes his reflections, and deepens several long-held views and assumptions about Wolin’s political thought. Rather than breaking new ground on the basis of her prodigious research, Cane pivots on these interpretations, albeit in a far more textually scrupulous and temperate fashion, and ventures onto different territory, as befits a left-liberal reader. The upshot: this is the best version yet of a long-held view of Wolin as a mournful thinker, incapable of coping with modernity, outside the bounds of respectable discourse.

In 2001, Wolin playfully invoked the famous opening of Franz Kafka’s The Trial to assert that he failed to “recognize the indictment” set forth in Kateb’s critique of him. Paraphrasing Wolin, one could say that Cane’s Wolin and Democracy is a much-better indictment, even if it ultimately remains equally somewhat unrecognizable.