georgephillip
Diamond Member
Chris Hedges interviews 92 year-old Sheldon Wolin, a political philosopher who witnessed the rise of the three great totalitarian movements of the early 20th Century: Bolshevism, Nazism, and Corporatism.
One one has survived, and it's due to the inverted nature of its totalitarian structure.
HEDGES begins by probing the significance of this inversion:
"So let's begin with this concept of inverted totalitarianism, which has antecedents. And in your great work Politics and Vision, you reach back all the way to the Greeks, up through the present age, to talk about the evolution of political philosophy. What do you mean by it?
SHELDON WOLIN, PROF. POLITICS EMERITUS, PRINCETON: Well, I mean by it that in the inverted idea, it's the idea that democracy has been, in effect, turned upside down.
"It's supposed to be a government by the people and for the people and all the rest of the sort of rhetoric we're used to, but it's become now so patently an organized form of government dominated by groups which are only vaguely, if at all, responsible or even responsive to popular needs and popular demands.
"But at the same time, it retains a kind of pattern of democracy, because we still have elections, they're still relatively free in any conventional sense.
"We have a relatively free media.
"But what's missing from it is a kind of crucial continuous opposition which has a coherent position, and is not just saying, no, no, no but has got an alternative, and above all has got an ongoing critique of what's wrong and what needs to be remedied.
HEDGES: You juxtapose inverted totalitarianism to classical totalitarianism--fascism, communism--and you say that there are very kind of distinct differences between these two types of totalitarianism. What are those differences?
Hedges Wolin 1 8 Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist
One one has survived, and it's due to the inverted nature of its totalitarian structure.
HEDGES begins by probing the significance of this inversion:
"So let's begin with this concept of inverted totalitarianism, which has antecedents. And in your great work Politics and Vision, you reach back all the way to the Greeks, up through the present age, to talk about the evolution of political philosophy. What do you mean by it?
SHELDON WOLIN, PROF. POLITICS EMERITUS, PRINCETON: Well, I mean by it that in the inverted idea, it's the idea that democracy has been, in effect, turned upside down.
"It's supposed to be a government by the people and for the people and all the rest of the sort of rhetoric we're used to, but it's become now so patently an organized form of government dominated by groups which are only vaguely, if at all, responsible or even responsive to popular needs and popular demands.
"But at the same time, it retains a kind of pattern of democracy, because we still have elections, they're still relatively free in any conventional sense.
"We have a relatively free media.
"But what's missing from it is a kind of crucial continuous opposition which has a coherent position, and is not just saying, no, no, no but has got an alternative, and above all has got an ongoing critique of what's wrong and what needs to be remedied.
HEDGES: You juxtapose inverted totalitarianism to classical totalitarianism--fascism, communism--and you say that there are very kind of distinct differences between these two types of totalitarianism. What are those differences?
Hedges Wolin 1 8 Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist