Last week, I delivered a paper at a conference about the work of Sheldon Wolin in Lausanne, Switzerland. For those of you who don’t know the name, Wolin was a political theorist who taught at Berkeley and Princeton. I took undergraduate courses with him on modern political thought and radical political thought; many other political theorists, including Wendy Brown, Cornel West, and Hanna Pitkin, studied with him as graduate students. He was one of the most influential teachers of political theory in the United States during the second half of the twentieth-century. Though I’ve always valued him most as a reader and teacher of political theory, he also had a wide audience as a political theorist in his own right.

Below is the paper I delivered on “Wolin’s Political Unconscious: On Sublimation, Lenin, and Freud.” It’s a close reading of the last two chapters of Wolin’s most important book, Politics and Vision. And while that might seem a narrow topic, it deals with a theme that consumed thinkers from Nietzsche and Weber to Arendt and Schmitt (and was formative to me at an earlier age): the trajectory of “the political.” I’ve found that, in working through Wolin’s ideas of sublimation and politics, I’ve been able to approach economics and political economy in a different vein from how political theorists in this tradition usually approach the matter.

For ease of reading, I have taken out all the footnotes with specific page numbers and references, but I have compiled a bibliography of the works I’ve cited at the end.

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One of the less noticed elements of Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision is the presence of Freud on the page.

By the presence of Freud, I mean two things.

The first is atmospheric. To conjure the mindset and mood of modern liberalism, Wolin makes frequent allusions to Freud and to psychoanalytic terms. He opens his penultimate chapter, on liberalism, with an epigraph from Studies in Hysteria, where Freud states that the aim of psychoanalysis is to “transform hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.” He compares Mill’s theory of human nature to Freud’s theory of repression. In his discussions of Locke on property, Franklin on pleasure, Bentham on profit, and Rousseau’s republic, Wolin drops Freudian and neo-Freudian mentions of object libido, status anxiety, sadomasochism, and identity crisis. The cumulative effect of these allusions is to suggest that the modal actor of liberal theory is not the robust and rational seeker of one’s preferences but a fragile creature of neurotic need. The so-called Economic Man of Hume, Smith, Malthus, and the Mills, is really the Psychological Man of Freud. “Psychoanalysis,” Wolin concludes, “is the science necessitated by the liberal ethos.”

The second Freudian presence is less atmospheric than analytical. Wolin makes deliberate and extensive use of the category of sublimation, which is a key concept in psychoanalysis, to explain the trajectory of “the political” in the Age of Organization, a period of time extending from roughly the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. When sublimation appears in the last chapter of Politics and Vision, it comes as a surprise. In the previous chapter, on “Liberalism and the Decline of Political Philosophy,” Wolin had made a strong case that the political had been displaced, then disappeared, by the economic and the social. The vocabulary of elimination and extinction in that chapter is total. Under the regime of sublimation, however, we see not the disappearance of the political but “the diffusion of the political.” The problem is not “the decline of the political,” Wolin now says, “but the absorption of the political into non-political institutions and activities.” Politics has not been displaced; it has been diverted.

I’d like to argue here that this vocabulary of sublimation is neither modish nor metaphorical. The psychoanalytic opens a real corridor for Wolin, down which he can pursue a story about the political that goes beyond the conventional declension narrative that he’s just told in the previous chapter and that we often hear from other theorists of the political such as Weber, Schmitt, and Arendt. Where each of those theorists narrates a story of the decline of homo politicus, who is replaced by homo economicus or some other substrate of human being, Wolin tells a more complex and nuanced story of the recreation of homo politicus in a new setting.

In this regard, his work bears reading in the context not of German theorists of political decline but of more complex and conjunctural American writers such as the historian Carl Schorske, whose Fin-de-Siecle Vienna also makes use of the category of sublimation, and the sociologist Philip Rieff, whose Freud: The Mind of the Moralist remains the best book on Freud.

Sublimation offers Wolin a path that he sees, yet can never, for reasons that will become clear, fully see his way through. Sublimation, in other words, is the key to Wolin’s political unconscious. Its most telling symptom, I’ll argue, appears in the most improbable of places—in his analysis of Lenin.

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In Freud’s account, sublimation begins with a sexual instinct or drive that is both primary and problematic. Primary, because while Freud believed in the plasticity of our sexual instincts, he also insisted that adult human sexuality contains vestigial or residual elements, traceable to infancy, that cannot be incorporated into our maturing desire. Hence, primary. Problematic, because those residual elements either fail to serve the functions of sexual reproduction and sexual intimacy, rendering them unusable to adults, or violate deep-seated taboos of civilization, causing persistent suffering and pain in adults. Hence, problematic. Thus, primary and problematic—and eligible for sublimation.

With sublimation, the sexual instinct is transformed. Its aim is diverted to a non-sexual object. It can now be satisfied through socially acceptable outlets, like art, work, and sociability. And while the sublimated drive is just as insistent as the original sexual instinct, it has shed the anarchy, the convulsive discharge, the disruptiveness, of the original. The sexual instinct remains, in other words, but with an altered aim and more controlled intensity.

It might seem strange to describe Wolin as thinking or writing about the political in this vein. Like Arendt, Wolin is supposed to be the theorist of all things political and the opponent of all things that detract from it, including the psychological turn of modern social science. If he uses the word sublimation, we should assume he’s being ironic or cheeky, without intending anything Freudian or psychoanalytic by the term.

 I want to challenge that reading, which used to be my own, to argue that Wolin is using sublimation in the psychoanalytic sense. There are many reasons for favoring the psychoanalytic reading. For starters, there’s a noticeable turn in how Wolin talks about the political in this last chapter. In earlier chapters, Wolin refers to the political as an order, a public setting with distinctive rules and claims, its own style of action and mode of engagement. Though he discusses individuals and agents in these chapters, they, and the motion and energy of his argument, flow downstream from the political. In his chapter on Machiavelli, for example, Wolin begins with an epigraph from John Dewey: “This is the question finally at stake in any genuinely moral situation: What shall the agent be? What sort of character shall he assume?” The political (“any genuine moral situation”) issues its requirements, in other words; the question for human beings is how to navigate them.

In this last chapter, on the sublimation of the political, the energy and motion of the argument flow in the opposite direction, from the individual to the political. Wolin introduces a personal, almost erotic vocabulary—not to decry the decline of the political but to describe its persistence. The political cannot be accounted for as a distinctive order—as the Aristotelian polis, for example, or the Machiavellian republic or the Hobbesian state. It is found, instead, in the distinctive desires, the residual “satisfactions” and “needs,” that human beings seek and derive from an activity and way of life. The political is now the site of our “long[ing] for community,” a place where our “energies” are exerted and expended. “There still exists,” writes Wolin, “an impressive capacity for political participation which is not, however, being diverted towards the traditional forms of political life.” In other words, there still exists, within the self, a residual drive, desire, capacity, for political things, derived from the infant stages of our civilization. Conceived as an order, the political may have disappeared. Conceived as an instinct, it is alive and well. As Wolin says, “the political animal is not extinct.”

What happens when an instinct is robust, but its public expression is constrained? The same thing that Freud said happens to the sexual instinct: it gets sublimated. Our ancient/infantile political instincts have been channeled and directed to another form: the organization. Intensifying the language of sexual instinct and sublimation, Wolin writes that in the Age of Organization, “man has fashioned [a] substitute love-object[] for the political.” There has been a “transference”—Freud saw transference as a mode of sublimation—“of the political” from the state to the organization.

The psychoanalytic valence of sublimation, in short, is a real presence in Wolin’s account.

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Freud stumbled upon his theory of sublimation early; it first appears in his paper on Dora. Despite its persistence across his subsequent writing, however, he was never able to figure out, to his own satisfaction, how it worked. He was certain that sublimation occurred. He just couldn’t explain its mechanics. According to Jonathan Lear, that’s still true. “The nature of sublimation remains an outstanding problem for psychoanalysis.”

But the confusion about sublimation involves more than an uncertainty about its causal pathway. Sublimation raises moral and political questions—for Freud, and, as we’ll see, for Wolin—about the desirability of the process itself, of how we should evaluate the transformation of what is primary and original into something that is secondary and derivative.

On one view, elements of which you can find in Freud, sublimation is the not-so-distant cousin of repression. It’s costly and cruel. For a lucky few, it takes the form of artistic creativity. For the rest of us, it appears as disgust and shame, in which the energy of the sexual instinct is converted into the “mental dam[]” of our internal moral judgments, which stop the unimpeded “flow” of our desires. One part of our sexual instinct is harnessed to suppress the remainder of that instinct, making the individual his own miserable jailer.

Even if sublimation does not take the form of repression, but is instead expressed as art or literature, even if the instinct finds another outlet, it loses a considerable amount of intensity on the road to expression. The beneficiary of sublimation is society, not the self, which suffers a net loss of enjoyment and happiness. “Each individual who makes a fresh entry into human society repeats this sacrifice of instinctual satisfaction for the benefit of the whole community,” writes Freud. Sublimation is the price we pay for civilization, and it comes “at the cost” of our most basic, originating impulses.

Wolin sometimes reads the sublimation of the political in this vein—that is, as a loss of vitality and feeling. Like Freud’s sublimation, Wolin’s begins with an earlier, more primary set of political instincts, which once had the privilege of being expressed openly and directly. As civilization matures, that direct experience of the political is sublimated into our membership in an organization, which offers us an ersatz experience of the political, a substitute that’s second-rate. Organization Man does not have the opportunity to engage in political activity, political action, or conflict. He is the object of manipulation rather than the beneficiary of leadership.

As is the case with any form of sublimation, the individual makes some gains. More of his passions are satisfied; Fourier counted 810. He suffers fewer pains. He’s psychically integrated into the organization, spared the loneliness and isolation that are otherwise rampant in modern societies.

But the overall effect of the organization is to erase the individual as a site of experience. There are no agents or selves in the organization, even among its leadership. Everyone is narrowed into a function or functionary. Without selves, there can be no political experience. There is just the functioning whole: efficient, integrated, orderly, productive, advancing. Like Freud, Wolin describes this as a net loss of intensity and feeling: “One result of this kind of theorizing” about the organization, he says, “has been to flatten the traditional majestas of the political order. This been achieved by reducing the political association.”

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Yet Freud also gives us, and Wolin, a different way of thinking about sublimation. Not as a loss but as an achievement, and not just for civilization and the whole but for the self.

For Freud, the alternative to sublimation is not the unrestrained and liberated expression of the libido. It is profound suffering. Not because civilization cannot accommodate our anarchic sexuality, but because our developing selves cannot survive that anarchy. No matter how emancipated a society may be, not every sexual instinct can be gratified, all the time. The desired objects of our satisfaction may not be available. They may rebuff our desires and wants. When we cannot satisfy our sexual desires, we suffer tremendous physical and psychic discomfort. Desire ceases to be an instrument our pleasure; we become a victim of its tyranny.

Sublimation allows our fragile self to gain control, mastery, over those instincts. Minimally, we no longer feel so intensely the pain of frustration and disappointment. Maximally, we find pleasure in activities, like art, that are less dependent upon the vicissitudes of ourselves and other people. Where our sexual instincts demand discharge and then disappear, our sublimated passions get exercised and develop. As we acquire skills and capacities in these activities, we become “masters of the situation.” We “pass[] over from the passivity” of our immature sexuality to active participants in “the activity of the game.” Seen in this light, sublimation is not a form of repression forced upon us by civilization; it is a tool we adopt and wield for our self-development and cultivation.

Wolin doesn’t often speak of the sublimation of the political in this way, but there is one, very intriguing, moment in the last chapter of Politics and Vision where he does. And that is in his discussion of Lenin.

I should say, at the outset, that I don’t think Wolin believes he is describing Lenin’s sublimation as any kind of achievement. But I think that that is in fact what Wolin is doing. We might say that in discussion of Lenin, Wolin is sublimating his own unprocessed instincts about the fate of the political in the Age of Organization. To read in the way I am proposing is to open a window on his political unconscious.

To appreciate what Wolin is doing with Lenin, we have to remember two of Wolin’s claims about the modern world. First, he argues that 1789, the year of “the great revolution,” was “the time when the political order had mustered its failing forces for a last-ditch attempt to assert its general responsibility for the well-being of society.” Like Arendt, Wolin believes that revolutions are modernity’s mode of political action. Unlike Arendt, Wolin praises the French Revolution, particularly its assertion that politics can superintend the whole, and eulogizes it as the last moment that such assertion will occur.

Second, though Wolin lodges many complaints against the Age of Organization, his last and largest grievance with the age is that organization consigns human beings to a restricted function. No one, not even the elites who manipulate the organization and its cogs, gets to see or partake of the whole. Seeing and superintending the whole is what the political is, in part, about, and that is precisely what has been lost with the Age of Organization.

That makes what Wolin has to say about Lenin all the more remarkable. Unlike other nineteenth- and twentieth-century theorists, who thought that organization would turn politics into administration, Lenin was “the first to seize the implications of transferring politics, political theory, political action—all that we have subsumed under the ‘political’—to the plane of organization.” Far from diminishing or diluting politics, Lenin understood that “the trick” of organization “was not to destroy the political, but to absorb it into organization, to create a new compound.”

According to Wolin, Lenin was able to break with other organizational thinkers because he understood revolution to be the central task of organization. With his focus on revolution, Lenin shattered the nineteenth-century commitment to economic action and to “the primordial importance of economic phenomena.” That belief in the economic spanned liberalism, socialism, and Marxism, says Wolin. Lenin understood the distinctiveness of political action, as opposed to economic and other kinds of actions. With Lenin’s theory of organization, Wolin writes, “political action was rescued from limbo and restored to a new primacy, new because revolution was proclaimed the quintessential form of political action.”

With that as his foundation, Wolin proceeds to paint a portrait of Lenin as a political theorist in the classical mold. Lenin’s faults cannot be chalked up to any kind of diminishing sense of the political, but to a problem Wolin has been tracing since the start of Politics and Vision: where the political becomes so exalted, as it does with Plato, that it eclipses politics. Before he gets to that eclipse, however, Wolin sets out a roster of Lenin’s achievements as a political theorist. Not only does Lenin rescue the political from economism, but he recreates the polis in the form of the party. The Leninist party, says Wolin, is the opposite of the narrow organization. The party deals “with the comprehensive, with what transcend[s] class horizons and interests.” Through the party, workers “acquire an ‘all-sided political consciousness’ responsive to ‘all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse.” Through the party, workers get a political education along the lines of “a very ancient notion.” They gain “a synthetic view of the whole.”

In his comparison to the ancients, Wolin instructively contrasts Lenin to Weber. Where Weber is depicted as the romantic plaything of ancient dreams of classical heroism, similar to the un-sublimated self that suffers the anarchy and fortuna of his infantile sexual instincts, Wolin casts Lenin’s superiority over Weber as one of mastery and sublimation. While Weber dreams, and dreams and dreams and dreams, Lenin takes those ancient political impulses, disciplines them through “art” and “timing,” and thereby “preserves ‘the energy, the stability and continuity’” of political action. Much as the Freudian sublimation of sexuality preserves and even enhances our energy and drive, so does the Leninist sublimation of our political instincts. Through the party, says Wolin, revolutionaries are able to “‘concentrate all these drops and streamlets of popular excitement’ into ‘a single gigantic flood.’”

Wolin being Wolin, it would be too much to expect from him an unnuanced or unqualified appreciation of Lenin’s political achievement. But what is so remarkable about his criticisms of Lenin, when they come, is how much they undermine Wolin’s overall account of sublimation as a diminution or the dissolution of the political. Wolin’s two major criticisms of Lenin are that he was antidemocratic and elitist, and that he suppressed “party rivalries, legislative maneuvers, the frictions generated by governmental units, and the struggle for group advantage.” Like Plato and so many of the great classical political theorists before him, in other words, Lenin was so enthralled by the political that he lost sight of politics.

That, as I’ve said, is a very old story in political theory. Indeed, it’s the old story that Wolin has been tracing since the beginning of his book. But if that’s the case, Wolin’s story turns out to be less one of innovation and decline, which is how he is often read, than of continuity and persistence, of a struggle that does not recede but simply takes on a new form. Sublimation marks not a loss but a reinvention, a theory of the political that we can perhaps make use of today.

Bibliography

Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Character and Anal Eroticism (1908), and On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love (1912), in Sigmund Freud on Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin, 1977.

Sigmund Freud, “Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness (1908), and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), in Freud, Civilization, Society, and Religion, trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin, 1985.

Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism (1914). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey. Volume XIV, pp. 67-102.

Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1977 [1920].

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961 [1930].

Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1965 [1933].

Jonathan Lear, Freud. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960.