Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Political Thought is both one and two books, written by both one and two political theorists. A changed world and changed thinker divides the 1960 edition from the 2004 expanded edition, the latter now appearing as a Princeton Classic.First published when Sheldon S. Wolin was a young Berkeley professor, Politics and Vision quickly rose to prominence for its luminous interpretations of canonical theorists and probing reflections on the shifting meaning and status of politics and political theory across Western history. A scholarly work of breathtaking scope composed in accessible literary cadences, it was exemplary of what Wolin would term “political theory as a vocation” in his 1969 essay by that name. Intentionally recalling Max Weber’s stipulations for scholarship and political leadership in his “Vocations” essays, and especially Weber’s contrast between career and calling, Wolin’s formulation of theory as a vocation distinguished political theory’s classic value from current disciplinary conventions. He sought especially to reestablish political theory’s longstanding concerns with res publicae and res gestae—concerns he termed as “irreducible and natural to the political theorist as a concern for health is to the physician.”With its immense erudition and close readings trained on the problematic of “the political,” Politics and Vision embodied Wolin’s insistence on political theory as “primarily a civic and secondarily an academic activity…a critical engagement with collective existence and with the political experiences of power to which it gives rise.”