The need to anticipate these questions already betrays an abnormal state of affairs. Carl Schmitt is an extremely controversial figure, compromised by his collusion with Nazism at the peak of his career and throughout his life a European conservative whose authoritarian political objectives have never been in doubt. So what is a nice leftist journal like Telos doing in a dieoretical dive like this? Having successfully protected our political virtues from corruption by the totalitarian undercurrents of the various Marxisms and (...) Marxism-Leninisms, have we now succumbed to one of the few alternatives that made the worst Stalinism palatable to a whole generation of odierwise highly sophisticated intellectuals like Bloch and Lukács? (shrink)

When, in Telos #55, we sought to evaluate the meaning and impact of French socialism in power, the verdict turned out to be peculiarly disappointing. The rhetorical question in the Introduction: “Beyond Reform or Revolution?” had already been effectively answered. As early as 1982 French socialism had revealed itself to be a “Gaullism with a Human Face” which did not have much to do either widi reform or revolution, and could provide nothing more -above and beyond the usual cliches—than a (...) continuation of the same berated but unsurpassed technocratic management of the given. Socialism had turned out to be a bad idea whose time had past. (shrink)

Critiques of liberalism are a dime a dozen. With every generation they come in and out of fashion like changing lipstick colors. This does not mean, however, that all is well in a context of perennial cyclic crisis alternating liberalism and conservatism. As Siegel shows in his account of liberalism's recent authoritarian involution, the latest developments mark a sharp departure from some of the better American political traditions. Specifically, the disintegration of pragmatism as a result of the Vietnam fiasco and (...) racial strife in the 1960s contributed to the concretization of what were at least latent anti-democratic tendencies into a procedural elitism oblivious to substantive realities and the human dimension. (shrink)

It has been almost half a century since Horkheimer and Adorno formulated their analysis of mass culture in the “Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment. This special issue on “Debates in Contemporary Culture” is an attempt to evaluate the relevance of this legacy in the mid-eighties. It has become part of the left conventional wisdom that the critical theory analysis of late capitalism, focusing on concepts such as the “totally administered world” (Adorno) or “one-dimensional society” (...) (Marcuse), was overly resigned and it remained unable to identify inchoate oppositional tendencies within the ‘iron cage’ of capitalist totalization. (shrink)

The passing away of Mitchell Franklin has meant not only the loss of a teacher and a friend, but also die dosing of a chapter in intellectual history which, in die U.S., was hardly ever opened. Franklin's persona was certainly “born in the U.S.A.” (he, on die odier hand, was bom in Montreal, Canada). Yet, he belonged to diat European generation of diinkers, who, confronted widi rising 20th century irrationalism, sought to vindicate an updated version of Enlightenment rationalism. In diis, (...) of course, he was in good company: diis is precisely die kind of trajectory one finds traced not only by most of diose intellectuals who came of age between die two World Wars (e.g., Lukács), but also, more recendy, by thinkers still confronted widi irrationalism as a national question (e.g., Habermas). (shrink)

Taves: Let us begin with the claim that universities are deadly to serious intellectual work. The university ethos fosters mediocrity, boredom and gutlessness. It has become a haven for conformist intellectuals who value patronage and status over intellectual quality and challenge. “Radical” academics are no exception; they too have bought into hyperspecialization, empiricism, professionalization, abstract theory, and have become marginal, predictable and politically irrelevant. If such is the case, what are the implications? Siegel: There is certainly a sense of pervasive (...) malaise on campus. Everyone seems to agree that there is an institutional and intellectual crisis of the disciplines. (shrink)

It is claimed that Arnold S. Kaufman's article ?On Alienation? (Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1965, pp. 141?65) shows no understanding of the concept of alienation, and the authors undertake to contrast the concept as Hegel and Marx develop it and Fromm and Mills re?state it, with Kaufman's interpretations of Marx, Fromm and Mills. They contrast the Marxist self?realization framework with Kaufman's want?satisfaction framework, and argue that in Marx alienation is necessarily concerned solely with labor, is unavoidable because a necessary (...) stage of self?development, and has inseparable sociological and moral aspects. They claim that Kaufman's article shows no understanding of any of these points. (shrink)

Functionalism in sociology has recently come under the critical scrutiny of philosophers of science who, by extending their analyses of the physical sciences, have attempted to examine its scientific credentials and resolve some of its basic methodological difficulties. These analyses, however, have tended to raise more problems than they solve and, in the process, they have sought to either trivialize or refute one of the main features of functionalism, viz., its teleology.

Once a vocation, being an intellectual today has become a profession. Like day traders or divorce lawyers, “public intellectuals” pack their briefcases in the morning and off they go to make a living in “the public sphere.” Unlike day-traders and divorce lawyers, however, who at least have no illusions as to who they are and what they do, public intellectuals still pretend to follow a higher calling. They like to see themselves as the theoretical vanguard of an otherwise inarticulate and (...) unsophisticated mass in need of guidance. Of course, this is nothing new. As in the dark ages of “pre-modernity,”…. (shrink)

While a definitive evaluation of the 20th century may still be premature, it is becoming increasingly clear that several preliminary judgments concerning its nature are utterly inadequate. Despite widespread liberaldemocratic gloating, the defeat of Nazism and fascism in WWII and the erosion of the components of the old USSR into geopolitical irrelevance through the Cold War are not likely to mark the end of an era — yet. That watershed will probably have to wait for the further decline and eventual (...) disappearance of the last specimen of those post-Enlightenment social systems described by the original Frankfurt School as “totally administered societies.”. (shrink)

Given that the modernist narrative seems inexorably headed for Chapter 11, the search for alternatives tends to turn, first and foremost, to allegedly transcended, “pre-modern” models of social organization. This helps explain not only the thriving, but also a return to religion and tradition. This state of affairs is routinely used to relegitimate the faltering of such an obviously “emancipatory” undertaking as the modernist project by reinforcing standard modernist theodicy, according to which all evil is a function of “greed” and, (...) most of all, the persistence of “superstition and myth,” i.e.,religion and tradition. Cause and effect are reversed: the project is presumably…. (shrink)

The thesis concerning the totalitarian character of the Enlightenment was originally articulated, if only briefly, during the heyday of the California exile of the Institute for Social Research, then suddenly dropped. Dialectic of Enlightenment was never completed and it was around that time, the mid-1940s, that Critical Theory went into its notorious theoretical hibernation. As Nancy Jachec shows in “Adorno, Greenberg and Modernist Politics,” the next two decades were wasted on forays into aesthetics, psychoanalysis and opportunistic liberal apologetics such as (...) The Authoritarian Personality — nothing radically different from what run-of-the-mill liberal ideologues such as Clement Greenberg were also doing. (shrink)

1. On the History of TelosFor many years, the Telos has been regarded as one of the leading journals of the New Left in the US. At the beginning, it was often seen as the journal of the American followers of the Frankfurt School, founded by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Could you tell us when, by whom and in what circumstances it was started and give us some historical background, explaining in particular the evolution of its relations with (...) the second generation of the Frankfurt School (Jürgen Habermas)? And how do you and the people you work…. (shrink)

What is one to do with a work whose modest opening lines by the editor proclaim it to be “one of the most crucial documents in European Marxism since … well, since maybe ever”? Almost as if to reinforce this claim, the book comes padded with no fewer than three introductions, three prefaces, and a long epilogue. This alone should alert the unaware reader that the impenetrability of the text is due not to any conceptual profundity — as epigones would (...) have it — but to an unimaginable theoretical confusion. The publisher's PR frontwoman seeks to market Negri as a “Eurocommunist theoretician” jailed for his explosive revolutionary views. (shrink)

Ebonics—Italian Style Usually, one has to read a book in order to evaluate it. Harney's book on “Italian” immigrants has the dubious distinction of capturing much of what is wrong with it on its cover. The very title prefigures its basic problem. Eh, Paesan! presumably refers to a particular greeting these immigrants employ in addressing each other. But there is no standard term “paesan.” The proper Italian word is “paesano,” which in its many dialectal renditions becomes “paisah,” “paisan” or variations (...) thereof. The same goes for the antecedent “Eh!” which in most Southern Italian dialects is actually “uí,” “ué,” “eeeeh,”…. (shrink)

Ever since Walter Benjamin drafted his theses on the philosophy of history, Critical Theory has attempted to theorize beyond the crisis of modernity and its concept of progress as what Adorno mockingly described as a linear trajectory from Adam and Eve to the Atom Bomb, Auschwitz and the Gulag. Today, over half a century after the defeat of Nazism, in the post-communist age of nuclear disarmament, the telos of progress would have to be updated, at best, to a consumerist wasteland (...) punctuated by McDonalds and Disneylands—an immensely less catastrophic but equally debilitating spiritual outcome. Although the Frankfurt School was always…. (shrink)