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The ongoing debate about budget deficits, public debt, and the case for or against austerity reflects old ideological disagreements that ignore the new realities of late-modern capitalism. Both left and right rehash virtually the same arguments since Reagan and Thatcher, but lack the imagination for genuinely fresh ideas and transformative policies.

Though his defense of National Socialism has earned him the reputation of being an ideologue, the most striking aspect of Carl Schmitt's political career is the changeable nature of his political loyalties, in which he defended both Roman Catholicism and then the Weimar Republic before he came to ally himself with the Nazis. If a certain amount of opportunism may have also played a part in his decision-making, his promiscuity also testifies to a basic agnosticism in his political beliefs that is grounded in his theoretical approach to the notion of culture. Because this approach begins with a Nietzschean delegitimation of value systems with a universal and preordained claim to truth, Schmitt's thinking develops as an attempt to understand politics in a multicultural world. His theories of decisionism and representation presume a world in which diverse value systems compete in order to establish the metaphysical foundations for order in a given time and place.

From the beginning of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s, Italian Communism—represented by the biggest Communist political party in the West—lost its propulsive force. The myth of "revolution" expired; the crucial social and economic role of the industrial working class disappeared; the capitalistic system consolidated itself as a mass consumerist society. In addition, there were important sociological changes in the leadership of the Italian Communist Party. First, we must specify who the Italian Communist militants were at the beginning, especially in the immediate years after World War II and in the first twenty years of the Republican period (1945-1965). During these years the Communist Party presented itself as an organization with a clearly defined identity and sense of purpose toward both outsiders and its own militants: the militant's everyday life was dominated by the so-called "Stalinist metaphor" ("metafora staliniana," a term coined by the Italian scholar Giuseppe Carlo Marino). What does that mean? To Communists, words such as "Stalin" and "USSR" signified an "ideal of absolute happiness, synthesis of moral standards and welfare, in opposition to the disturbing and corrupting promises of the American capitalism."

Telos 151 (Summer 2010), a special issue on China, edited Russell A. Berman and Ban Wang, is now available for purchase. Click here to order. Read Berman and Wang's introduction here.

Telos turns its attention to China and a set of diverse encounters between Critical Theory and contemporary Chinese society and culture. How does the Chinese experience shed a new light on the questions that have been at the core of Critical Theory for decades: bureaucracy and domination, innovation and particularity, capitalism and its metamorphoses, reification and democracy, art and emancipation. The essays collected in this issue of Telos try to explore these questions from the Critical-Theoretical tradition in relation to the Chinese present, which in turn puts pressure on Critical Theory to recalibrate its inherited metrics. Since the work of Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin, the western Marxist tradition has involved systematic reflection on capitalism and culture: to continue that project today demands reflection on China.

On Tuesdays at the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jennifer Wang looks at Dominic Moran's "Decisions, Decisions: Derrida on Kierkegaard and Abraham," from Telos 123 (Spring 2002).

In "Decisions, Decisions: Derrida on Kierkegaard and Abraham," Dominic Moran attempts to use deconstructive critique on Derrida's notion of decision as it is relevant to ethics, justice, and political responsibility. In particular, Moran's is a critique of how practicable the sort of decision advanced by Derrida is, if at all. In the end, he concludes that it is not: a deconstructive ethics cannot even be considered paradoxical but rather is strictly contradictory in its relation of theory to practice. Moran sets Derrida's engagement with politics in the aftermath of the de Man scandal and the ensuing criticism that deconstruction's political possibilities tend toward nihilism and radical relativism. He is generous, however, in granting that Derrida is not entirely reactionary, for engagement with the political is the final stage in deconstruction's development.