Russell Berman, editor emeritus of Telos, began his work with the journal as an intern in the mid-1970s before becoming an editorial associate in 1979. In 2004, after the death of Paul Piccone, Russell assumed the role of editor of Telos. Russell considered Paul one of his best mentors, teachers, and friends. In turn, Paul regarded Russell as one of those closest to the spirit of Telos, someone who could carry on the journal’s legacy of an uncompromising appeal to lived creativity as well as to the generative force of tradition. Paul built an international community of intellectuals of diverse opinions, bringing European thought into the American discussion, a groundwork that Russell both maintained and expanded.
During Russell’s editorship, the journal featured issue-length discussions of Critical Theory, Carl Schmitt, Theodor Adorno, Martin Luther King Jr., terrorism, religion, and Italian Fascism, as well as special issues on Peter Szondi, China, Hans Blumenberg, the Anthropocene, Gillian Rose, Stefan George, and Korea. Russell also added new editorial associates to the board, including Aryeh Botwinick, Jay Gupta, Kenneth Johnson, Michael Marder, and Marcia Pally, as well as associate editor Adrian Pabst. In 2019, Russell stepped down from his position as editor of Telos.
Some of the authors that Russell introduced to the journal were subsequently published in Telos Press Publishing’s book line, which now includes Frederik Stjernfelt and Jens-Martin Eriksen’s The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism and Matthias Küntzel’s Germany and Iran. Russell also served as editor of Ernst Jünger’s The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios and co-editor of Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea and The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts. He also contributed the preface to Jünger’s On Pain.
Read Russell Berman’s articles from Telos in our online archives. To find out more about Telos’s latest projects, please see the letter from the publisher.
Russell Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University as well as a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
