In anticipation of our two-hundredth issue, the editorial board of Telos is organizing an exciting new international initiative: the Telos Student Seminars (TSS). We are reaching out to you as a valued friend of the journal in the hope that you will be a part of our efforts.
Modeled on the study groups from which Telos first grew, yet reconceived for the digital age, the Telos Student Seminars will provide a forum for students around the world to engage with critical theory by discussing a common set of paired texts from Telos—one current essay, and one pertinent essay from our archives—guided by questions drawn up by our student interns and our editorial board. These questions will seek to connect the past and present of the journal to its future.
We seek faculty from around the world under whose aegis TSS groups can meet and who can provide students with intellectual encouragement and support. These friends of Telos will be designated as our Seminar Conveners. We would be thrilled if you would serve in this special capacity. Conveners are responsible for ensuring that their institutions have a subscription to Telos and its backfile so that students can participate—they can do so by contacting their university librarians.
We ask that each Convener in turn approach a graduate student or upper-level undergraduate to serve as their group’s Executive Organizer. These student leaders will be responsible for selecting and organizing from three to fifteen fellow students to come together for a single, ninety-minute seminar-style discussion of two paired Telos articles twice each year. Meetings will take place on a flexible timeline sometime during a single month coinciding with the publication of a new issue of the journal.
After each group meets and discusses the two articles under consideration, Executive Organizers will be invited to submit a report of up to 1,000 words about their group’s conversation for possible publication under the author’s name in TELOSscope. A global TSS Rapporteur chosen among our interns will in turn synthesize these accounts for publication in TELOSscope and, eventually, the journal. In a culminating event, all seminar participants will be invited to a global video discussion with the author of the most recent essay and, when possible, the author of the past article as well.
We hope that the result of our efforts will be a lively seminar series, unique among academic journals, that channels the founding spirit of Telos into the digital age, and that helps bring a new generation of students into the tradition of lively, open-ended, unorthodox conversation for which the journal is known.
To help us continue to foster this conversation by becoming a Seminar Convener, please fill out the Google form available through this link.
If you do not have a Google account or you have any questions—or if you would like to recommend colleagues who could equally serve as conveners, wherever in the world they might be—please contact editorial board member Mark S. Weiner at tss@telospress.com.
Once we have heard from a sufficient number of conveners to make our initiative viable, we will contact you via email with information about our timeline and next steps, as well as sample discussion questions.
Our first article pairing will be Paul Kahn’s “Law and Representation: Observations from an American Constitutionalist” (Telos 195, Summer 2021) and Telos founder Paul Piccone’s “The Crisis of Liberalism and the Emergence of Federal Populism” (Telos 89, Fall 1991).
Writing thirty years ago, Piccone presciently argues that populist responses to the crisis of liberalism have been ineffective, have indeed largely deepened the crisis, by relying on a nationalist political imaginary unsuited to opposing the New Class and its program of technocratic managerialism. He instead envisions a populist movement in which new territorial communities with particularized structures of value are federated within a decentralized and regionalized system, and he looks to an unlikely source for inspiration for that project: the Lombard League of northern Italy. “The Lombard League,” he explains, “rejects outright the obsolete concept of the nation-state in favor of an integral federalism predicated on the constitution of new nomoi and the reconstitution of local communities as the social space within which to practice participatory democracy.” The League and other widely misunderstood populist political formations—which transcend the outdated distinction of Left/Right—embody for Piccone, under current historical conditions, “the same democratic spirit that gave rise to the original American Constitution and the Swiss Confederation, and provide a concrete alternative to a moribund liberalism.”
Kahn’s work implicitly shines a light backward on Piccone’s analysis through its searching examination of the widespread loss of constitutional faith in the United States, and the consequent rise of a politics stripped of its connection to the political. “The civil religion that once animated the nation is dying,” writes Kahn. “While we once understood constitutionalism to control politics, now it is the other way around. Everything is politicized. But constitutionalism cannot survive when the appeal to law is only an extension of ordinary politics by other means.” Kahn’s goal, he writes, is “to remind us of the political imaginary within which American constitutionalism has played a vital democratic role.” Does this reminder of a judicially articulated ideal in which national popular sovereignty was grounded in a vision of “law as a robust source of meaning” and “as an end in itself” add a complementary theoretical dimension to Piccone’s analysis of the crisis of liberalism? How might reading the two essays together speak to a possible future through which critical theory could chart a goal toward human emancipation within our current historical moment?
Thank you for considering becoming a part of the Telos Student Seminars and extending the Telos tradition.
