A Return to Politics

Political opinion, once regarded as a manufactured consensus foisted on the public by a government–media alliance, is now clearly entering a new, more volatile formation, marked by the anarchic dissemination of information, a truly global networking potential, and the emergence of unexpected allegiances. There is no self-evident common denominator in this eruption of political activity, except in the sense that unconstrained creative impulses have challenged the structures of traditional control. In Telos 169, we explore this return of politics in some of its crucial current contests as well as in the history of theorizing political aspirations.

Introduction
Russell A. Berman

After the Scottish No: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the Case for “Mixed Government”
Adrian Pabst

Johann Herder, Early Nineteenth-Century Counter-Enlightenment, and the Common Roots of Multiculturalism and Right-Wing Populism
Göran Adamson, Aje Carlbom, and Pernilla Ouis

Left Behind
Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt

Purity in Political Thinking
Zoltán Balázs

Imagination, Prophecy, and Morality: The Relevance and Limits of Spinoza’s Theory of Political Myth
Johnny Brennan

Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt on Democratic Political Creation: From Councilism to Cochabamba
Christopher Holman

Wittgenstein and Marx on Reification, Language, and Commonality
Dimitris Gakis

Empirical and Theoretical Knowledge in Adorno’s “Experimentation in Music Psychology”
Joshua Rayman

Forum on the NSA

Notes on the NSA
Warren Habib

Security vs. Privacy in an Era of Terror and Technology
Robert J. Lieber

Ethical and Social Issues in Military Research and Development
Baruch Fischhoff

A Modern Pascal’s Wager for Mass Electronic Surveillance
David Danks

The Transformation of the National Security Agency
David Pan

Reviews

Escape from the City of Brass
Mark S. Wagner

Hegel for the (Middle) Ages
John H. Smith

Substituting Mysticism for Skepticism
Sandra Rudnick Luft