Universal History
Universal history today imagines the convergence of humanity around a single trajectory of capitalist technological progress coupled with the defense of liberal rights. But as much as technology has increasingly linked the world into a single movement of history, we cannot say the same about liberal rights. If the progress toward liberal norms is not inevitable, is it because of their inadequacy as a universally valid way of ordering the world? Or is it simply because of the difficulty of setting up such an order, even if it would in fact be the best of all possible worlds? The essays in this issue provide conflicting answers to these questions. Telos 186 also features a symposium on the work of the historian Martin J. Sklar, who established a unique form of universal history that attempts to synthesize capitalism and socialism into a “mix” that preserves the best qualities of both.
Introduction
David Pan
Marrano Universalism: Benjamin, Derrida, and Buck-Morss on the Condition of Universal Exile
Agata Bielik-Robson
Which Humanity? From Cultural to Racial Ethnocentrism: The Chinese Perspective on Universal History on the Threshold of the Twentieth Century
Maria Adele Carrai
The Particularity of Universal History
Greg Melleuish
Locke and “War by Design”
Ethan Putterman
Symposium on Martin J. Sklar
Symposium on Martin J. Sklar: Introduction
Norton Wheeler
“An Extremely Old Leftist”: Martin J. Sklar on Politics, Socialism, and History
Christopher A. Olewicz
A Man between Two Worlds: Assessing Martin Sklar’s Philosophy of Liberalism
Kim R. Holmes
Martin Sklar’s Theory of Capitalism and Socialism
Erik Olin Wright
Martin J. Sklar, 1935–2014: Historian, Patriot, Socialist, and Friend
Ronald Radosh
Martin Sklar’s Beautiful American (Post)Imperialism
Richard Schneirov
Martin J. Sklar: Afterword
Norton Wheeler
Reviews
Michael Ley on the Suicide of the West: The Islamization of Europe
Arno Tausch
