By David Pan · Wednesday, October 18, 2023 Telos 204 (Fall 2023): Quandaries of Race and Gender Theory is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 Old-style leftists have puzzled over how today’s left-liberals have abandoned traditional left-wing goals such as reducing class inequality and improving working-class standards of living. A key reason lies with the shifting of the politics of class. As Paul Piccone and Fred Siegel argued over thirty years ago in these pages, the problem of class is no longer a question of capitalists against workers. According to a recent Gallup poll, 61 percent of U.S. adults own stock, and such capitalist ownership, while a good way to increase wealth, is no longer the preserve of the ruling class and does not by itself confer much power. Rather, the ruling class that exercises real power consists not of owners but primarily of a bureaucratic class of managers in corporations, government, non-profits, universities, and the media. In spite of this shift, theories developed over a century ago continue to shape current leftist perspectives. Dominated by a socialist perspective, left-wing social policy fails to recognize and address the new contours of class division. As a result, it continues to employ a framework that is based on an anti-capitalist and anti-market agenda that tries to manipulate outcomes to promote socialist goals, precisely the methods of a managerial class.
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By Telos Press · Friday, January 21, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Xuesong Shao about her article “Restoring and Reimagining Socialist-Built Cities: Wang Xiaoshuai’s ‘Third Front Trilogy,’” from Telos 197 (Winter 2021). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the history of the Third Front Movement in China; how migration is depicted in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Third Front trilogy; the article’s approach to the issue of nostalgia; the relationship of nostalgia and ruination in Red Amnesia; the ways in which Wang Xiaoshuai uses the male gaze to reinforce gender stereotypes; the personal versus the historical in Eleven Flowers and how elusive personal recollections align with the master narratives of the nation-state; and the different ways that Wang Xiaoshaui and Jia Zhangke depict places of memory and places of history. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 197 are available for purchase in our online store.
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By Wolfgang Thierse · Friday, March 12, 2021 The following essay was originally published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on February 22, 2021, and appears here in translation with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.
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Community membership used to be a matter of religion and, after that, ideology. Today this function has been taken over by the concept of identity. Religion and ideology in the past led repeatedly to serious and even bloody conflicts. Will this history repeat itself under the new principle? Themes of cultural membership seem to be rattling our Western societies increasingly, splitting them along the political lines of distributive justice. Questions of identity—ethnic, gender, sexual—dominate, as the debates over racism, postcolonialism, and gender grow violent and aggressive. These are probably unavoidable confrontations in an increasingly pluralistic society, just as they give expression to social conflicts, fought over the distribution of visibility and influence, attention and recognition.
As unavoidable as these conflicts may seem, they are also confusing, opaque, and ambivalent. The violence of some attacks against traditionalist positions, as well as the violence in the defense of tradition, in addition to the radicalness of identity demands lead to the question: How much identity politics strengthens the pluralism of a society, and at what point does it turn into fragmentation? The principle at stake is this: the ethnic, cultural, and religious-worldview pluralism that is growing in Germany as elsewhere is no idyll; on the contrary it is full of disputes and conflict potential. If this multifacetedness is to be lived out in a peaceful manner, then pluralism must be more than the mere coexistence of minorities and identities that not only differ from each other but also separate from each other. Fundamental commonalities are necessary, including of course a common language, and naturally also a shared recognition of justice and law.
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By Arno Tausch · Monday, September 25, 2017 This article summarizes a forthcoming analysis by the author under the tile Islamism, Arab Spring and the Future of Democracy: Developing a World Values Perspective, under contract at Springer Publishers, N.Y.
Sixteen years ago, on a bright and beautiful September morning in New York, Islamist terror against the West reached a new stage. The attacks, which began at 8:46 local time, killed 2,996 victims.
To equate “Muslims” with terrorism is unjust—just recall the heroic example of the Jordanian Air Force pilot Muath Safi Yousef Al-Kasasbeh, who, on January 3, 2015, was burnt alive by ISIS after his F-16 crashed during an operation across ISIS territory. He, too, was a believing Muslim and a Jordanian patriot. “Muslims” today also include the 9 percent of the Arab population who, according to data from the ACRPS Institute in Qatar, advocate the diplomatic recognition of Israel, despite the prevailing climate of anti-Israeli hysteria.
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By Arno Tausch · Wednesday, April 19, 2017 This article develops new empirical perspectives on the growing gender policy and gender role clash of civilizations now looming ahead in Western countries. The very same European governments that welcomed hundreds of thousands of migrants from countries with what the Muslim feminist Ziba Mir-Hosseini called “compulsory dress codes, gender segregation, and the revival of cruel punishments and outdated patriarchal and tribal models of social relations,” are untiringly promoting gender mainstreaming, which is now a top priority for European Union policymakers. Western feminism is at a turning point. Will it share with large sections of the green and left political currents in the West the cowardly silence about the threat of Islamist totalitarianism and terrorism, or will it develop solidarity with Muslim feminism?
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, April 3, 2017 In addition to its main focus on original sin in modernity, Telos 178 (Spring 2017) features a special section of topical writing, introduced here by Russell A. Berman, that continues our ongoing commitment to setting forth a critical theory of the contemporary. Telos 178 is now available for purchase in our store.
 Not that long ago, debates over politics were anchored in a clear opposition between universalism and relativism. Proponents of an inclusive structure of, at least aspirationally, all states—the new world order—envisioned an unchallenged entrenchment of democratic capitalism everywhere. Where dictatorships endured, as in North Korea, they were treated as bizarre outliers, exceptions that proved the rule of the progress of mankind toward Kant’s perpetual peace. Universalist values held sway; ultimately all rights were to become human rights, due to all humans solely on the basis of their humanity, implying that rights pursuant to national citizenship, to membership in any particular national community, would dwindle in significance: no borders, no sovereignty, no traditions. However this conceptual expression of globalization faced sophisticated critics, variously postmodern, which treated that universalism with disdain and suspicion, insinuating to it an imperial agenda and offering an alternative program of multiplicity, diversity, and multipolarity. That was the historical moment of the theoretical opposition between Habermas and Derrida, the universality of communicative reason versus the insistence on difference. Inclusion and integration stood opposed to multiculturalism, as did generally applicable norms to the particular claims of local culture and tradition.
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