By Martin J. Sklar · Wednesday, May 11, 2016 This is the second in a series of posts that introduce the thought of historian Martin J. Sklar, as a prelude to a print symposium on his life and work in a future issue of Telos. For a fuller introduction, refer to the head note to the first TELOSscope post. That post featured something unusual for a historian: an excerpt from a perceptive essay on Hegel. Hegel’s understanding of human history as developmental and cumulative, particularly with respect to the expansion of human freedom, colored Sklar’s career as a historian. Excerpts from two of his published works (second and third selections, below) reflect that influence. Not all of Sklar’s engagement with Hegel was affirmative. In the first selection, he endorses Marx’s critique of Hegel’s statism. As will be further illustrated in future posts, one of Sklar’s longstanding criticisms of many fellow leftists was their equation of socialism with state control over society. From his research on the Progressive Era in the United States, he concluded that presidents and other strategic thinkers of that period consciously incorporated elements of socialism into their ideas and programs in ways that affirmed positive government as a middle way between laissez-faire and statism. This was the meaning of his somewhat cryptic assertion in an influential (but often misunderstood) 1960 essay that corporate liberalism was “the bourgeois Yankee cousin of modern European and English social-democracy” (Studies on the Left 1:3, 41). Over time, Sklar progressively (in both senses) fleshed out this insight.
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By Martin J. Sklar · Wednesday, May 4, 2016 Martin J. Sklar, who died in 2014, was a historian, left-wing activist, and original thinker. As a scholar/journalist-activist, he founded Studies on the Left, co-founded Socialist Revolution and In These Times, and was a founding member of The Historical Society. As a historian, he originated the influential concepts of “corporate liberalism” and “disaccumulation” and shaped the thinking of historians of the Progressive Era, the Jefferson–Hamilton divide, Lincoln’s revolutionary role in ending slavery, the sources and consequences of U.S. imperialism—and more.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, March 14, 2016 Telos 174 (Spring 2016): Philosophy, Literature, Theory is now available for purchase in our store.
 In this issue, Telos turns to a diverse set of philosophers, contemporary and classical, and questions, concerning ethics and politics on the one hand, and literature and aesthetics on the other. More often than not, those distinctions turn out to be difficult to maintain. A case in point is the opening essay, which examines how statements by Levinas have been subjected to political readings in order to impute to him positions that he did not hold. What are the ethics of intentional misreadings? In their meticulously argued analysis, Oona Eisenstadt and Claire Elise Katz demonstrate how the philosopher’s comments in a 1982 radio interview, in the immediate aftermath of the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, have been subjected to increasing degrees of misrepresentation, culminating in false accusations that he justified the killings. These insinuations involved fabricating quotations to put words in his mouth. Eisenstadt and Katz expose the poor philology and tendentious politics implicit in such distortion.
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By Nigel Tubbs · Thursday, February 4, 2016  In her preface to the 1995 edition of Hegel Contra Sociology, Gillian Rose says that her project is “to demonstrate a nonfoundational and radical Hegel, which overcomes the opposit[ion] between nihilism and rationalism” and can renew critical thought “in the intellectual difficulty of our time.” However, I think this is not quite the case, for two reasons. First, Rose’s Hegel is not nonfoundational. Instead, as the book makes very clear, Rose’s Hegel does think the absolute, or the true. Yet her Hegel is also radical because she does not eschew the “ineluctable difficulty” of the authority of saying that truth either can or cannot be thought. Second, and in the teeth of this apparent inconsistency, thinking the absolute does not “overcome” such oppositions. Instead, it learns of their truth, their self-determination, by rethinking the religious and political presuppositions upon which these oppositions depend. Against the logic of mastery and ownership, or the propertied logic, that continues to dominate Western thinking, in Rose’s Hegel the learning and education which is endemic to the Aufhebung is not prejudged as “overcoming” (i.e., as abstract truth) or “failing to overcome” (yielding chaos and infinite regression). Instead, what it commends, and what I explore in this article, is a different logic of freedom, an educational logic, which can find its truth in preserving and reforming the opposition between nihilism and rationalism. This self-determining educational logic is the work in which thinking can renew itself in the intellectual difficulty of our time.
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By Andrew Shanks · Tuesday, February 2, 2016 Gillian Rose began as a sympathetic interpreter of Adorno. This essay considers the abiding strength of Adorno’s thought, from her point of view, by contrast for instance with that of Heidegger; but also the rationale of her eventual move beyond Adorno, and back to Hegel. Fundamentally at issue, in this move, is the Hegelian notion of “Absolute Knowing,” as a systematic re-opening of the most purely rationalistic philosophy, toward theology. That is, the sense in which it represents an ideal “salvage” strategy, with regard to religion: neither over-reductionist in the manner of Kant, or of Feuerbach, nor inadequately critical in the manner of Schleiermacher; but, rather, an approach precisely focused on the ineradicable ambiguity of all religious utterance—as a potential medium for “Spirit”—even whilst fully acknowledging religion’s unsurpassable potential virtues as a non-elitist mode of communication. Rose, it is argued, quite rightly sees beyond Adorno’s caricatural misreading of Hegelian grand-narrative “theodicy”: which is by no means, in fact, the intrinsically de-sensitizing mode of ideology he supposes it to be, but is, instead, a therapeutically “comedic” impulse, akin to Nietzschean amor fati, combined with a (not at all Nietzschean) concern for effective cosmopolitan solidarity-building.
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By Andrew Brower Latz · Tuesday, January 26, 2016 This article examine Rose’s claim in Hegel Contra Sociology that Hegel’s philosophy, properly understood, is able to provide a better way to do sociology. It understands this claim as one of method and metatheory: by better appreciating the logic of sociology and the social nature of logic, and the relationship between theory and metatheory, social theory may be less prone to make certain errors. Rose found in Hegel’s logic and phenomenology the way to such understanding. By pushing Rose’s work in a direction she did not explicitly take it, this article shows how it nevertheless addresses some central debates in sociological theory. It finds that her version of Hegelian conceptual knowing can speak to and cope with issues of logic and the sociology of knowledge, the repeated recurrence of contradictions and antinomies in sociology, and issues of emergence and the social totality. It finds a possible source of the repeated recurrence of positivism in sociology suggested by Rose’s critique of neo-Kantianism: faulty methodological self-understanding. Rose’s work on social theory can then be seen as in part offering a better account of what good sociology already does. While in no way imagining that this approach does justice to the whole of Rose’s thought, it shows her fiercely theoretical work is effective not only in philosophy but also in sociology, which is consistent with her dismay at their disciplinary separation.
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