By Gerald Berk · Thursday, May 30, 2024 I am a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Oregon, and I am an observant, progressive Jew. I appreciate the efforts of conservatives, some of whom have made valuable contributions to the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative, to expose antisemitism in my profession and among my students since October 7. I share their concern that anti-Zionism has become one plank in an anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-American project characteristic of some segments of the contemporary left. It’s vital to bear in mind that Jews have thrived when liberal, American values and institutions have been strong.
 
Does this mean, as Bari Weiss counsels, that I should join Jews in a lockstep turn to the right? I think not. Twenty-five years ago, in Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty challenged what he called the “cultural left” to suspend high theory, identity politics, and cultural revolution to attend instead to the economic distress of the many Americans left behind by neoliberalism. He challenged an increasingly anti-American left to build a left-wing patriotism. And he pointed to domestic historical resources to realize those aims in the work of Emerson, Whitman, and Dewey. Rorty feared the alternative to such pragmatic liberalism was an authoritarian demagogue, who would reverse the gains of identity politics and usher in an era of American fascism.
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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 Florindo Volpacchio · Wednesday, December 28, 2022 If a journal manages to survive for 100 issues, it is reasonable to assume that the editorial board has managed to reach some sort of internal consensus and can finally rest on its laurels. Such is not the case with Telos. . . . After all these years, nothing seems to be settled and [Telos] remains a hopelessly heterogeneous group still trying to come to some agreement concerning many crucial and not-so-crucial issues. . . . This is why this theoretical bellum omnium contra omnes may be interpreted as evidence of lingering internal vitality, an unwillingness to take anything for granted, and a suspicion of all positions even faintly resembling conformism and passivity.
 With those words from Telos 101 (Fall 1994), Paul Piccone launched his critique of those who felt Telos had lost its direction and had settled into the role of the cranky old uncle of intellectual journals. Having just celebrated its 200th issue in its 54th year, those words still speak to the current state of the intellectual project he launched back in 1968.
Piccone’s critique of his critics, “From the New Left to the New Populism,” was intended not to lay claim to any settled doctrine for Telos but to demonstrate the journal’s ability to constantly rethink its position among current debates along the entire ideological spectrum. While the bellum omnium contra omnes Piccone refers to in his article specifically refers to Telos‘s own family, I think it is more than fair to say it was applied to any and all who asserted a suspicious and artificial ground for emancipation. Toward this end, Piccone begins by providing his own critique of the Western Marxist tradition out of which Telos arose. This in itself, in its pure compactness, is a tour de force of intellectual history and should be read by all those who seek an origin story, or who simply need to have their revision revised.
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By Russell A. Berman · Friday, March 12, 2021 To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
Former President of the German Bundestag Wolfgang Thierse mounts a powerful argument against identity politics in Germany and their political consequences. His comments here and originally here have elicited a robust discussion in Germany, especially because the current leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), of which Thierse is a long-term member, reportedly responded that they felt ashamed at his “regressive” views. While the leadership represents the current left wing of the party, other voices from the center rallied to Thierse’s defense. At stake is the gap between alternative aspirations within this venerable party, once the foundational political organization of the German left with roots in the workers’ movement of the nineteenth century.
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By Norbert Bolz · Monday, September 14, 2020 The rage about corona and its consequences has evidently elicited a mental disturbance with global reach. Every insanity has now become acceptable—on the condition that the insanity claims to be of the “left,” i.e., anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, etc. Whoever wants to keep it at a distance will be silenced. This has come to be called “cancel culture.” While the loudspeakers still boom about the political correctness of variety, diversity, and multiculturalism, we are living in fact in a radically illiberal period that no longer permits discussions. Germany has become incapable of debates—this is the result of the fanatic moralization of all life questions.
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By Kim R. Holmes · Wednesday, May 1, 2019 Kim R. Holmes’s “A Man between Two Worlds: Assessing Martin Sklar’s Philosophy of Liberalism” appears in Telos 186 (Spring 2019), as part of a symposium on Martin J. Sklar. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
 Martin Sklar is an underappreciated thinker. The fact that he was a leading intellectual of the New Left in the 1960s and remained a self-identified leftist gave him a unique historical perspective. It enabled him to cut through many misunderstandings and clichés about the history of American liberalism, and gives us an opportunity to understand the left’s theory of community in a different light. One of Sklar’s central theses is his contention that the American system during the Progressive Era became a “mix” of capitalism and socialism. Looking at this background, one of Sklar’s more prescient theses is his distinction between the “broad left” and the “sectarian left.” This also informs his insightful idea of the “transvestiture of left and right”—that the left and right have largely changed historical places on ideas. The postmodern left is very different from, and indeed has largely broken off ideologically from, classic as well as mainstream liberalism as it has been understood in the past. One very important component missing from Sklar’s approach is religion. It must be recognized that the post-revolutionary construct in America helped ensure that the freedom of civil society as a liberal project could not fully flourish without the support of religion. Sklar’s work illuminates the great intellectual divide between classic liberalism and socialism, and between the moderate and radical Enlightenment legacies, which rest on two different views of human nature. However, if a choice had to be made between liberty and the dictates of community, Sklar always chose liberty.
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