As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Tomash Dabrowski looks at Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Western Marxism,” from Telos 6 (Fall 1970).
Prior to 1960, the work of György Lukács was largely unknown in France; Lukács’s work had only belatedly gained influence there with Lucien Goldmann’s translation of History and Class Consciousness almost forty years after its first publication, and five years after the 1955 publication of Merleau-Ponty’s study of his work in Les Aventures de la Dialectique. Merleau-Ponty had in a sense anticipated the French debates on Lukács’s otherwise eminent text, already having cited passages from History and Class Consciousness in 1946. “Western Marxism,” however, is a meditation on a Marxism far removed from the type that Merleau-Ponty was enthusiastic about almost ten years prior. Until 1950 his political commitments were supportive, albeit cautiously, toward the Soviet project; the present work is however concurrent with a disillusionment of institutionalized Marxism, a cynicism that had grown in Merleau-Ponty since the Korean War.
In 1933, the rise of National Socialism had terminated the Frankfurt School’s residency in Germany, and “Materialism and Morality” marks the last contribution by Max Horkheimer to the Institute’s journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, while still located in Frankfurt. In this respect, the present essay is a macrocosm of the development of the thought of the Frankfurt School at the cusp of exile. Key concepts in Horkheimer’s more widely known mature work already germinate in “Materialism and Morality,” but the essay’s unique position in his individual intellectual development likewise straddles the ongoing process of elaborating a cohesive sociological vision for the institute. The still nascent idea of a “Critical Theory,” which is now synonymous with the school, had yet to wait four years to be coined by Horkheimer; indeed “Materialism and Morality” is part of a still continuing clarification of what an interdisciplinary critical method might look like in application. 
Even if Paul Piccone in fact mistakenly attributes the poem Contro Gli Aristotelici to Galileo—as scholars such as Charles B. Schmitt claim—the conclusion remains invariably the same. Piccone, of course, is not alone in this: the mistake originated in an early article written by the great Galilean scholar Antonio Favaro (1869–1922), responsible for the colossal twenty-volume edition of Galileo’s Opere. Favaro himself corrected the mistake one year later in a much lesser known article, but in print the attribution was already made and Jacopo Soldani’s satire, for years, was adopted by Galileo’s pen. 
A recent Colombian periodical announced the news: by the end of 2011, the country’s capital, Bogotá, reported an unemployment rate, at least by official accounts, 0.3% lower than that of the United States. The headlines, mediatic as they may intend, aim at fixing in print the dynamics of a continental reality: while European and American economies struggle with unprecedented crises, at least eight Latin American economies closed the year, according to the Centre for Latin American Studies (CESLA), with above average growth. 
Michael Mack’s “Richard Wagner and the Trajectory of Transcendental Philosophy” explores the differing brands of anti-Semitism in Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Schopenhauer, and explains how their scrutiny of Jews as a hindrance to society was radicalized by Richard Wagner. Mack details how each philosopher’s particular form of anti-Semitism fed into Wagner’s social-political writings as well as his “total works of art.” By investigating the concepts put forth by Wagner’s philosophical predecessors, one can more fully understand how a radicalized version of Kantian moral philosophy infiltrated German national culture through the composer’s art. Mack specifically addresses how these ideas manifested in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. 
