Telos 183 (Summer 2018), celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the journal Telos, is now available for purchase in our store.
Telos began this anniversary year with our previous issue’s exploration of the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., tragically assassinated fifty years ago in April. That too was 1968, the excitement of profound social change and the bitter taste of disappointment. So much in our culture today remains framed by that specific polarity. Now, in this issue of the journal, we take stock more broadly: not a judgment on that one year but a return to some of the key themes that have defined Telos. We have been able to carry on these discussions thanks to the vision of the founder, Paul Piccone, the support of our publisher, Mary Piccone, the dedication of our editorial group, the intellectual agility of our authors, and the loyalty of our readers. Thanks to all.
It was a year of uprising, in West and East, driven by an existential dissatisfaction with bureaucracy and administration. It was the year that saw the “establishment” facing the challenge of a “counter-culture,” dedicated to both independence and community: so, a year not that different from our present, since in some ways the 1968 “movement” and contemporary populism have more than a little in common (which is particularly apparent when one looks at the left variants of populism in Europe, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain). Similarly, a dissatisfaction with the “culture industry” then resembles the current turn against the social media giants, now suddenly recognized as Kafkaesque machines of unlimited surveillance. Yet there is a dimension of optimism too: then and now, a reshuffling of the political deck would seem possible, although, in the aftermath of 1968, the New Left withered away, a minority turning to destructive and self-destructive terrorism, while the vast majority learned to make its accommodations with the conformism of the Democratic Party, not very much of a counter-culture after all. Where our current political paths will lead remains very much up in the air. We do know however that the 2016 presidential election demonstrated enormous dissatisfaction with both major political parties, leading to revolts against their establishments: it was the party in which that revolt was crushed that lost the election.
1968: a year when the rhetoric of revolution could rule the streets of Paris, but during which the tanks of the Warsaw Pact crushed the hopes of Prague; and a year in which the Vietnam War raged, while the opposition to the war was willing to fool itself into believing a Communist regime would be gently benign—the refugees, the “boat people,” soon proved them wrong. That simultaneity of emancipatory aspiration and brutal repression would repeat itself, less than halfway through this half century, when in 1989 the opening of the Berlin Wall ushered in the end of the Soviet empire, at the same time as the Communist regime could undertake the massacre at Tiananmen Square. Nor was this the last example of such drastic inversions: the Arab Spring of 2011 followed so soon by Arab Winters, or, in Germany specifically, how the euphoric welcome of refugees in 2015 turned quickly into the reaction of 2017, part of the populist eruption still around us.
Too much of contemporary public discussion (notionally “public” although, as we have learned, privately owned in Silicon Valley) only thinks one side of these problems. The mission of Telos has involved thinking beyond such one-dimensional partisanship and prepackaged talking points in order to understand the complexity—the dialectics, in the idiom of that bygone era—of lived experience, including as well the relationship of conceptual thought to that experience: how we think is as much at stake as what we think, probably even more.
This anniversary issue is not a history of the past five decades, nor is it a history of the journal. Instead, contributors discuss themes that have been particularly salient in the journal and that, in various ways, demonstrate how Telos has explored important topics during this era. A key configuration during the early years of the journal was the encounter of phenomenology, especially the work of Edmund Husserl, with the Critical Theory legacy, notably the thought of Theodor Adorno and, his source and antipode, Georg Lukács. A vital point of intersection involved the notion of life-world, on the one hand, and the domination of nature, on the other. Two different formulations to be sure: but they both indicate a concern with the space in which life, biotic or cultural, takes place, although as Aldo Leopold taught, those two sides can hardly be separated. One version of this thinking can lead to variants of environmentalism, a theme that has always accompanied the journal. In this issue, Tim Luke begins with Adorno, juxtaposing his Critical Theory with the temptation toward scientism in some environmentalist thinking, but on the basis of Adorno’s critique a utopian potential emerges all the more powerfully: “the spirit of hope that all of the living beings thriving in ‘creation might survive the injustice done to them by human beings.'” Sabine Wilke pursues this connection between Critical Theory and the environment, specifically with regard to the concept of “the Anthropocene,” and brings it to bear on aesthetics and contemporary performance culture. This insistence on the powerful connection between works of art and our social condition—including the environment—is part and parcel of the tradition. It is what imbues art with its truth content. Ban Wang rounds out the section on the environment with a discussion of Kang Youwei, who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, brought together parts of the Confucian legacy and modern reform efforts in China as part of a response to the challenges devolving from the encounter with the West, and a crucial element of this agenda involves a holistic thinking of the world. This essay also demonstrates the urgency, at this moment in modernity or postmodernity, to engage with premodern legacies, often but not always in the form of religion, as a vital source of orientation. In addition, Wang’s article exemplifies the recognition of how the questions inherent in Critical Theory as developed in Telos are not simply symptomatic of their Central European genealogy but have global resonance (watch for our next special issue on Korea).
Adorno pervades the environmental essays. The next two pieces focus on Carl Schmitt, and the combination of these two thinkers, incompatible on so many points, is a Telos signature. For us both figure as proponents of the priority of the particular. Adorno’s provocative anti-Hegelian declaration of the “whole as the untrue” is the philosophical analogue to Schmitt’s suspicion of Wilsonian universalism. Joseph Bendersky provides an extensive chronicle of how Telos has approached Schmitt and how the journal’s perspective gradually evolved, in synch with the development of Schmitt scholarship more broadly. Anyone needing proof positive of the Schmittian core thesis that politics is a matter of agonistic enmity rather than normative universalism need only follow the Machiavellianisms that abound in Washington, where what matters is not the rule of law but using the law to gain the power to rule. David Pan pursues a key claim in Schmitt’s thought, the tension between liberalism and democracy, in order ultimately to turn, via Hobbes, to the question of representation and myth. What myth can sustain our embattled polity into the future? In the Myth of Eurasia, Bruno Maçães argues that in the twentieth century, the United States came to understand itself as the heir and successor to Europe, in an era when Europe, at least initially, was a significant site of power, and its legacy was interpreted to be one of liberalism notionally embedded in a “Western tradition.” As power shifts to China, will the United States adapt and model itself on its new counterpart and competitor?
The focus on Schmitt leads naturally to the third group of contributions in this issue, which treat politics and political ideas. Fred Siegel walks us through the decomposition of liberalism in the United States, from a party of industrial growth, blue-collar constituencies, and patriotism, to the new establishment of counter-culture values, post-national cosmopolitanism, and coastal elites. With Alain de Benoist, we turn to France and the vicissitudes of conservatism there, its inherent ambiguities (what is it that one might want to conserve, he asks provocatively), and the prospects of a convergence of conservatism and populism. My own essay traces the rapid reversal of sentiment in Germany, from pro-refugee enthusiasm to something much less welcoming and considerably more ominous, an object lesson for the immigration debate in the United States. Adrian Pabst wraps up this group with an examination of the failures of “hyper-liberalism,” and the various competing modalities of post-liberal politics: nationalist traditionalism, one-nation conservatism, tech utopianism, and ethical socialism, positions that Pabst sees as “at war” with each other. Recognizing and resolving this post-liberal conflict is urgent, as his closing words make clear: “We live in troubled times. A sense of anger and abandonment is spreading among people who feel humiliated, unable to live the lives they hope for, and powerless to shape the forces that dominate them and those they care about most. . . . A common good politics is about nurturing a sense of fraternity, which in the West we inherited from the fusion of Greco-Roman philosophy with biblical revelation and which secular modernity has marginalized by unleashing the forces of dispossession that are capitalism, statism, liberalism, and globalization. Europe and the wider West will not survive and influence global affairs unless it renews its unique legacy and can find ways of instilling the practice of virtue in pursuit of the common good.”
Our anniversary issue culminates in a group of essays more philosophical in nature, and in which ethics and religion overlap. James V. Schall, S.J., inquires into the very need for political philosophy, drawing on classical virtue philosophy and juxtaposing it with the modern elevation of freedom as the ultimate good, a distinction that echoes aspects of Pabst’s criticism of liberalism. Kenneth Johnson looks at contemporary just war theory, especially against the backdrop of the war with ISIS, and inquires into both a Schmittian framework as well as, in his conclusion, the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Finally, Aryeh Botwinick continues his inquiry into the lineages between monotheism and skepticism, in the context of mysticism as the source of a philosophical and possibly political understanding of the world.
This anniversary issue concludes with a set of reviews. Mark Wagner takes a look at two edited volumes, We Will Not Be Silenced, ed. William I. Robinson and Maryam S. Griffin, and The Imperial University, ed. Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira Michael, collections that we pay attention to for their symptomatic value as examples of the sort of flat and self-serving political discourse that passes for scholarship in the contemporary United States. If one wanted to look for evidence of an American decline, it would probably be found most easily in parts of the academic humanities and the university presses that promote books like these. Yet genuine scholarship still does take place elsewhere, as we can see in Michael Gladwin‘s review of Wayne Hudson’s rich and informative book on Australian Religious Thought, and Iván Garzón Vallejo‘s judicious discussion of Ronald Dworkin’s Religion without God. At Telos‘s half century, it is serendipitous to conclude this introduction by quoting Vallejo’s final lines on Dworkin’s posthumously published book: “It is good news that one of the most important American liberal scholars devoted his final work to discussing the place of religion in public life. In this sense, Dworkin’s Religion without God stands as another example of a secularist’s late discovery of the important political role that religion plays in the modern world.” Amen.
