By Erik Olin Wright · Thursday, May 9, 2019 Erik Olin Wright’s “Martin Sklar’s Theory of Capitalism and Socialism” appears in Telos 186 (Spring 2019). 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.
 This essay explores how Martin Sklar’s typology of the patterns of thought that have animated social and political struggles in capitalist societies since the mid-nineteenth century can, with some modification, be incorporated into a more general analytical framework for thinking about alternatives to capitalism. Sklar frames his analysis primarily in terms of two contrasts—between what he calls “utopian” and “realist” modes of thoughts, and between capitalism and socialism as ways of organizing political-economy institutions. He supports a realist mode of thought that examines the ways in which socialist elements emerge within capitalism, creating various kinds of hybrids through what he calls the “capitalism/socialism interplay.” The prospects for progressive social change come out of that interplay. This essay proposes modifying Sklar’s framework in two respects: First, rather than rejecting the utopian mode of thought, utopian models can be useful as a way of clarifying the normative foundations of struggles for human emancipation and the logical connections between different elements of proposed alternatives to existing institutions and social structures. Second, while Sklar is correct that real economic systems contain hybrids of capitalist and noncapitalist elements, it is a mistake to lump all relevant noncapitalist elements under the rubric “socialist.” Specifically, it is useful to distinguish statism from socialism. This creates a more nuanced conceptual map of possibilities and points more clearly to the problem of democratizing state and democratizing the economy as the central task of progressive politics.
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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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By Agata Bielik-Robson · Wednesday, April 24, 2019 Agata Bielik-Robson’s “Marrano Universalism: Benjamin, Derrida, and Buck-Morss on the Condition of Universal Exile” appears in Telos 186 (Spring 2019). 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.
In this article, I would like to outline a new strategy for the universalization of history, which emerges from an analysis of the modern Jewish practice of philosophizing. I call it a Marrano strategy, building an analogy between the religious practices of the late-medieval Sephardic Jewry, which was forced to convert to Christianity but kept Judaism “undercover,” and the philosophical intervention of modern Jewish thinkers who spoke the seemingly universal idiom of Western philosophy but, at the same time, impregnated it “secretly” with the motives deriving from their “particular” background. This secret particularist lining did not serve to abolish the universalist perspective, but merely to transform it; for the last heirs of this “Marrano” line, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, the proper universalism amounts to an after-Babel project of mending the broken whole from within, horizontally, without assuming the abstract position of a general meta-language, but through the multilingual “task of translation.”
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By Ethan Putterman · Thursday, April 11, 2019 Ethan Putterman’s “Locke and ‘War by Design’” appears in Telos 186 (Spring 2019). 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.
Few passages in John Locke’s writings are more controversial than the incongruous descriptions of the state of nature in chapters III and IX of the Second Treatise on Government. A hodgepodge of opposites where men live at once in a “State of Peace, Good Will, Mutual Assistance, and Preservation” yet remain “very unsafe, very unsecure,” Locke’s state of nature is, according to John Dunn, “probably the most misunderstood idea in the English radical’s political philosophy.” In this article, I explore Locke’s epistemology behind humankind’s comprehension of natural law to argue that his state of nature is more consistent than appears. I demonstrate that the symmetry of the philosopher’s state of nature is best understood by way of the theory of knowledge in his Essays on the Law of Nature and Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
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By David Pan · Monday, March 18, 2019 Telos 186 (Spring 2019) is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
This issue is devoted to the question of universal history and is based in part on a 2015 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference organized by Greg Melleuish. As this event suggested, universal history today imagines the convergence of humanity around a single trajectory of capitalist technological progress coupled with the defense of liberal rights. But as much as technology has increasingly linked the world into a single movement of history, we cannot say the same about liberal rights. Rather than pointing us toward the liberal light at the end of the historical tunnel, world politics seems to be casting us into the blazing arena of the “clash of civilizations” presaged by Samuel Huntington, with different regions of the world—Africa, America, Asia, Europe, the Muslim world—increasingly at odds, each region with a dominant civilization pursuing its own cultural and political hegemony. This divergence between a materialist unity of development and a cultural fragmentation frames the problem of universal history.
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By Loralea Michaelis · Monday, February 25, 2019 Loralea Michaelis’s “Temporality and Revolution in Horkheimer’s Early Critical Theory: A Luxemburgian Reading of Dämmerung” appears in Telos 185 (Winter 2018). 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.
 This article challenges the related assumptions about temporality and the significance of success and failure for revolutionary activism that have governed the standard interpretation of Horkheimer’s critical theory as foundering on the disappointment of its early revolutionary expectations. The early influence of Luxemburg on Horkheimer is used to bring into clearer focus Horkheimer’s handling of the problem of a failed revolution in Dämmerung, his earliest published work, which bears a striking resemblance to Luxemburg’s own positions on the centrality of failure to the development of the revolution as well as her critique of the success-oriented politics of reformism. Dämmerung foregrounds the German revolution of 1919–23, but the working through of its failure yields not pessimism over the future but a challenge to the preoccupation with future prospects which underlies both pessimism and optimism; it also yields a conception of revolution as a present-oriented resistance that not only does not expect to succeed in its aims but regards the aim of success with a skeptical eye. Contrary to the standard reading, the failed revolution is not a problem for which Horkheimer’s early critical theory needs to find a solution; rather, it is its practical correlative.
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