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.
With this issue of Telos, we announce that Russell Berman, who has edited the journal since the passing of Paul Piccone in 2004, is stepping down in order to pursue an opportunity with the U.S. State Department. Under his stewardship, the journal has flourished by developing the major theoretical approaches that have become relevant for discussing issues such as the War on Terror, the Arab Spring, the Anthropocene, religion and politics, the rise of China, and the new populism. Adapting Critical Theory to the ever-changing needs of practice, he has maintained the Telos focus on emancipation while recognizing that every historical moment calls for its own particular response. We will miss his leadership and trust that it will be put to good use in a new context.
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.
The most immediate question is whether the focus on individual rights forms the basis of a universal historical development toward a better world or just expresses a particular Western European understanding of culture. Recent events suggest the latter. While the United States is currently retreating from its role as global enforcer of a liberal order, China’s attempt at maintaining authoritarian capitalism wagers that economic development and technological progress do not necessarily depend upon the expansion of individual rights. The current success of its merging of state and private sector into a corporatist framework reminiscent of the institutions of Italian Fascism and German Nazism suggests that there may not be a firm connection between economic development and liberal structures. In the Muslim world, the failure of both U.S. nation-building and the Arab Spring to bring about a lasting movement toward liberal democracy indicates that those areas may not be joining the universal historical bandwagon very soon. In fact, as Arno Tausch suggests in his review of Michael Ley’s book on the “suicide of the West,” the movement could even go in the other direction, with Islamic migrants shifting Europe away from its own liberal legacies.
To the extent that these developments have undermined faith in the inevitable proliferation of individual rights, they force us to think through their historical status. If the progress toward liberal norms is not inevitable, is it because of their inadequacy as a universally valid way of ordering the world? Or is it simply because of the difficulty of setting up such an order, even if it would in fact be the best of all possible worlds? The essays in this issue provide conflicting answers to these questions.
Adi Armon’s essay poses the question of universal history as one that sets the universal materialism of technological development against the differentiating character of culture. He recounts how Alexandre Kojève reads Hegel and Marx to interpret the advance of technology as the path toward a homogeneous universal humanity. But Kojève’s materialist vision of unity runs up against Leo Strauss’s insistence that the extrapolation from technology to ideals is a form of “tyranny with imperialist ambitions” because it allows the capitalist satisfaction of material needs to overrun the nobility of ideals.
But it may be that the linking of universality to materiality obscures the underlying ideological intent behind universal history. Rather than linking the universal to the material, Agata Bielik-Robson poses the problem of universal history as a conflict between the universality of grand narratives and the particularity of local cultures. She lays out the framework for a new universal history that avoids the choice between a philosophical universality that treats all of humanity as participating in a single Hegelian grand narrative and a communal particularism that maintains each culture in isolation. Taking the process of translation as a model, Bielik-Robson presents the possibility of a “bi- or multi-linguality” that stays within the plane of particular texts and histories but can escape the confines of a single culture through the link to another culture.
In response, Maria Adele Carrai argues that universal history is always an inherently ethnocentric project that defines the trajectory of one’s own culture as the central and normative one. Chinese universal history in the dynastic period maintained a Chinese cultural ethnocentrism that regarded the world only in relation to the Chinese center. Similarly, the European idea of universal history developed in the nineteenth century into race theories that privileged the white race, while the Chinese reception of this model accepted the idea of hierarchy but revised it to place the yellow races on top. For Carrai, every universal history is in fact already particularistic. Translation does not solve this problem, but merely extends it.
Greg Melleuish treats universal history as part of the methodological quandary of all history: how to balance the imaginative character of narrative history with the documentary claim to reveal the truth in its particularity. Affirming that human culture is never stable but always in flux and therefore proliferating into new pathways, he argues that universal history, in imagining a common humanity, necessarily limits the plasticity of the human and suppresses particularity, becoming the mode of history suited to empire. The current form of universal history is thus linked to the contemporary form of empire, understood as the progress of globalization. But does universal history then function as the superstructural expression of a global capitalist empire, the mythic legitimizer of a Western liberal empire, or the heralder of the scientific progress of the world toward a liberal utopia?
Ethan Putterman’s essay suggests the latter. By arguing for the consistency of Locke’s depiction of the state of nature, Putterman treats it as the basis for an objective understanding of how historical events conform to certain patterns. Locke’s analysis of the state of nature does not necessarily describe a historical situation, but rather outlines an idealized situation that can be used for theorizing about concrete cases. Putterman thus argues for the scientific status of Locke’s claims, which are treated not merely as part of a specific tradition of political theory but as part of an objective theory of natural law that can be universally applied.
The second half of this issue is devoted to a symposium edited by Norton Wheeler on the work of the historian Martin J. Sklar, who established a unique form of universal history that attempts to synthesize capitalism and socialism into a “mix” that preserves the best qualities of both.
As Christopher A. Olewicz lays out, Sklar was a lifelong socialist, championing a form of democratic socialism that was committed to freedom, equality, and social welfare, but therefore criticizing the academic and political left for shifting toward a form of left-wing sectarianism that abandoned these principles in favor of a multiculturalist anti-Americanism. Founder of Studies on the Left in the 1950s and co-founder with James Weinstein of In These Times in the 1970s, Sklar defended an anti-statist and democratic form of socialism that was rooted in American traditions and did not have to reject the free market. Consequently, though mind-bendingly, he saw Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin as the best recent embodiments of American socialism, as they all moved the country toward a reduction in statist solutions and toward reliance on market mechanisms to meet socially progressive goals. Such an unorthodox reading of recent American history made Sklar into an anomaly on both the right and the left. Yet, his unique willingness to revise his opinions based on historical analysis places him firmly in the camp of those who would treat history as objective analysis rather than mythmaking.
While Kim Holmes agrees with Sklar’s critique of the vanguardism, sectarianism, and statism of current left-liberal politics, he disagrees about the advantages of a mix of capitalism and socialism. If Sklar saw a new kind of anti-statist socialism in the types of free market policies established by Reagan and Clinton, Holmes insists on the opposition between free market liberalism and socialism in order to defend the former. If Sklar pragmatically treats individual rights and the free market as the best ways to ensure the welfare of the people, Holmes is unwilling to subordinate these liberal values to socialist goals. No namby-pamby Hegelian synthesis here. Grounded in natural law, liberal rights need to remain unchallenged for Holmes as the absolute basis of a civic religion with universal significance.
As opposed to Holmes’s firm commitment to liberal rights, Erik Olin Wright and Ronald Radosh emphasize the socialist aspect of Sklar’s thought. Radosh describes how Sklar’s socialism was infused with a commitment to individual rights that helped him to recognize both the possibility of a capitalist-socialist mix and the dangers of a state-dominated economy. Wright recounts how Sklar’s ability to imagine a merging of capitalism and socialism depends on the idea that the difference between the two comes down to who—capitalist investors or broader social groups—benefits from the investments made. In response, Wright argues that the difference between capitalist and socialist should consider who exercises the power in making investment decisions. Capitalism, statism, and socialism can be distinguished by determining if private owners, the state, or ordinary people have this decision-making capacity, though it is unclear how ordinary people would exercise this capacity other than as private individuals or clients of the state.
Richard Schneirov and Norton Wheeler describe the significance of Sklar’s work for questions of global order. While Wheeler provides an overview of some of the implications of Sklar’s work for current debates about the rise of China, the private financing of social welfare, and the populist scrambling of left/right divisions, Schneirov focuses on Sklar’s interpretation of American imperialism as the attempt to develop foreign markets in order to overcome the late nineteenth-century domestic economic problem of overproduction. This form of imperialism did not exploit colonies through parasitic trade relationships but invested in foreign markets to create economic development rather than subjugation. The United States set off a “cumulative-evolutionary” development that could permanently transform pre-capitalist economies and establish the basis of a “universal humanity” and “universal human freedom on a world scale” that eventually displaces the United States as the center of the world by promoting economic development worldwide. Schneirov asks, however, whether this development will lead to a multipolar capitalist-socialist world, a new globalization with China at the center, or a threat to individual rights due to China’s authoritarian, one-party government. These questions indicate, however, that the corporation-based universality that Sklar describes may only be universal in its reduction of all humanity to clients of global managerial networks dominated by an alliance of state and corporate bureaucracies. In this case, we arrive back at the quandary about whether the commitment to individual rights, as opposed to the reliance on communal traditions, becomes the universal antidote to, or the universal alibi for, the totally administered world.
