By Danilo Breschi · Thursday, July 25, 2013 Danilo Breschi’s “From Politics to Lifestyle and/or Anti-Politics: Political Culture and the Sense for the State in Post-Communist Italy” appears in Telos 163 (Summer 2013). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
 In Italy, the transition from communism to post-communism, from the PCI to today’s Democratic Party, has been determined and strongly influenced not only by the collapse of ideologies and by the changes in the international political scene after 1989, but also by the profound changes that have invested the customs, lifestyles, and collective mentality from the end of the 1960s and, ever more rapidly, from the 1970s. Mass individualism and consumer society are the factors that more than others have undermined the myth of the anthropological “diversity” and the claim to moral superiority cultivated for decades by the Italian communists. Moreover, they help explain the passage of many of them from the utopia revolutionary and the dream of a “new world” to the liberal-bourgeois radicalism that seems to characterize today’s Italian left. Is there anything left of the communist tradition in today’s Italian political and cultural scenario? There is probably one attitude shared by many Communist militants but that belongs to the entire Italian political tradition, i.e., the deeply rooted aversion to public institutions and a poor sense of the state as embodying the rule of law. The greatest and most negative legacy of the long hegemony, on the left, of a communist party narrowly loyal to the Soviet Union was and still is the lack of legitimacy of the state and its institutions. The Soviet experiment having failed, there remains a populist cultural capital that has passed on to the Lega Nord in the 1990s and that has recently migrated to the Five Stars Movement of Beppe Grillo.
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By Geneviève Pigeon · Friday, July 19, 2013 The following paper was presented at the Seventh Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–17, 2013, in New York City.
 Province of Québec’s territory is vast, and much of it has been left in what could be considered a “natural” state. Today’s paper will focus on one particular region called Abitibi-Témiscamingue, located on the west side of the province, but north of Montreal (which is why we usually refer to it as a northern area).
Abitibi-Témiscamingue has been occupied for more than 8000 years, with the latest occupants being the Algonquins (the Abitibi and the Témiscamingue being the two main groups of Natives living there when Europeans arrived). While their presence has been known since the first French merchants came in the 1700s to trade fur, it is only around 1837–38 that Montreal’s Bishop decided to “take care” of these poor souls and sent missionaries to convert them. In 1863, the Oblate missionaries founded a permanent mission and from there, travelled the entire territory.
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By Jens-Martin Eriksen · Thursday, July 18, 2013 Jens-Martin Eriksen’s “Culturalism: When the Culture becomes Political Ideology” appears in Telos 163 (Summer 2013). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store. Eriksen and Stjernfelt’s The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism is also available here.
The political critique of modernity has gained momentum in Europe in recent years. It is a diverse movement, encompassing populist nationalist and national-conservative parties in Western Europe, a fascistoid Christian-nationalist revival—and on the opposite side: Islamism and the people they instrumentalize, the multiculturalists. They all agree that politics should focus primarily on culture and religion, and all other fields of operation depend on these aspects being stable and undisturbed and not influenced by other trends in society. The dogma that individuals from different groups should not mix is widely accepted and a de facto apartheid is more or less implemented in Western Europe by the civil society. The physical segregation in the cities and in public schools is a fact. The political power play is for the moment over signs and political symbols—e.g., the referendum in Switzerland about the prohibition of minarets, the ban on religions symbols in public schools in France, and other initiatives. The Left seems dazed and confused in this battle and unable to calibrate how to meet the challenge.
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By Michael Millerman · Tuesday, July 16, 2013 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, Michael Millerman looks at Luigi Marco Bassani’s “The Bankruptcy of the Republican School,” from Telos 124 (Summer 2002).
 Luigi Marco Bassani’s essay “The Bankruptcy of the Republican School” (2002) consists of an overview of the conflict in American historiography between two schools of thought. The first—Lockean liberalism—insists that America was founded on principles that recognize an abstract, natural right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of one’s private happiness. These natural rights are liberties that define a private sphere, to be protected from government interference. By contrast, the second school proclaims that not Lockean liberalism, but rather republicanism informed the Founders’ vision of what America is and should be. Republicanism elevates such notions as “the common good” and “the public sphere” above those of “individual liberties” and “private happiness.” Indeed, it can justify infringing on the latter for the sake of the former. Hence, it is in conflict with Lockean liberalism.
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By Reem Bassiouney · Thursday, July 11, 2013 Reem Bassiouney’s “Language and Revolution in Egypt” appears in Telos 163 (Summer 2013). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
Based on the assumption that language is a social resource, this article contends that during political conflicts, issues of linguistic resources and access to them are disputed. Issues of inclusion and exclusion are predominant. Note that Egypt is a diglossic community, a community in which two language varieties exist each with a different function. Examples are drawn from Egyptian media directly before, during, and after the revolution of January 25, 2011. Two newspaper articles are analyzed in detail, as well as additional material from TV talk shows, films, Facebook pages, and poetry. The first section in this article outlines how linguists in the Arab world at large, and in Egypt in particular, have referred to the diglossic situation to explain and justify negative social and political phenomena, especially the lack of democracy. Section two discusses examples of linguistic manipulation that took place during the revolution and in which the Egyptian state media attempted to cast doubt on the identity and motivations of the protestors in Tahrir Square. The conflict was not one sided, and the Tahrir Square protestors counterattacked the state media through poetry and other means. The main contribution of this section is to show how the diglossic situation is used after the revolution to lay claims on political legitimacy and credibility of the revolutionaries rather than the pro-Mubarak group. In a final section, the concept of linguistic unrest is introduced and defined.
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By Johanna K. Schenner · Tuesday, July 2, 2013 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, Johanna Schenner looks at Federico Stame’s “The Crisis of the Left and New Social Identities,” from Telos 60 (Summer 1984).
 In “The Crisis of the Left and New Social Identities” (1984), Federico Stame addresses the problems encountered by left-wing ideologies and political parties, such as the banality of their demands, as well as deeper underlying issues, such as the falling away of the friend-foe nexus in politics. He also provides hope for improvement by invoking the leading role of new social identities in renewing the tradition of the political Left.
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