By David Ost · Tuesday, November 1, 2011 David Ost’s review of Victor Zaslavsky’s Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn appears in Telos 156 (Fall 2011). Read the full review online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here. Zaslavsky’s Class Cleansing is available for purchase here.
 In this powerful short book on the horrific Soviet massacre of over 20,000 Polish reserve officers in 1940, Victor Zaslavsky utilizes recently opened Moscow archives to lay out what happened, and then argues that it was the result of a committed effort to wipe out a class. Unfortunately, that claim is not fully developed. Zaslavsky never specifies the identity of this class, and passes over the key role played by nationality. The fact that Ukrainian and Belarusian elite officers arrested from the same lands were spared—lands the Soviets were about to transfer from Polish to Soviet sovereignty—shows that not all elites were targeted equally, and that destroying those loyal to the now-dismantled Polish state (which in the pre-war period did constitute a genuine threat) was the primary consideration. The author’s equation of “classism” with “racism,” as just two different kinds of “discrimination,” is also challenged, on grounds that persecution based on the ascriptive characteristic of race differs fundamentally from efforts of class-based economic redistribution that most countries carry out, and that communist categories of class tended to be more fungible than Zaslavsky here allows.
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By Maxwell Woods · Monday, October 31, 2011 A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory is now available from Telos Press. Maxwell Woods talked with contributor Scott McNall about the influence of Telos and Paul Piccone on his intellectual outlook.
Maxwell Woods: Your article “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: A Retrospective on Telos” discussed Telos‘s development, from its beginnings in 1968 to its publicizing of Carl Schmitt, federalism, and populism. How did this article, and Telos more generally, fit into your intellectual world when you wrote the piece?
 Scott McNall: When I wrote the piece, I was focused on the collapse of the economy, climate change, and the continued destruction of the biosphere on which human life depends. I wondered what it would be like if the Telos “gang” were all together again, what they would make of our current situation. I’m sure it would be more than just “We told you so.” I very much wished I could have found out from Paul Piccone what he thought about our current economic and biological crises, not because I would necessarily have agreed with him, but because I would have almost certainly been forced to deal with new ways of thinking about the problems. In writing the piece I also needed to go back over years of the journal; it was a treat and an opportunity to remember the debates, the good ideas, those that were not so useful, and the emotion and intellectual energy that fueled the entire Telos project.
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By Yaacov Yadgar · Friday, October 28, 2011 Yaacov Yadgar’s “A Post-Secular Look at Tradition: Toward a Definition of ‘Traditionism'” appears in Telos 156 (Fall 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
Building on the “post-secular” turn in the interdisciplinary study of society, culture, history, and religion, this essay aims at refocusing the investigative gaze at tradition and the attitudes toward it. Originating from an interest in Israeli-Jews who decline to self-identify as either “secular” or “religious” and instead choose “masorti” (deriving from masoret, Hebrew for tradition) as the label of their religious identity, the essay attempts to present an interpretative, phenomenological discussion of tradition, traditionalism, and what is suggested here as the proper translation of masorti-ness, “traditionism.” The essay first reconstructs an understanding of tradition that stresses its constitutive, dialogical, dynamic, and contemporary nature. Building on this understanding of tradition the paper then investigates what academic literature often refers to as “traditionalism,” commonly understood to be marking a rigid, ultra-conservative, and totalizing view of tradition’s authority over the individual’s as well as the community’s life. Contrasting “traditionism” with this traditionalist ultra-conservatism, the essay suggests an outline for interpreting and understanding traditionism as a (late-) modern, self-reflective, practical, critical, and selective adherence to tradition. The essay argues that traditionism thus offers a viable post-secular alternative to the predominant notion of an inherent antinomy between modernity and tradition.
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By James Fowler · Wednesday, October 26, 2011 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, James Folwer looks at Anton Oleinik’s “On Negative Convergence: The Metaphor of Vodka-Cola Reconsidered” from Telos 145 (Winter 2008).
 Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990 there has been an accelerated process of negative convergence between the United States and Russia, encompassing transfers of knowledge, technologies, and institutions. The issue that Anton Oleinik tackles in “On Negative Convergence: The Metaphor of Vodka-Cola Reconsidered” is whether or not this process has helped us move toward a better, more inhabitant-friendly world. As Oleinik explains: “Change is bilateral: from the United States as well as to the United States. These transfers do not always contribute to improving the situation at either end of exchange. On the contrary, mechanisms of negative learning and mimicry operate that support a hypothesis of ‘negative convergence’: globalization in its current form produces a convergence of participating countries toward a constellation of common problems instead of moving toward a better world.”
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By Somogy Varga · Tuesday, October 25, 2011 Somogy Varga’s “The Paradox of Authenticity” appears in Telos 156 (Fall 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
The ideal of authenticity has become a prevalent ethical ideal with an immense impact on popular culture. Authenticity is no longer restricted to the periphery of philosophy, and prominent thinkers have recently reintroduced it as a central philosophical issue. However, contemporary accounts do not seem to pay sufficient attention to how the ideal of authenticity and certain practices in capitalism have shaped each other reciprocally. This essay attempts to make initial steps toward filling this gap.
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By Maxwell Woods · Monday, October 24, 2011 A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory is now available from Telos Press. Maxwell Woods talked with contributor Robert D’Amico about his history with Telos and the journal’s influence on his intellectual outlook.
Maxwell Woods: How did your article “What is Federalism? On Piccone’s Late Political Philosophy” fit into your own intellectual outlook?
Robert D’Amico: I have always been interested in political philosophy in the widest sense of that term. Telos was born out of a focus on Marx and Marxism as political theories within European philosophy. Like the journal, I abandoned that framework in time, before the journal did I think, but it did me a lot of good to think through those issues and the journal made some of the more interesting work on it available. The focus on federalism and populism came late in Paul’s life. I can’t say that they are part of my thinking, but writing this piece gave me an opportunity to work through what Paul and I often talked about in the times I saw him in NYC before his death. Also I think that is what Paul would have liked, not a remembrance of him but an argument.
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