By Telos Press · Monday, June 8, 2009 The Third Annual Telos Conference is scheduled for Saturday, January 16, 2010, in New York City. The topic will be “From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama.”
In the context of a dramatic reorganization of the relationships among state, market, and society, the 2010 Telos conference will turn its attention to competing accounts, both theoretical and empirical, of the new modalities of administration, domination, and power. Facing the authoritarian state and a politicized market, how does one “defend society”?
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By Barret Weber · Monday, May 25, 2009 While it may come as little surprise to many, Leo Strauss’s (1899–1973) legacy remains today at the center of a rather heated and ongoing controversy. His powerful indictments of social scientific relativism and historicism, beginning in the 1930s and spanning the rest of his career into the 1960s, charge the social and political sciences with an ignorance, or, what is even worse, with an active denial of founding principles in the break with natural right.
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By Ying Ma · Friday, May 15, 2009 President Barack Obama swept into office promising to replace American hubris with humility and diplomacy. Instead of George W. Bush’s visions of a democratic revolution in the Middle East and an end to tyranny in the twenty-first century, President Obama vowed to bring back love for America in foreign capitals from Paris to Tehran.
Three and a half months into the new U.S. presidency, however, Beijing has presented numerous complications for Obama’s wishful thinking and self-adulation. Since Obama’s inauguration, Chinese leaders have been busy complaining about U.S. policies.
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By Fred Siegel · Saturday, April 4, 2009 Modern liberalism has been defined conceptually as the experimental method applied to politics and as the mentality which insists that culture, not nature, puts the future of humanity in its own hands. In terms of American history, modern liberalism is presented as an adaptation of nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberal individualism to the growth of big business, and as an updated expression of Jacksonian animus to vested interests. There is something substantial in all of these approaches. But, even taken together, they leave out a great deal.
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By Nicole Burgoyne · Saturday, March 28, 2009 Michèle C. Cone’s review of Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine’s Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: l’oubli du fascisme: trois intellectuels roumains dans la tourmente du siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002) appears in Telos 146. Nicole Burgoyne followed up with some questions.
Nicole Burgoyne: In discussing the success of Ionesco, Cioran, and Eliade in postwar France, despite their earlier ties to the Fascists, you postulate that in addition to the authors’ successful hiding of their past, a “conscious or unconscious complicity” of France’s postwar intellectual community provided a supporting network. Do you subscribe to such historical accounts of postwar France’s national narrative as Henry Rousso’s The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944? Rousso’s history traces the development of Gaullist myth as a political creation, but credits creative works like The Sorrow and the Pity with shattering it. Where do Lavastine’s three subjects, and her research itself, fit into this history?
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, March 16, 2009 Critical Theory developed in response to the specific historical developments of twentieth-century Europe: war and revolution, the transformation of Communism into Stalinism, and the rise of Nazi Germany. Combining the legacy of German philosophical idealism with the tradition of critics of idealism—Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche—Critical Theory also built on the emergent social theory, especially Weber’s analysis of modernity and his one overriding theme, bureaucratization. For Weber, creative innovations that transform social life and that take shape especially through religious genius as charismatic prophecy succumb to the dead weight of the world: however animating the idea, however compelling the vision, its spirit flags, worn down by the inertia of life. This decline transpires, tragically, as a consequence of the efforts to implement the ideals: first comes the prophecy, then comes its management, which finally snuffs it out. This deadly logic of bureaucratization marks the fate of both capitalism and socialism; it is the institutional form of rationalization. Indeed, modernity faces two alternative threats: the stultifying embrace of bureaucratic rationalization and its opposite, the seductive irrationalism that promises fulfillment but only makes matters worse. The pessimism stereotypically associated with Adorno derives significantly from Weber’s bleak vision, the choice between charismatic dictators and anemic bureaucrats, while reserving a very small and unstable position for an objective thoughtfulness—where reason and values might momentarily coincide.
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