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, Frederick Wertz looks at Franklin Adler’s “The Original Model of American Democracy and the Turn to Statism,” from Telos 104 (Summer 1995).
In his well-known visit to the United States, Alexis de Toqueville was particularly struck by the invisibility of the American state: “Nothing strikes a European traveler in the United States more than the absence of what we would call government or administration. One knows that there are written laws there and sees them put into execution every day; everything is in motion around you, but the motive force is nowhere apparent.” At the time of his visit, the state governments of Europe were indeed gargantuan compared to that of the newly founded state across the pond. While such a gap used to be the main distinguishing characteristic between governments of the old world and new, few would disagree that today this gap has closed significantly. For better or worse, the government of the United States has taken a decidedly statist turn from its original model.
In his book Radical Democracy, C. Douglas Lummis writes that democracy is a “whore among political words.” Indeed, anyone who sees the ideals of inclusionary dialogue and autonomy that democracy is supposed to represent juxtaposed with the “democratic” endeavors of certain political actors knows quite well that democracy and its meaning are in desperate need to be revisited. Alain de Benoist does just that in his article “Democracy Revisited.” 
Although the work of Karl Korsch was cardinal to subsequent theoretical developments within the twentieth-century Marxist canon, the appreciation of his work is usually eclipsed in intellectual history by the long shadow cast by Lukács over the development of what would later be called “Western Marxism.” Nevertheless, the belated rediscovery of Korsch’s work by the New Left was certainly in part due to the fact that Korsch’s position was the more heretical in the eyes of the Soviet variant of Marxist orthodoxy. Although Lukács dismissed the dogmatic hagiography of Marx’s conclusions, he nevertheless introduced his magnum opus, History and Class Consciousness, with the “scientific conviction” in the method of dialectical materialism. Even provided that all of Marx’s findings would be proven false, genuine Marxist method would nevertheless yield a privileged relationship to history. 
From its origin to its social significance, almost everything about rock and roll music remains steeped in fierce debate. Exactly when and where was it born? Who, if in fact there is one only, is rock’s founding figure? What exactly did it and does “rock and roll” mean? Although all of them amount to approximations, certain answers have become commonplaces: it was born with bluesman Robert Johnson, with Chuck Berry, with Jerry Lee Lewis, with Elvis Presley, in the Mississippi Delta, in Memphis, and its sound was crafted by means of the technological breakthrough of the electric guitar. It signifies the rebelliousness of a generation, the nonconformity of the young, the break with the status quo. Yet rock and roll’s relationship with capitalism cannot be more complex. 
Prior to 1960, the work of György Lukács was largely unknown in France; Lukács’s work had only belatedly gained influence there with Lucien Goldmann’s translation of History and Class Consciousness almost forty years after its first publication, and five years after the 1955 publication of Merleau-Ponty’s study of his work in Les Aventures de la Dialectique. Merleau-Ponty had in a sense anticipated the French debates on Lukács’s otherwise eminent text, already having cited passages from History and Class Consciousness in 1946. “Western Marxism,” however, is a meditation on a Marxism far removed from the type that Merleau-Ponty was enthusiastic about almost ten years prior. Until 1950 his political commitments were supportive, albeit cautiously, toward the Soviet project; the present work is however concurrent with a disillusionment of institutionalized Marxism, a cynicism that had grown in Merleau-Ponty since the Korean War. 
