By Johnny Brennan · Monday, January 5, 2015 Johnny Brennan’s “Imagination, Prophecy, and Morality: The Relevance and Limits of Spinoza’s Theory of Political Myth” appears in Telos 169 (Winter 2014). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
 How should we understand myth in the political realm? Some see myth as a dangerous form of regression that allows its utilizers to reorient the consciousness of a population toward dangerous ends. Others see myth as a necessary spark to incite revolutionary progress; myth brings with it the emotional charge needed to unite a population into action. Yet others see myth as a set of training wheels helpful for grasping more difficult and abstract concepts—training wheels which some are never meant to take off. Spinoza stands unique in that he is able to incorporate all of these dimensions of political myth. His motivating question is not what myth is, but rather what are its legitimate uses. Myth can be progress, but used improperly can also lead to regression. Myth relies on the basest form of knowledge in order to be able to communicate to all people, but cannot last if it is blindly accepted. Myth, for Spinoza, is inseparable from our lives and from society; it is a part of our mental construction and in that manner can be used for progress. But myth also has its limits, and should it surpass those limits it can lead to a culture of superstition that will regress to more primitive forms. Spinoza’s is a more successful theory of political myth because it is more accepting of, and true to, the way myth acts in our individual and social lives.
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By Telos Press · Monday, January 5, 2015 Telos seeks essays on the economic, political, cultural, literary, philosophical, and historical dimensions of Korea for a special issue. With its dramatic recovery from the devastating legacies of colonial rule and civil war, South Korea has emerged as one of the leading hubs of cutting-edge information technology and an epicenter of production in the realm of popular culture. Civil governance has taken bold steps forward over the past two decades, signaled by the advent of leaders who defy long-standing meritocratic and patriarchal conventions; meanwhile a multidimensional rethinking of the past is underway, ranging from ancient territorial boundaries to current disputes over national waters. In contrast, North Korea continues to enforce its lone doctrine of authoritarian rule, serving as a constant reminder of the precarious bind of ceasefire. Revenants of the past century’s ideological divide hang over the peninsula in the form of nuclear threat, while South Korea’s hasty march toward capitalist affluence has not benefited everyone equally. How can Critical Theory understand the South Korean path to modernization or the oppressiveness of the North Korean regime? How does Korea position itself as a nation, culture, and a system of values that inherit its past and inspire its future? How can we think South Korean economic dynamism together with/against its popular culture? Is there a (South) Korean model that can be evaluated in an international context and/or through the eyes of the Korean diaspora? This special issue invites critical analyses on these subjects from various disciplines, including but not limited to literature, sociology, anthropology, political science, philosophy, cultural studies, economics, and history. Please direct inquiries to Haerin Shin by email at haerin.shin@vanderbilt.edu. Manuscripts (7500 words) due by December 1, 2015.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, December 15, 2014 Telos 169 (Winter 2014) is now available for purchase in our store.
In recent years, there has been much hand-wringing over widespread apathy, not only among young generations but throughout the public. Politics, so critics have been claiming, has become a matter exclusively of media manipulation, of a manufactured consensus foisted on a malleable citizenry. This dystopian vision allegedly held not only in the United States (although perhaps especially here) but across much of the globe. Democratization movements appeared to have been crushed, whether in Iran or China, as the leadership in the West—once the premier advocate of democratic transformation—opted instead for the realpolitik of deals with rulers, no matter how unsavory, over support for popular movements, no matter how just.
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By Telos Press · Monday, December 8, 2014 On The Agenda with Steve Paikin, Michael Millerman discusses the philosophy of Alexander Dugin and its influence on Vladimir Putin and contemporary Russian geopolitics. It’s a wide-ranging interview that covers Dugin’s theory of Eurasianism, his critique of the West and liberal democracy, the defense of Russia as a unique, non-Western civilization in its own right, the compatibility of Dugin’s anti-communism with the view that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical catastrophe, the difference between Western multiculturalism and the kind of multicivilizational diversity that Dugin advocates, and much more. Watch the full interview below. In addition to co-translating Dugin’s The Fourth Political Theory (Arktos, 2012), Michael is also a former Telos intern. You can read more of his writing in the TELOSscope archives.
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By Telos Press · Sunday, December 7, 2014 Writing in the Washington Post, George Will discusses Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict (recently published by Telos Press) and the reasons why today’s government serves the wealthy and powerful.
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By Joseph van der Naald · Wednesday, December 3, 2014  Mario Tronti’s postscript to the second edition of his publication Operai e Capitale, published in Telos in 1972 as “Workers and Capital,” provides the reader with a summation of his thought on the development of the “mass worker,” presented through an analysis of notable labor struggles across the Western world. Tronti’s methodology, which he briefly explicates at the beginning of the piece, delineates certain historical workers’ struggles in order to examine “macroscopic groups of facts yet untouched by the critical consciousness of labor thought” (25). His purpose is to yield “an historical model, a privileged period of research” (25) so as to better analyze the emergence of the autonomy of the working class engaged in a dialectical struggle with capital.
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