President Barack Obama, unlike his predecessor George W. Bush, has not made promoting freedom abroad his cause. When he arrives in China on November 15 for his first state visit, however, he will not be able to ignore freedom’s latest, most momentous development: the Chinese government has divorced economic freedom from political freedom for the past three decades and has largely made it work.
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Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Philip Crone looks two articles about the Frankfurt School: Ben Morgan’s “The Project of the Frankfurt School,” from Telos 119 (Spring 2001), and James Gordon Finlayson’s “Morality and Critical Theory: On the Normative Problem of Frankfurt School Social Criticisms,”from Telos 146 (Spring 2009). In an earlier post on the TELOSscope blog, Nicole Burgoyne highlighted a 2001 interview with Paul Piccone in which he discussed the appearance of Telos in the 1960s. Piccone listed a number of ideological currents that played major formative roles in the early years of Telos, including Frankfurt School critical theory. Forty years after the first issue of Telos was published the journal is still going strong, but can the same be said of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School? The Frankfurt School itself long predates Telos; the beginnings of its program can be traced to the 1920s when the Institute for Social Research was founded by Carl Grünberg. The Frankfurt School, or at least what is known as its “first generation,” reached its apex with the publication of the second edition of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1947. While thinkers influenced by this first generation continue to exert enormous intellectual influence, the ideas of the original group itself have waned. Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Marcus Michelson looks at Jean-Michel Landry’s “Confession, Obedience, and Subjectivity: Michel Foucault’s Unpublished Lectures On the Government of the Living,” from Telos 146 (Spring 2009). Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Etel Sverdlov looks at Arden Pennell’s “Why Are They So Happy? Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Local Context,” from Telos 144 (Fall 2008). The 2010 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.” Click here to register at the Telos Institute website. Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Philip Crone looks at Fabio Vander’s “Kant and Schmitt on Preemptive War,” from Telos 125 (Fall 2002), and Michael Mack’s “Toward a Redefinition of Europe’s Political Identity: Spinoza’s Non-hierarchical Vision,” from Telos 145 (Winter 2008). In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress, announcing the global war on terrorism and articulating the Bush doctrine of preemptive military action. His speech was followed shortly by the American-led invasion of Afghanistan, and a year later his administration began to make its case for war against Iraq. The formal campaign for the war began with President Bush’s address to the UN Security Council on September 12 and eventually led to the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1441, which called for “serious consequences” should Iraq not comply with weapons inspections. |
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Why do we obey? Even when people rebel, it seems they simply reconstitute a form of obedience. We all know the old cliché “they aren’t rebels, they’re just following a ‘rebellious’ social code.” The way people dress, their hairstyle, tattoos, earrings, piercings, etc., only seem to reinforce our belief in their obedience to well-defined social practices. Even if we aren’t all playing by the same rules, we are all playing by rules. Do we even know what it would mean anymore to rebel? In the meantime, cultural critics admonish our decline, criticizing us for adhering to more philistine, insipid, or self-defeating values. But doesn’t this criticism amount to saying that we are just obeying the wrong thing, whereas obedience itself is simply presupposed? Could obedience really be ubiquitous, and if so, how did we get this way? On the other hand, how can we describe a legitimate form of autonomy? 
In all honesty, children playing under the shadow of the presidential statue in the Lincoln Memorial, sweethearts embracing behind the slabs of the World War II plaza, or families picnicking in the shade of the Vietnam Memorial, seem odd and incongruous. Monuments are rarely expected to act as recreational spaces. Rather, the heavy subject matter solemnified in each should lend to reflection and concentration. The opposite, however, is the case with the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, where the plaza filled with uniform rectangles of various heights provides visitors with a place to sunbathe, to cuddle, to play, to eat. In her article 
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”? Has the strong state and a repoliticization of society returned in the name of left populism in the United States? How does international power operate in new forms of empire? How will Obama’s foreign policy and the economic crisis affect the structure of global relations? 
