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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By Joseph W. Bendersky · Saturday, March 14, 2009 This talk was presented at the 2009 Telos Conference.
A few months ago at the German Studies Association Conference, the well-known leftist historian Geoff Eley opened his keynote address with a blistering attack on Theodor Adorno in 1968. In a mocking tone, he repeatedly referred to Adorno as “Teddy,” which elicited the expected sarcastic laughter from the audience. Eley’s purpose was to transform the memory of the 1968 student revolt from that of “failure” to that of the “great hope” for true democracy that was squandered by the SPD and other institutions. And Eley gave the Frankfurt School a prime position among those institutions inhibiting the radical student path to true democracy. As a symbolic example, Eley reiterated how Adorno had had his graduate student Hans-Jürgen Krahl, a prominent SDS leader, arrested and tried for occupying a building. Having stigmatized Adorno—personally, ethically, and politically—Eley then moved to the more substantive issue of Adorno’s split with Marcuse over an array of 1960s domestic and international positions. Basically, Adorno had defended the West German status quo, including Germany’s alignment with the United States’ anti-communist crusade. It was a position reinforced by Adorno’s sincere concern that the student movement might evolve into fascism. In Eley’s account, by July 1968, this fracture culminated in a full-scale “witch hunt” against Marcuse, in which Max Horkheimer now joined. In the mind of Marcuse and Eley, the students represented a new, necessary form, of “militant democracy” of the streets against the stagnant, inherently oppressive, Adorno-Horkheimer form of institutionalized parliamentary democracy.
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By John Milbank · Friday, March 13, 2009 This talk was presented at the 2009 Telos Conference.
In what follows, I summarize a fragmentary political theology, written from a British perspective, but one that opens itself out to Continental and North American intellectual influences, as well as to global concerns.
It was once said to me, by the late Texan theologian John Clayton, in Lancaster, that he had finally worked out what was “weird” about me: “Most of us, John, are trying to combine German theology with Anglo-Saxon philosophy. A few trendy people go for Continental philosophy as well. But you’re doing the opposite—with utter perversity you’re trying to combine British theology (of all things!) with Continental philosophy—and what is worse, with French stuff!”
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