By Telos Press · Friday, August 10, 2018 Telos 50th Anniversary Sale! To help celebrate the 50th anniversary of Telos, we are offering a 20% discount on individual subscriptions and books purchased through the Telos Press website! Just use the coupon code TELOS50 during the checkout process. Offer expires August 31, 2018.
Writing at City Journal, Fred Siegel reports on the lively conversations at the Telos 50th anniversary event, held in June in New York City. An excerpt:
 Describing the vibrant intellectual life of New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage is one of my favorite books. “Alienated from alienation,” Broyard was fascinated by the lively parties where people debated so intensely that “we didn’t know where books ended and we began.”
Recently, I had the good fortune to attend such a gathering: a celebration held in honor of the 50th anniversary of Telos, the lively, unpredictable highbrow magazine founded in 1968 by Paul Piccone, then a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Buffalo. Piccone died in 2004, but Telos, unsubsidized by any university and unwilling to bend to any ideology, has continued as an independent journal under the talented tutelage of his widow, Mary, and the current editor, Russell Berman, who has written insightfully about the great German writer Ernst Jünger. Telos began as part of the New Left but later broke with all orthodoxy, publishing the Schmittians of the Left and Gramscians of the Right (referring to hard-Right 1930s German political philosopher Carl Schmitt and 1930s Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, both back in vogue today, but in unexpected places).
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By Ban Wang · Thursday, July 19, 2018 Ban Wang’s “Confucianism and Nature: Ecological Motifs in Kang Youwei’s Great Community” appears in Telos 183 (Summer 2018), our fiftieth anniversary issue. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
Environmental writers have been turning to Chinese traditions for a harmonious relation between humans and nature. However, treating environmental crises as a metaphysical meditation on how humanity as a whole stands over against nature ignores the critical examination of power relations in the equal relation of production, social hierarchy, and political oppression. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno declared, humanity’s domination of nature stems from the domination by some humans over others as well as over human nature. Environmental injustice is social injustice. From this immanent critique, Kang Youwei’s recapture of Confucian cosmology proves to be a critical resource. An influential thinker and reformer in the transition from the empire to a modern nation, Kang Youwei (1858–1927) wrote The Great World Community (Datong shu) and proposed to abolish all boundaries of nation-state, class, hierarchy, gender, and race, in hopes of bringing diverse peoples and nations into a cosmopolitan community. Ecological motifs could be recovered in Kang’s critique of oppressive social, political, and gender relations.
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By Timothy W. Luke · Wednesday, July 11, 2018 On June 8, 2018, Telos celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at a special event held in New York City. Speakers included Telos editors Russell Berman, Tim Luke, David Pan, and Adrian Pabst, as well as Jacob Siegel, who delivered a talk on “Telos, Post-liberal Politics, and a Veteran’s Reading of Ernst Jünger.” Videos of the event are available at the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website. Telos 183 (Summer 2018), our fiftieth anniversary issue, is available for purchase in our store. Presented below is a transcript of Tim Luke’s remarks at the anniversary event.
To address the history of Telos, I will open this brief account tonight about the journal by recalling my history with Telos since 1975. As a new cadre in “the St. Louis TELOS group,” I began by unloading boxes of Telos 26 (Winter 1975–76) from a panel truck early on a Saturday morning during the winter break outside of McMillan Hall, where Paul Piccone and the Telos office were embedded in the Sociology Department of Washington University, St. Louis. Working then as what we call an “intern” today, I soon was translating “into” the American English various versions of different draft manuscripts. Many articles at that time came through the mail as pages of disorderly text that another individual, like the author or an associate, with some English skills translated “out of” Czech, German, Hungarian, Italian, or Polish into a global semi-Anglophonic creole.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, June 11, 2018 Telos 183 (Summer 2018), celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the journal Telos, is now available for purchase in our store.
 Telos began this anniversary year with our previous issue’s exploration of the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., tragically assassinated fifty years ago in April. That too was 1968, the excitement of profound social change and the bitter taste of disappointment. So much in our culture today remains framed by that specific polarity. Now, in this issue of the journal, we take stock more broadly: not a judgment on that one year but a return to some of the key themes that have defined Telos. We have been able to carry on these discussions thanks to the vision of the founder, Paul Piccone, the support of our publisher, Mary Piccone, the dedication of our editorial group, the intellectual agility of our authors, and the loyalty of our readers. Thanks to all.
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By Lillian Hingley · Thursday, May 31, 2018 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, Lillian Hingley looks at Peter Bürger’s “Adorno’s Anti-Avant-Gardism” from Telos 86 (Winter 1990–91).
Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984) is one of the landmark texts on aesthetic theory published in the twentieth century. One of the book’s significant claims is that modernism and the avant-garde should be defined as distinct aesthetic movements; specifically, he defines modernism as the less radical cousin of the avant-garde. This distinction is important to note because it is also the crux of Bürger’s thesis in a later article, “Adorno’s Anti-Avant-Gardism,” a historicist critique of Adorno’s “modernist” aesthetic theory that was published in Telos 86 (Winter 1990–91). By acknowledging the pre-established position Bürger was bringing to this article, we can question how useful his distinction may be when constructing an Adornian aesthetic theory today.
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By Jeffrey Herf · Tuesday, May 29, 2018 Can the same Trump who lies constantly, flouts the norms of the rule of law, fans the flames of racial resentment, and attacks basic notions of fact and evidence offered by journalists and his own law enforcement and intelligence agencies, can this same man be right about leaving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Iran nuclear deal of 2015? This instance of cognitive dissonance, of holding two or more contradictory beliefs in our minds at the same time, is staring us in the face. The serial liar, that man who has undermined our alliances and replaces rational explanations with conspiracy theories, has made the right decision to leave the JCPOA and to restore and intensify the economic sanctions on Iran in an effort to bring about a definitive end to both its nuclear program and its regional imperialism in the Middle East. In the polarized climate he has done so much to create, Trump supporters forget Trump the liar while agreeing on policy while those of us who oppose him reject any policy he advocates. The desire for consistency generally overwhelms the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. In the following, I make the case for living with the discomfort of accepting that this awful man who is wrong about most everything is right about this issue.
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