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Telos (journal)

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Telos
DisciplinePolitics, philosophy, critical theory, culture
LanguageEnglish
Edited byDavid Tse-Chien Pan
Publication details
History1968-present
Publisher
Telos Press Publishing
FrequencyQuarterly
0.065 (2013)
Standard abbreviations
ISO 4Telos
Indexing
ISSN0090-6514
LCCN73641746
OCLC no.1785433
Links

Telos is a quarterly peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes articles on politics, philosophy, and Critical Theory, with a focus on contemporary political, social, and cultural issues.[1] Telos is an independent journal, free of university and professional associations.[2] The journal's Editor is David Tse-Chien Pan; its Editor Emeritus is Russell A. Berman; its Founding Editor was Italian-American philosopher and social theorist Paul Piccone.[3]

Established in May 1968 with the intention of providing the New Left with a coherent theoretical perspective, the journal later rejected "the standard Left/Right distinction" as part of its critique of the New Class or professional-managerial class.[4] Since its founding, it has published an ideologically heterodox, international roster of contributors.[5] The journal has printed essays by or extensive interviews with Theodor W. Adorno, Sohrab Ahmari, Herbert Aptheker, Andrew Arato, Stanley Aronowitz, Rudolf Bahro, Jean Baudrillard, Zygmunt Bauman, Seyla Benhabib, Alain de Benoist, Russell A. Berman, Ernst Bloch, Murray Bookchin, Rufus Burrow, Jr., Cornelius Castoriadis, Gary Dorrien, Norbert Elias, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Stuart Ewen, Ferenc Feher, Paul K. Feyerabend, Michel Foucault, Ernst Gellner, Herb Gintis, Mary Ann Glendon, Paul Gottfried, André Gorz, Alvin W. Gouldner, Antonio Gramsci, Jürgen Habermas, Ágnes Heller, Jeffrey Herf, Susannah Heschel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Axel Honneth, Max Horkheimer, Edmund Husserl, Martin Jay, Russell Jacoby, Paul W. Kahn, Douglas Kellner, Joel Kovel, Matthias Küntzel, Jacek Kuron, Christopher Lasch, Claude Lefort, William Leiss, Vincent Lloyd, György Lukács, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Karel Kosík, Catherine Malabou, Herbert Marcuse, Andrei Markovits, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adam Michnik, John Milbank, Martha Minow, Oskar Negt, Claus Offe, Cary Nelson, Adrian Pabst, Enzo Paci, Paul Piccone, Mark Poster, members of the Belgrade Praxis School, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bernhard Schlink, Carl Schmitt, Trent Schroyer, Fred Siegel, Kiron Skinner, David A. Westbrook, Richard Wolin, Frank Zappa, John Zerzan, Slavoj Zizek, and Sharon Zukin.[6]

Among politically engaged scholarly journals, Telos is known especially for:

• its longstanding critique of the bureaucratizing tendencies of modernity, including of the welfare state[7];

• its early critical engagement with the work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory[8];

• its support of central and eastern European dissidents during the Cold War, when it also brokered an encounter between Marxism and phenomenology[9];

• its critique of the New Class under Communism and the professional managerial class in the West;

• Timothy Luke and founding editor Paul Piccone's theory of "artificial negativity"[10];

• having turned its attention beginning in the 1980s to reevaluating the tradition of political populism as a "bulwark against growing New Class encroachment," during which it announced "a definitive break with the standard Left/Right distinction" in social and political thought[11];

• its controversial interest in German jurist Carl Schmitt[12]; and

• its exploration of political theology, including that of Martin Luther King, Jr.[13]

The journal's extensive, serious engagement with the work of Carl Schmitt and other ideologically right-wing critics of liberalism has fostered denunciations on the left that the journal has moved to the right politically.[14][15] The journal has regularly published writing rejecting "the standard Left/Right distinction" and critical of efforts to categorize the publication ideologically.[16] Members of the journal's editorial board have described their work as "out beyond the margins of the established academy ... featuring the voices of alternative networks recruited from the contrary currents of many different intellectual traditions."[17]

History

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Founded in May 1968 at SUNY-Buffalo,[1] the journal sought to expand the Husserlian diagnosis of "the crisis of European sciences" to prefigure a particular program of social reconstruction relevant for the United States. In order to avoid the high level of abstraction typical of Husserlian phenomenology, the journal began introducing the ideas of Western Marxism and of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.[18][19][20][21]

With the disintegration of the New Left and the gradual integration of what remained of the American Left within the Democratic Party, Telos became increasingly critical of the Left in general. It subsequently undertook a reevaluation of 20th century intellectual history, focusing on authors and ideas including the Nazi legal philosopher Carl Schmitt[14] and American populism. Eventually the journal rejected the traditional divisions between Left and Right as a legitimating mechanism for new class domination and an occlusion of new, post-Fordist political conflicts. This led to a reevaluation of the primacy of culture and to efforts to understand the dynamics of cultural disintegration and reintegration as a precondition for the constitution of that autonomous individuality critical theory had always identified as the telos of Western civilization.[22][23][24]

The academic Joan Braune writes that Telos turned to right-wing politics in the 1980s, when editor Paul Piccone supported United States intervention in Nicaragua.[14] In 1994, the paleoconservative Sam Francis was the keynote speaker at a Telos conference about populism.[14][25] Telos had ties to the paleoconservative Chronicles magazine, and was sympathetic to the Lega Nord in Italy, but Telos differed from paleoconservatives by supporting military intervention by NATO against Serbia in 1999 to prevent ethnic cleansing.[15] Braune in 2019 described Telos as far-right, writing that the journal had translated the French New Right figure Alain de Benoist and had written favorably about the "Russian fascist" Aleksandr Dugin.[14]

The journal is published by Telos Press Publishing and the editor-in-chief is David Pan.[26] It regularly cooperates with the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute, which hosts annual conferences, select papers from which have been published in Telos.

Abstracting and indexing

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The journal is abstracted and indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents/Social & Behavioral Sciences, and Current Contents/Arts & Humanities.[27] According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2013 impact factor of 0.065, ranking it 133rd out of 138 journals in the category "Sociology".[28]

Telos Press Publishing

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Telos Press Publishing was founded by Paul Piccone, the first editor-in-chief of Telos, and is the publisher of both the journal Telos as well as a separate book line. It is based in Candor, New York.

References

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  1. ^ a b Gary Genosko with Kristina Marcellus, Back Issues: Periodicals and the Formation of Critical and Cultural Theory in Canada (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019): 1-20; Elisabeth K. Chaves, Reviewing Political Criticism: Journals, Intellectuals, and the State (New York: Routledge, 2016): 84-90; Stephen Eric Bronner, Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2017): 87, 90; "About Telos". Telos Press. Retrieved December 9, 2023.
  2. ^ https://www.telospress.com/masthead/; on founder Paul Piccone's relationship to the American university, see Russell Jacoby, "Paul Piccone: Outside Academe," in Timothy W. Luke and Ben Agger, eds., A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2011), 57-61.
  3. ^ Telos Press, "Masthead," https://www.telospress.com/masthead/
  4. ^ Telos Staff, "Populism vs. the New Class," Telos 88 (Summer 1991), 2-36, 6.
  5. ^ Timothy W. Luke, "The Trek with Telos: A Rememberance[sic] of Paul Piccone (January 19, 1940—July 12, 2004), Fast Capitalism 1 (2) (2005), https://fastcapitalism.uta.edu/1_2/luke.html
  6. ^ "About Telos," https://www.telospress.com/about-telos/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Telos_Poster.jpg; see also Telos 75 (Spring 1988), front cover.
  7. ^ Timothy W. Luke, "The Trek with Telos: A Rememberance[sic] of Paul Piccone (January 19, 1940—July 12, 2004), Fast Capitalism 1 (2) (2005), https://fastcapitalism.uta.edu/1_2/luke.html
  8. ^ Timothy W. Luke, "The Trek with Telos: A Rememberance[sic] of Paul Piccone (January 19, 1940—July 12, 2004), Fast Capitalism 1 (2) (2005), https://fastcapitalism.uta.edu/1_2/luke.html
  9. ^ See, for example, Telos 51 (1982), special issue: "European Peace Movements and the Polish Crisis."
  10. ^ See Paul Piccone, “The Crisis of One-Dimensionality,” Telos 35 (Spring 1978), 43-54, 48: “Counter-bureaucratic bureaucracies become one of the paradoxical expressions of artificially generated negativity. The problem with this system-generated negativity is that, to the extent that it is itself bureaucratically sanctioned, it tends to become an extension of the very bureaucracy in need of control …. It simply extends the bureaucratic logic it was meant to challenge and becomes counter-productive. The organic negativity necessary to successfully sustain this challenge must develop outside the bureaucratic administrative framework"; Patricia Mooney Nickel, "Revisiting the Artificial Negativity Thesis: An Interview with Timothy W. Luke," New Political Science 35 (4) (2013), 627-47, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07393148.2013.848707
  11. ^ Telos Staff, "Populism vs. the New Class," Telos 88 (Summer 1991), 2-36, 6.
  12. ^ Carl Schmitt: Enemy or Foe?, Telos 72 (Summer 1987), special issue
  13. ^ Martin Luther King, Jr. Fifty Years On, Telos 182 (Summer 2018), special issue.
  14. ^ a b c d e Braune, Joan (2019). "Who's Afraid of the Frankfurt School? "Cultural Marxism" as an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory" (PDF). Journal of Social Justice. 9 (2164–7100): 1–25.
  15. ^ a b Ashbee, Edward (March 2000). "Politics of paleoconservatism". Society. 37 (3): 75–84. doi:10.1007/BF02686179. ISSN 0147-2011.
  16. ^ Russell A. Berman, "Creation and Culture: Introduction to "Toward a Liturgical Critique of Modernity," Telos 113 (Fall 1988), 3-10, 4 ("I[s] there not a risk in being confused with the moral majority and the politicized religious Right? ... Thankfully, Critical Theory never buckled under this sort of policing"); John K. Bingley, "Diversity and the End of Deference," Telos 204 (Fall 2023), 155-162, 162 ("Gather three readers of Telos together in a room to speak about a controversial issue, and you’re likely to hear six opinions, each one forcefully expressed. After all, the journal has made a point of addressing the social and political challenges of modernity by cultivating the intellectual resources of discrete, often overlooked communities and traditions. This has placed the clash of divergent viewpoints, or “intellectual diversity,” at the core of its identity. Want to hear an anarchist argue with a liberal about a Catholic conservative’s reading of the implications of Carl Schmitt for the neo-Confucian view of culture, nationhood, and globalization? A Telos conference is the place for you").
  17. ^ Timothy W. Luke, "The Trek with Telos: A Rememberance[sic] of Paul Piccone (January 19, 1940—July 12, 2004), Fast Capitalism 1 (2) (2005), https://fastcapitalism.uta.edu/1_2/luke.html
  18. ^ Genosko, Gary (2004). "The Arrival of Jean Baudrillard in English Translation: Mark Poster and Telos Press". International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. 1 (2).
  19. ^ Timothy Luke, "The Trek with Telos: A Remembrance of Paul Piccone (January 19, 1940—July 12, 2004)", Fast Capitalism, vol. 1, no. 2 (2005).
  20. ^ Luke, Timothy (2005). "The Trek with Telos: A Remembrance of Paul Piccone (January 17, 1940 — July 12, 2004)". Fast Capitalism. 1 (2): 137–141. doi:10.32855/fcapital.200502.015.
  21. ^ Kenneth Anderson, "Telos, the critical theory journal and its blog," November 18, 2007.
  22. ^ Danny Postel, "The metamorphosis of Telos," In These Times, April 21-30, 1991.
  23. ^ Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987): 151-52.
  24. ^ Jennifer M. Lehmann, Social Theory as Politics in Knowledge (New York: Emerald Group Publishing, 2005): 81-82.
  25. ^ Drolet, Jean-François; Williams, Michael C. (January 2, 2020). "America first: paleoconservatism and the ideological struggle for the American right". Journal of Political Ideologies. 25 (1): 28–50. doi:10.1080/13569317.2020.1699717. ISSN 1356-9317.
  26. ^ "About the Editor". Telos Press. Retrieved July 14, 2020.
  27. ^ "Master Journal List". Intellectual Property & Science. Thomson Reuters. Retrieved March 9, 2015.
  28. ^ "Journals Ranked by Impact: Sociology". 2013 Journal Citation Reports. Web of Science (Social Sciences ed.). Thomson Reuters. 2012.
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