What was Telos All About?

Abstract

Telos once published articles about revolution, dialectic, commodity fetishism, liberation, alienation, and monopoly capitalism. It now publishes articles on federalism, populism, Carl Schmitt, and the nuances within conservatism. What is living and what is dead in Telos' Marxist past after 100 issues? To understand the journal's relation to Marxism and philosophy, it is necessary to recount some intellectual history. The term “Western Marxism” was coined in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic and the political impulse of this theoretical view had its sources in his 1947 defense of Stalinism, Humanism and Terror. The term came to be applied, retrospectively, to the intra-communist disputes of the 1920s reflected in the work of Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch, and Antonio Gramsci, among others.

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