A Short History of Telos

In a terrific new article at The Ideas Letter, Geoff Shullenberger traces the history of the journal Telos from its origins amid the intellectual ferment of 1968 to its ongoing engagement with contemporary cultural and political debates. An excerpt:

On January 18, 2021, as the first Trump administration entered its last days, the 1776 Commission published its final report. Convened in response to The New York Times‘s 1619 Project, the Commission set out to show how America had strayed from “the fundamental truths of human liberty” enunciated in the nation’s founding documents. Like others on the right, the report’s authors laid some of the blame on left-wing intellectuals who had seduced the nation’s leading institutions with the “set of revolutionary ideas called Critical Theory.” They highlighted two European Marxist thinkers in particular: Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse. The spread of these two men’s ideas, the report alleged, had diluted public faith in core national principles.

A few months earlier, another report had been issued by a different committee created by the same administration: the Commission on Unalienable Rights, charged with outlining a new approach to human rights. In broad strokes, it resembled the 1776 Commission. As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo explained, it sought to “ground our discussion of human rights in America’s founding principles.” But anyone looking more closely into the backgrounds of its members might have been struck by a peculiar fact. Two of them, Russell Berman and David Tse-Chien Pan, are respectively editor emeritus and editor of the journal Telos, whose tagline is “Critical Theory of the Contemporary.” Founded in the New Left watershed year of 1968, this publication and its associated book imprint arguably did more than any other institution to disseminate the ideas of figures like Marcuse and Gramsci to English-language readers. If there was a conspiracy to spread Critical Theory in America, as conservatives have often claimed, Telos was surely at its center. Yet two long-time members of its editorial board were serving in an administration that was elsewhere denouncing Critical Theory as a malign influence.Be sure to read the full article at The Ideas Letter.

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