Paul Piccone

The Crisis of One-Dimensionality

When the one-dimensionality thesis was fully enunciated in the early 1960s, it was already historically obsolete, not because of the student activism and anti-war militancy that exploded in the following years, but because it described a phase of capitalist development already in the process of being superseded. Furthermore, the critical theory that had formulated such a thesis from 1940 on, turned out to be structurally unable to anticipate and explain the new social process. This failure was the result of key theoretical commitments made in the 1930s to explain those social developments which orthodox Marxism seemed unable to grasp, while retaining unchanged most fundamental Marxist assumptions.

Dialektik ohne Dogma

Works translated into foreign languages are often shorter than the original, either because of editorial exigencies, obsolescence of some of the material, or because of the authors second thoughts concerning the topic -in which case the mutilated text is usually supplied with a new explanatory introduction or postscript. It is rare, however, to find a translation of a book such as Havamanns Dialektik ohne Dogma? whose actual text is more extensive than the original: the last section on ethics did not appear in the German. But this is only one of the peculiarities of this book, whose genesis and significance is at least as interesting as its content.

Confronting the french new right: old prejudices or a new political paradigm?

To the extent that, as Hegel remarked, philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, major historical events cannot be fully understood until well after they occur — after reflection has generated new, more adequate categories of analysis. Thus it is not surprising that the collapse of the Soviet system and the fading of the Cold War were initially misread as, e.g., “the end of history” (by naive liberal apparatchiks) or as the dawn of “authentic socialism” (by diehard Leftists, who saw contingent authoritarian encrustations as the only problem with an otherwise sound “really existing socialism”). These apologetic hermeneutical exercises are easy to understand: in both cases the objective is, first and foremost, to relegitimate internalized ideological assumptions by reducing the new to a mere extension of the old. The price one pays, however, is to miss what is really new.

Introduction to Carl Schmitt

The need to anticipate these questions already betrays an abnormal state of affairs. Carl Schmitt is an extremely controversial figure, compromised by his collusion with Nazism at the peak of his career and throughout his life a European conservative whose authoritarian political objectives have never been in doubt. So what is a nice leftist journal like Telos doing in a dieoretical dive like this? Having successfully protected our political virtues from corruption by the totalitarian undercurrents of the various Marxisms and Marxism-Leninisms, have we now succumbed to one of the few alternatives that made the worst Stalinism palatable to a whole generation of odierwise highly sophisticated intellectuals like Bloch and Lukács?

Federal Populism in Italy

One of the few positive features of the 20th century — the century of mass destruction — is that it came late 1914) and ended early (1989), spanning from the definitive decline the jus publicum Europaeum (and the sovereign state on which it was based) and the end of the Cold War. An era of false starts for Utopian social systems and new international orders, uneasy adjustments to a post-colonial world first and post-industrial realities later, it closed with the 19th century problems it originally inherited not only unsolved but even more intractable than before. The increasingly obsolete central state of the previous four centuries was not replaced by any viable alternative.

Roundtable on Communitarianism

Taves: We are here to discuss a range of social and political issues which can be subsumed under the rubric of communitarianism, and which are increasingly rising to the top of various political agendas. What is this communitarianism? While this question is undoubtedly open to a variety of possible answers, let me propose a simple working description. Communitarianism refers to those political sentiments sometimes associated with populism. It involves an attempt to recapture political control in local communities, to reconstruct the social basis to support stable family structures, i.e., to provide a totalizing context for social existence and personal identity.

The Crisis of American Conservatism

The spectacular success of the Right in the 1980s hides a paradoxical development: the social, cultural and political hegemony of conservatism has been accompanied by a hitherto unexamined fragmentation of whatever passed for conservative ideology to date. This may not be fatal — and has not been thus far — in routine political competition with the Left and with a liberalism caught in even more advanced stages of internal disintegration. Yet it has serious consequences: it makes it difficult or even impossible to implement and sustain any kind of coherent right-wing program. Thus tactical success in the last decade has been achieved by forfeiting whatever strategic ambitions the American Right might have had during its “long march” through the New Deal.

Schmitt's “Testament” and the Future of Europe

The new Europe has its roots in an old project. Far from being fixed once and for all, however, it has been constantly changing. Toward the end of WWI, when the devastation of the conflict rekindled interest in internationalism and a universal language adequate to it, Gramsci pointed out that most of the arguments for and against Esperanto were actually beside the point. Major cultural and political shifts, such as the adoption of a universal language, do not come about because of their “desirability,” but only if and when they become necessary as a result of the intensified interaction of nations and cultures.

Dialectic and Materialism in Lukács

The recent rash of translations of History and Class Consciousness: French (1960), Italian (1967) and English (1971), along with the official republication of the German original (1968), and the growing literature on the subject, has reopened the debate, interrupted since the 1920s concerning the theoretical foundations of Marxism. As Breines has already indicated, the resumption of such a debate at this time has been inextricably connected with the resurgence of militancy in the West and the need to theoretically mediate what at first appeared as purely spontaneous insurgences into a coherent and oriented political movement — something that proved impossible to do by means of the empty slogans and manipulative politics that had been inherited from the various communist parties as “orthodox Marxism.”

Paradoxes of Perestroika

The intensification of hitherto largely unsuccessful efforts to restructure the Soviet system has had, as one of its lesser unintended consequences, the marginalization of old debates about the nature of the USSR. New problems concerning the future of that society now appear considerably more compelling. If the system is indeed undergoing a radical restructuring, what seems to matter is not so much what it was, but what it is about to become. Since, however, in the USSR today nothing seems to proceed as projected, the configuration of this future is far from clear. As a rule, unforeseen blockages and covert bureaucratic opposition subvert reform proposals even before they are fully deployed, thus intensifying chronic economic dysfunctions.