Telos 

About: Telos is an academic journal published by Telos. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Liberalism. It has an ISSN identifier of 0090-6514. Over the lifetime, 2362 publications have been published receiving 42632 citations.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Abstract: This writer who has warned us of the “ideological” function of both the oeuvre and the author as unquestioned forms of discursive organization has gone quite far in constituting for both these “fictitious unities” the name (with all the problems of such a designation) Michel Foucault. One text under review, La Volonté de Savoir, is the methodological introduction of a projected five-volume history of sexuality. It will apparently circle back over that material which seems to have a special fascination for Foucault: the gradual emergence of medicine as an institution, the birth of political economy, demography and linguistics as “human sciences,” the invention of incarceration and confinement for the control of the “other” in society (the mad, the libertine, the criminal) and that special violence that lurks beneath the power to control discourse.

On Social Identity

Abstract: The question: “Can Complex Societies Form a Rational Identity?” already indicates how I wish to use the term ‘identity.’ A society does not just have an identity ascribed to it in the trivial sense an object does, which can be identified by various observers as being the same ‘thing,’ although they may apprehend and describe it in different ways. In a certain sense a society achieves or, let me say, produces its identity; and it is by virtue of its own efforts that it does not lose it. To speak, moreover, of the ‘rational’ identity of society reveals that the concept has a normative content.

The World in Depression

Abstract: This is a book about the present crisis of the American system seen through the great 1929 crisis. Kindelberger analyzes the great depression in order to find its causes and locate remedies for the ills of the past—remedies to be utilized today as well. In other words this book is only apparently dealing with the past: in reality, it is a book about the present crisis of American and world capitalism. The book begins with an outline of the major accounts of the origins of the crisis: Friedmann's thesis according to which the crisis could have been avoided by means of a more careful monetary policy, and Samuelson's thesis according to which the crisis was the product of accidental events.

New Social Movements

Abstract: In the last ten to twenty years, conflicts have developed in advanced Western societies that, in many respects, deviate from the welfare-state pattern of institutionalized conflict over distribution. These new conflicts no longer arise in areas of material reproduction; they are no longer channeled through parties and organizations; and they can no longer be alleviated by compensations that conform to the system. Rather, the new conflicts arise in areas of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization. They are manifested in sub-institutional, extraparliamentary forms of protest. The underlying deficits reflect a reification of communicative spheres of action; the media of money and power are not sufficient to circumvent this reification.

Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

Abstract: One of the paradoxes of North American Marxism is that its generally impoverished history has yielded a body of literature — perhaps even a ‘school’ — which is equal to any, and is read and studied throughout the world: the writings associated with Monthly Review. In part this is no mystery. Paul Baran was European-born and educated, and the conduit for Paul Sweezy's Marxism was Schumpeter. In any case, Sweezy's The Theory of Capitalist Development, Baran's The Political Economy of Growth, and their Monopoly Capital, to name only the major works, have constituted a series of texts which have introduced a generation to a serious and nondogmatic Marxism. Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital is an able and articulate addition to this ‘school.’