Telos (journal)

Telos  

Abbreviated title (ISO 4)	Telos
Discipline	Politics, philosophy, critical theory, culture
Language	English
Edited by	Russell Berman
Publication details
Publisher	Telos Press Publishing
Publication history	1968-present
Frequency	Quarterly
Impact factor (2013)	0.065
Indexing
ISSN	0090-6514
LCCN	73641746
OCLC no.	1785433
Links
Journal homepage Online access Online archive

Telos is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal established in May 1968 to provide the New Left with a coherent theoretical perspective. It 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.

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 primarily on forgotten and repressed authors and ideas, beginning with Carl Schmitt 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.

The journal is published by Telos Press Publishing and the editor-in-chief is Russell Berman (Stanford University). It is affiliated with the Telos Institute, which hosts annual conferences of which the proceedings are often published in Telos.