Telos is a quarterly peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes articles on politics, philosophy, and Critical Theory, with a focus on contemporary political, social, and cultural issues. Telos is an independent journal, free of university and professional associations. The journal's Editor is David Tse-Chien Pan; its Editor Emeritus is Russell A. Berman; its Founding Editor was Italian-American philosopher and social theorist Paul Piccone. Established in May 1968 with the intention of providing the New Left with a coherent theoretical perspective, the journal later rejected "the standard Left/Right distinction" as part of its critique of the New Class or professional-managerial class. Since its founding, it has published an ideologically heterodox, international roster of contributors. The journal has printed essays by or extensive interviews with Theodor W. Adorno, Sohrab Ahmari, Herbert Aptheker, Andrew Arato, Stanley Aronowitz, Rudolf Bahro, Jean Baudrillard, Zygmunt Bauman, Seyla Benhabib, Alain de Benoist, Russell A. Berman, Ernst Bloch, Murray Bookchin, Rufus Burrow, Jr., Cornelius Castoriadis, Gary Dorrien, Norbert Elias, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Stuart Ewen, Ferenc Feher, Paul K. Feyerabend, Michel Foucault, Ernst Gellner, Herb Gintis, Mary Ann Glendon, Paul Gottfried, André Gorz, Alvin W. Gouldner, Antonio Gramsci, Jürgen Habermas, Ágnes Heller, Jeffrey Herf, Susannah Heschel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Axel Honneth, Max Horkheimer, Edmund Husserl, Martin Jay, Russell Jacoby, Paul W. Kahn, Douglas Kellner, Joel Kovel, Matthias Küntzel, Jacek Kuron, Christopher Lasch, Claude Lefort, William Leiss, Vincent Lloyd, György Lukács, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Karel Kosík, Catherine Malabou, Herbert Marcuse, Andrei Markovits, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adam Michnik, John Milbank, Martha Minow, Oskar Negt, Claus Offe, Cary Nelson, Adrian Pabst, Enzo Paci, Paul Piccone, Mark Poster, members of the Belgrade Praxis School, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bernhard Schlink, Carl Schmitt, Trent Schroyer, Fred Siegel, Kiron Skinner, David A. Westbrook, Richard Wolin, Frank Zappa, John Zerzan, Slavoj Zizek, and Sharon Zukin. Among politically engaged scholarly journals, Telos is known especially for: • its longstanding critique of the bureaucratizing tendencies of modernity, including of the welfare state ; • its early critical engagement with the work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory ; • its support of central and eastern European dissidents during the Cold War, when it also brokered an encounter between Marxism and phenomenology ; • its critique of the New Class under Communism and the professional managerial class in the West; • Timothy Luke and founding editor Paul Piccone's theory of "artificial negativity" ; • having turned its attention beginning in the 1980s to reevaluating the tradition of political populism as a "bulwark against growing New Class encroachment," during which it announced "a definitive break with the standard Left/Right distinction" in social and political thought ; • its controversial interest in German jurist Carl Schmitt ; and • its exploration of political theology, including that of Martin Luther King, Jr. The journal's extensive, serious engagement with the work of Carl Schmitt and other ideologically right-wing critics of liberalism has fostered denunciations on the left that the journal has moved to the right politically. The journal has regularly published writing rejecting "the standard Left/Right distinction" and critical of efforts to categorize the publication ideologically. Members of the journal's editorial board have described their work as "out beyond the margins of the established academy ... featuring the voices of alternative networks recruited from the contrary currents of many different intellectual traditions."

History

Founded in May 1968 at SUNY-Buffalo, the journal 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 on authors and ideas including the Nazi legal philosopher 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 David Pan. It regularly cooperates with the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute, which hosts annual conferences, select papers from which have been published in Telos.

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents/Social & Behavioral Sciences, and Current Contents/Arts & Humanities. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2013 impact factor of 0.065, ranking it 133rd out of 138 journals in the category "Sociology".

Telos Press Publishing

Telos Press Publishing was founded by Paul Piccone, the first editor-in-chief of Telos, and is the publisher of both the journal Telos as well as a separate book line. It is based in Candor, New York.