After Liberalism?

Abstract

It is natural that the appearance of Telos' 100th issue should evoke the same contentiousness among its editors that one finds in all the back issues. There is the predictable lively discussion whether Dialectic of the Enlightenment and other texts of choice for Telos continue to be relevant. Some also wonder whether the magazine still has — or ever had — a clear and defensible prise de position amid the political programs of this by now waning century. All this is, for me, profoundly ironic. For most of my life I have been an old-style European liberal and, in American politics, an unreconstructed Taft Republican. I have literally reeked of liberalism to the point of defending Max Weber's “value-free science” and Vilfredo Pareto's metodo sperimentale.