War and Time: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and the Eclipse of Peace

Coedited by Michael Marder and Denys Sultanhaliiev

In what appears to be a peculiar paradox of our time, the Russo-Ukrainian war—initially a profound rupture in the European political imagination—has gradually receded into the background noise of global media circulation. Saturated coverage has not yielded conceptual clarity. On the contrary, despite the overwhelming volume of commentary, there remains a striking absence of sustained theoretical engagement with the war’s implications for political thought. Rather than catalyzing new frameworks, the conflict has too often been instrumentalized as confirmatory evidence for already established positions.

This special issue of Telos seeks to address this philosophical void.

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Modern China emerged through the struggle with the customs and traditions of imperial China. This struggle continues in present-day attempts to think through how earlier customs, on the one hand, remain active in Chinese culture and, on the other, have been transformed by China’s modernization. And then there are the customs that have been cut off by modernity; to what extent and in which ways can or should they be revived?

The central challenge is that China has undergone spectacular political and social transformations over the past century, meaning that older ideas and customs must now operate within an entirely new sociopolitical context. Consider how different the political imagination was in imperial (neo-)Confucian China, which placed the imperial court at the center of the cosmos. Before the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China saw itself as Zhongguo (中国) or Zhonghua (中华), meaning the “Middle Kingdom” and the “central civilization,” respectively. Thus, far from conceiving itself as merely one country among others, it imagined itself as the morality-carrying center of the tianxia (天下), “all under heaven,” which could only be harmoniously ordered if its Chinese center itself was properly ordered.

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China saturates Western media and academic discourse, invoked incessantly as a force remaking the world, while the political and social-theoretical ideas through which China thinks, judges, and interprets that world remain largely unheard. Western discourses on China exhibit a persistent tendency toward objectification and reification. Chinese phenomena figure as objects of analysis, yet such analyses rarely delve into their subjective-interpretative depth. Were they to do so, they would encounter these “objects” as subjects who actively make sense of their worlds, carrying ideas, ideals, and self-conceptions embedded in distinct interpretive traditions. At the same time, Western media and academics are often unaware that their own views are actively influenced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which spends $10 billion per year on international propaganda efforts that include advertising, news production, and social media campaigns.

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Knowledge, What Is It Good For? Italian/American Leadership in the Twenty-First Century

by Anthony Julian Tamburri

Anthony Julian Tamburri’s Knowledge, What Is It Good For? provides a detailed and systematic examination of Italian/American leadership today, whether that leadership arose through consensus or self-appointment. The various chapters describe the key issues at hand, which overall reflect a lack of knowledge about the history of Italians and their descendants in the United States. Through the critique of these issues, Tamburri emphasizes the need for solutions to remedy these gaps. This book is a follow-up to Tamburri’s A Politics of [Self‑]Omission: The Italian/American Challenge in a Post-George Floyd Age (2022), which offered a first look at influential individuals and leaders of non-scholarly Italian/American organizations.

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In 1998, Alan Wolfe remarked that “the right won the economic war, the left won the cultural war, and the center won the political war.” It was the age of triumphant liberalism, freed from the shackles of the Cold War confrontation between the capitalist West and the Communist East. Capitalism was now the uncontested model, as Western countries increasingly abandoned a more embedded social market economy in favor of the global market-state while emerging market economies embraced the state-market. In each case, society was the loser. Even as countries converged internationally and China morphed into an economic powerhouse, asset and income inequality increased within countries, and so did regional disparities—between the former heartlands of the Rust Belt and the new metropolitan hubs exemplified by Silicon Valley. Building on the writings of Paul Piccone and Christopher Lasch, critics of liberalism such as Christophe Guilluy, Nancy Fraser, Michael Lind, and Quinn Slobodian have highlighted the growing gulf between elite enclaves and peripheral wastelands, or hubs vs. heartlands, but their analysis has mostly been dismissed as nostalgic or downright reactionary. Something similar applies to politicians on both sides of the spectrum who have questioned liberal economics—whether Pat Buchanan in the past or JD Vance and Josh Hawley more recently on the Republican right, or Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, and Chris Murphy on the Democratic left.

Some political and policy differences notwithstanding, the mainstream left and right—in the United States, Europe, and other Western countries such as Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand—took a progressive turn and embraced untrammeled markets, hyper-individualism, and foreign military adventures. The ruling elites felt vindicated by the “end of history” utopia of a global convergence toward liberal market democracy and the inevitable forward march of globalization. Both liberal interventionists and neoconservative crusaders advanced the vision of America as a liberal Leviathan that secures the social contract at home and U.S. supremacy abroad.

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