We are still living in the shadow of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, when the theological and monarchical justifications for political authority began to lose legitimacy. Individual autonomy, open debate, and evidence-based reasoning were to replace adherence to traditions and established authorities as the basis for political order and decision-making in a democracy. Almost immediately after the enunciation of this new perspective, though, left-wing and right-wing reactions developed. On the left, there was a critique of liberal proceduralism on the part of those French revolutionaries who sought to engineer egalitarian social outcomes, even against democratic majorities. On the right, thinkers such as Joseph de Maistre defended established religions and traditions, which were held to be essential for maintaining moral constraints on otherwise purely self-interested decision-making in a democracy. While religious conservatives continually lost ground in the process of secularization, socialism and nationalism gained importance to the extent that they provided secular theologies to replace the religious ones.

Socialism and fascism became important in the twentieth century but then were discredited as key political theologies. Meanwhile, the victory of liberalism at the end of the Cold War actually presaged its crisis. When liberalism could finally implement the Enlightenment project on a global scale, the focus on rational methods in fact could not answer the political theological question of legitimacy. In the twenty-first century, nationalism, religion, and a revived socialism have reasserted themselves as the mythic bases for political identity, while liberal rationalism deteriorated into the ideology of the new class of bureaucratic managers of human life. Against the liberal new class, populist identity politics has gained ground in nationalist, religious, socialist, and anti-imperialist variants, or combinations thereof.

Continue reading →

Wittfogel contrasted “hydraulic societies” with feudalism and modern capitalism. Driven by ecological imperatives of irrigation and flood control, bureaucratic systems emerged in much of Asia and achieved sustained domination over rival power centers in society. Just as private property existed on the sufferance of political power, so too did individual ambition and social prestige gravitate to state service. While this model prevailed longest and most consistently in settings like ancient Egypt, Mughal India, and premodern China, it found analogues elsewhere whenever material conditions and rulers’ convenience converged, including the Roman and Inka Empires. No part of the world, Wittfogel warned, was immune to hydraulic taming of free peoples; they succumbed on the frontier more easily than they might imagine. In the Cold War context of modern state socialism, indeed, such hierarchical systems could penetrate even more deeply into daily life: “The industrial despotism of the fully developed and totally managerial apparatus society combines total political power with total social and intellectual domination.”

Continue reading →

Continue reading →

China remains the inscrutable elephant in the room for the world’s political theorists and policymakers. Its growing importance to the world’s economy and politics compels us to continue to analyze its ideological currents and political conflicts. While scholars inside and outside of China struggle with the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to censor debate, it is all the more necessary to engage scholars in productive discussions that provide real analysis rather than talking points. The essays in this issue on China and sovereignty discuss how China has engaged with Western thinkers, in particular Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Carl Schmitt, to develop its own basis for sovereignty and its vision for world order. Subsequently, our authors offer conflicting perspectives on the nature of the Chinese government and how the United States should respond to China’s rise.

Continue reading →

July 12th marks 22 years since the passing of Paul Piccone. His vision, energy, and charisma created Telos and continues to inspire all of us who are connected with it, whether or not we had the good fortune of knowing him personally. He was always committed to following the truth, wherever it might lead him. This explains the complicated trajectory of interests in the history of Telos, from the Frankfurt School and Jean Baudrillard to Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger, from left-wing politics to populism, from debates about the 1980s peace movements to discussions of radical orthodoxy, from phenomenology to postliberalism. This continuing movement could not be constrained by disciplinary boundaries, but it would be misleading to consider the mix of topics as simply eclectic or interdisciplinary. We would be failing if we were simply drawing attention to obscure writers or movements. Rather, we seek to focus on what is vitally relevant but not yet recognized as such. The vagaries of Telos‘s trajectory reflect targeted shifts in attention that respond to new insights and current problems. This sixth sense was the key to Piccone’s genius. We cannot claim to have maintained it, but this remains the telos in Telos. As we commemorate Paul Piccone, we also rededicate ourselves to continuing his vision.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →