By Steven Torrente · Wednesday, January 31, 2018 Steven Torrente’s “Beyond Just War: Jan Patočka’s Solidarity of the Shaken” appears in Telos 181 (Winter 2017). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are now available in both print and online formats.
The just war tradition has for a long time provided the categories and logic used to debate the tensions inherent in armed conflict. If war and killing are seen as both inevitable and undesirable, some system of limitation must be developed. Just war concepts such as right authority, just cause, and others offer a framework of off-ramps on the road to nihilistic violence. However, critics contend that just war theory fails to negotiate a real compromise between naïve pacifism and unrestrained war. They argue that the just war tradition not only reduces to the unrestrained pole, but in fact it can legitimate and exacerbate war. If so, just war thinking suffers from a logical contradiction—it facilitates that which it seeks to limit.
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By Aaron Zack · Thursday, January 18, 2018 Aaron Zack’s “Sovereignty and Grand Strategy: Some Observations on the Rise of China and Decline of the Americans” appears in Telos 181 (Winter 2017). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are now available in both print and online formats.
The rise and decline of great powers are not solely material in nature but also moral, political, and cultural. Many modern theorists emphasize the material factors in rise and decline, but older political thinkers focused on moral-political explanations. Carl Schmitt defines the essence of the political as the distinction between friend and enemy. A rising sovereign will effectively distinguish between friends and enemies and act in the interest of a political community. A decaying sovereign will gradually lose its capacity to both make a rational distinction between friends and enemies and act in the interest of the (fading) political community. True grand strategy therefore depends upon a robust sovereign—a decayed sovereign faces difficulty in implementing an effective or optimal grand strategy.
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By Telos Press · Monday, January 23, 2017 At the 2017 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Conference, held this past weekend in New York City, Kenneth Anderson delivered a keynote address entitled “Situating Asymmetrical Warfare among Forms of Emerging Conflict in the Post–New World Order World.” We are delighted to present the full video of the address here.
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By Telos Press · Friday, January 20, 2017 At the 2017 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Conference, held this past weekend in New York City, Steven Metz delivered a keynote address entitled “Future Conflict and the Conceptual Prison of Asymmetry.” We are delighted to present the full video of the address below.
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