By Telos Press · Monday, March 22, 2021 To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
On The Agenda with Steve Paikin, the discussion about governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic turned to Thomas Brussig’s recent editorial “Risk More Dictatorship,” originally published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and translated into English in TelosScope. Listen to the discussion here, and read Brussig’s full essay here, along with Russell Berman’s commentary on it here.
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By David Pan · Friday, March 19, 2021 Telos 194 (Spring 2021): Political Theology Today is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 What does political theology mean today? At the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference from which many of the essays in this issue originated, a primary goal was to discuss the crisis of secular liberalism and “how faith is reshaping culture and politics today.” But even this project perhaps limits too much the scope of political theology, implying that we have a choice between reason and faith, or that political theology is a commitment to faith rather than an analysis of the element of faith that underlies all of our endeavors. The idea of political theology begins with the premise that every existing human order is built upon some understanding of ultimate meaning. The task would then be to analyze the kind of meaning that each existing order embodies and determine the kinds of decisions about meaning that are made and need to be made at various points in its history. Even secular liberalism, to the extent that it constitutes an existing order, presumes some answer to this question of meaning, and a closer look at the political theology of the United States reveals a mythic dimension that underlies its liberal democratic processes. The essays in this issue examine the political theological underpinnings of economy, politics, technology, and religion, laying out the ways in which these areas of human life develop not as autonomous spheres but as the result of struggles over a set of political theological choices.
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By Wolfgang Thierse · Friday, March 12, 2021 The following essay was originally published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on February 22, 2021, and appears here in translation with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.
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Community membership used to be a matter of religion and, after that, ideology. Today this function has been taken over by the concept of identity. Religion and ideology in the past led repeatedly to serious and even bloody conflicts. Will this history repeat itself under the new principle? Themes of cultural membership seem to be rattling our Western societies increasingly, splitting them along the political lines of distributive justice. Questions of identity—ethnic, gender, sexual—dominate, as the debates over racism, postcolonialism, and gender grow violent and aggressive. These are probably unavoidable confrontations in an increasingly pluralistic society, just as they give expression to social conflicts, fought over the distribution of visibility and influence, attention and recognition.
As unavoidable as these conflicts may seem, they are also confusing, opaque, and ambivalent. The violence of some attacks against traditionalist positions, as well as the violence in the defense of tradition, in addition to the radicalness of identity demands lead to the question: How much identity politics strengthens the pluralism of a society, and at what point does it turn into fragmentation? The principle at stake is this: the ethnic, cultural, and religious-worldview pluralism that is growing in Germany as elsewhere is no idyll; on the contrary it is full of disputes and conflict potential. If this multifacetedness is to be lived out in a peaceful manner, then pluralism must be more than the mere coexistence of minorities and identities that not only differ from each other but also separate from each other. Fundamental commonalities are necessary, including of course a common language, and naturally also a shared recognition of justice and law.
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By Thomas Brussig · Monday, March 8, 2021 This essay was published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on February 9, 2021, and appears here in translation with permission of the author. Footnotes have been added for clarification. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here. The author intends the title as an ironic reference to Chancellor Willy Brandt’s 1969 statement that Germany “must risk more democracy.”
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 The corona crisis remains an experience of helplessness, even though infection rates are falling. Despite all the limitations on everyday life and despite the start of the vaccinations, an end to the restrictions is nowhere in sight—even though a few countries have succeeded in stopping the virus. The feeling of helplessness in the face of corona is due to the fact that we have had to surmount the corona crisis with the tools of democracy.
Sigmund Freud spoke of “three blows to humanity”: first, the Copernican worldview that pushed us out of the center of the universe; second, Darwinism, according to which we did not descend from God but from monkeys; and third, psychoanalysis, which teaches that we are not self-determined but only act due to hidden, unconscious, and instinctual motivations. Now we can speak of three blows to democracy, although it was only thirty years ago when liberal self-consciousness stood at its high point. According to the popular thesis of an “end of history,” market economies and democracy had achieved such an indisputable victory that nothing would stop their spread around the world.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, March 8, 2021 To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
A distinctive feature of public debate in Germany involves prominent literary authors, especially novelists, expounding on current political matters in major newspapers. Thomas Brussig’s essay “Risk More Dictatorship,” translated here, belongs to this genre. Known especially for his satire of East Germany, Heroes Like Us, Brussig chose a provocative title that seems to echo and respond to Chancellor Willy Brandt’s appeal more than fifty years ago to “risk more democracy.” Brandt was speaking in 1969 at a pivotal moment in the history of West Germany, indeed of the whole world, in the face of the protests during the previous year; Brussig in contrast appeals for “more dictatorship” in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, which he depicts as a potentially similar turning moment, with an accelerated “learning process,” that calls old certainties into question. These include the “end of history” claim that liberal democracy is inevitable; Brussig suggests that the “impotence” of democracies in the face of the pandemic raises the question as to whether other forms of government might be superior. The Chinese model of dictatorship casts a shadow across the essay.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, February 11, 2021 Both sides of the transatlantic alliance, America and Europe, pride themselves on their commitment to freedom. And rightly so: these political communities emerged out of histories of extended emancipation struggles, laying claim to rights against pre-democratic authoritarian states, just as they have done battle with modern, totalitarian dictatorships. The fundamental assumption that individuals have a right to freedom against the state as part of their catalogue of human rights defines the political self-understanding of this Western community, and this assumption has spread around the globe far beyond the geographical West. It has however not spread everywhere to be sure: neither Putinist Russia nor Xi’s China embraces freedom, although in both countries there are brave regime critics who risk their lives in freedom’s pursuit. They deserve our support.
Yet although liberty is so central to the Atlantic community, we have seen it suddenly and strictly curtailed in the current state of emergency response to the spread of the coronavirus. German philosopher Otfried Höffe examines this alacrity with which liberty has been abandoned here and subjects it to perceptive criticism. Of course public health measures to limit the spread of the virus are necessary, but Höffe points to the disturbing eagerness with which policies have been imposed, which may go beyond appropriate measures. One might dwell on the particular policy failings everywhere—Höffe naturally focuses on Germany and the EU—but his analysis points to several conceptual points that apply broadly and to the United States especially.
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