In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Jon Simons about his article “Divine Violence, Profane Peace: Walter Benjamin, Rabbis for Human Rights, and Peace in Israel–Palestine,” from Telos 192 (Fall 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
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Mitchell Dean’s “Oath and Office” appears in Telos 185 (Winter 2018). 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 available in both print and online formats. Kenneth A. Taylor’s “On King, Resistance, Faith, and Despair” appears in Telos 182 (Spring 2018), a special issue commemorating the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. 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. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s deep and abiding religious faith led him to believe that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but . . . bends toward justice.” Though he believed that God exercises providential guidance over the universe, he did not think that the work of bending the arc of the universe belongs to God alone, with no need for human agency. We humans are urgently called by God to cooperate in the struggle for justice through “vigorous and positive action.” And King knew firsthand how arduous this struggle could be. We toil for justice in a darkened world that creaks and groans under the weight of many and diverse forms of injustice. Heeding the call may cost us much that is dear—including, as it did for King himself, our lives. King was convinced, however, that if our efforts are anchored in faith, we can rest assured that if we do heed the call, we will struggle neither alone nor in vain. The God who calls to us will struggle with us. “Evil dies on the seashore,” says King, “not merely because of man’s endless struggle against it, but because of God’s power to defeat it.” His faith that this is so not only spurred him to action but sustained him in his darkest hours and functioned as a bulwark against a potentially paralyzing despair. The following paper was presented at the Eighth Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–16, 2014, in New York City. Peter A. Redpath’s “Justice in the New World Order: Reduction of Justice to Tolerance in the New Totalitarian World State” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here. |
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In the perspective of many, the prime criticism of liberal theories of democratic politics is that such theories proceed with a certain false and idealized individual in mind—these are great theories, elegant or hubristic, but at bottom, theories and not “real politics.” Political liberalism wrongly imagines the citizen to be a rational individual, sure of his will and life plans—or is this imagining wrong? The deeper critique holds that liberalism describes a peculiar individual, and that this individual really exists, but looks strangely like the liberal theorist and his class. Thus, for example, John Rawls’s theory of justice is suggested to fail women and the profoundly disabled. My critique today follows in this vein; I wish to add to this characterization of liberalism’s presumed political actor by showing him to be antiheroic. 
This article’s general thesis is that, shortly after World War II, some leading Western intellectuals started to work to build a new world order based upon a modified understanding of national sovereignty and a notion of justice that rejected Machiavellianism. It claims that during the 1960s, this project became hijacked by Western socialists and was turned toward undermining the authority of national constitutions and legal traditions and promoting Machiavellianism on a global scale. Socialists effected this transformation by wedding Nietzsche’s Machiavellianism to Rousseau’s teaching about morality. From Rousseau they adopted the notion of “tolerance”—having the right feelings and right way of reading history about an exploited, sinless, innocent class (the proletariat under communism)—to replace the classical notion of justice as a moral, behavioral, quality (habitually behaving rightly toward other people) in human affairs. Of crucial significance is that, in the process, they changed the West’s understanding of justice from a classical moral category related to behaving rightly toward others into a hermeneutical category of having the right political reading of history. 
