Telos 204 (Fall 2023): Quandaries of Race and Gender Theory

Telos 204 (Fall 2023): Quandaries of Race and Gender Theory is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.

Old-style leftists have puzzled over how today’s left-liberals have abandoned traditional left-wing goals such as reducing class inequality and improving working-class standards of living. A key reason lies with the shifting of the politics of class. As Paul Piccone and Fred Siegel argued over thirty years ago in these pages, the problem of class is no longer a question of capitalists against workers. According to a recent Gallup poll, 61 percent of U.S. adults own stock, and such capitalist ownership, while a good way to increase wealth, is no longer the preserve of the ruling class and does not by itself confer much power. Rather, the ruling class that exercises real power consists not of owners but primarily of a bureaucratic class of managers in corporations, government, non-profits, universities, and the media. In spite of this shift, theories developed over a century ago continue to shape current leftist perspectives. Dominated by a socialist perspective, left-wing social policy fails to recognize and address the new contours of class division. As a result, it continues to employ a framework that is based on an anti-capitalist and anti-market agenda that tries to manipulate outcomes to promote socialist goals, precisely the methods of a managerial class.

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The Telos Press Podcast: Chih-yu Shih on Benevolent Love, Universal Love, and Hong Kong

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Chih-yu Shih about his article “Loving Hong Kong: Unity and Solidarity in the Politics of Belonging,” from Telos 202 (Spring 2023). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss why liberalism is based on universal love rather than universal rights; the relationship between a rights-based liberalism and communitarianism in the West; the difference between Western universal love and Confucian benevolent love; solidarity love and role-embedded love; the Confucian critique of universal love; the meaning of “One Country, Two Systems” in Hong Kong; how the idea of benevolent love affects the understanding of “One Country, Two Systems” in comparison with the liberal idea of it; the different interpretations, based on universal love and benevolent love, of the 2014 and 2019 protests in Hong Kong; the links between benevolent love and stability and prosperity and between universal love with autonomy and political rights, and why there is a conflict between these two sets of goals. 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. Print copies of Telos 202 are available for purchase in our online store.

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The Telos Press Podcast: John Milbank on Carl Schmitt and the Current Global Crisis

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with John Milbank about his article “A Tale of Two Monsters and Four Elements: Variations of Carl Schmitt and the Current Global Crisis,” from Telos 201 (Winter 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the three idioms into which Milbank divides Carl Schmitt’s thought; why they should be seen as separate idioms rather than different aspects of a single perspective; the extent of overlap between the idioms; whether the decisionist Schmitt is as arbitrary as he is made out to be; the characteristics of a medieval European conception of nomos that Schmitt wishes to retrieve; the similarities between Schmitt’s third idiom of global regions and both Nazism and Russian theorists like Gumilev, Panarin, and Dugin; Schmitt’s decisionism, basic values, identity, and thinking through popular sovereignty. 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. Print copies of Telos 201 are available for purchase in our online store.

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The Telos Press Podcast: Paul Grenier on Konstantin Krylov's Ethical Theory

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Paul Grenier about his article “Konstantin Krylov’s Ethical Theory and What It Reveals about the Propensity for Conflict between Russia and the West,” from Telos 201 (Winter 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss Russian conservative thinkers, including Konstantin Krylov, Vadim Tsymburski, and Vladimir Solovyov, and their attitudes toward the West; how Krylov differentiates between different civilizational types as well as how he differentiates between liberalism and Russian civilization; how Krylov frames his critique of liberalism and of Russian civilization; how his view of liberalism compares with other definitions; how else we can interpret the weaknesses of liberalism, aside from Krylov’s view of a good and bad version; the relationship between liberalism and tradition; and what Krylov’s thought tells us about the development of Russian perspectives on its relationship to the West today. 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. Print copies of Telos 201 are available for purchase in our online store.

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The Telos Press Podcast: Brian Wolfel on Carlyle’s Transcendentalism and Theorizing Postliberalism

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Brian Wolfel about his article “Thomas Carlyle’s Conception of Transcendentalism in Sartor Resartus and Its Application to Theorizing Postliberalism,” from Telos 199 (Summer 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the problems of liberalism that transcendentalism tries to address; the basic characteristics of the transcendentalism that Thomas Carlyle describes in Sartor Resartus; how Carlyle’s transcendentalism embodies a kind of post-liberalism; how Carlyle’s transcendentalism can be understood as anti-dogmatic, or as a dogmatic anti-dogmatism; how Carlyle’s transcendentalism functions as a practical political philosophy; the relation of Carlyle’s transcendentalism to American transcendentalism and contemporary New Age philosophy; and the perilous status of liberalism in relation to current forms of authoritarianism. 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. Print copies of Telos 199 are available for purchase in our online store.

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Violence and Tolerance

If we are seeing a rise in political violence today, is the main cause a decline in tolerance? On today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, I discuss the concept of tolerance with Tomáš Sobek, whose essay on the subject appeared in Telos 199. He argues that tolerance cannot be equated with liberalism, or rather that there are two ways of understanding the meaning of liberalism. While a positive form of liberalism contains a set of values that today would include support for abortion rights and gay marriage, a negative form of Liberalism (let’s call it Liberalism with a capital L) is limited to tolerating viewpoints or practices that one does not agree with. From this perspective, Liberal tolerance would include a conservative opposed to abortion who is willing to tolerate its practice. On the other hand, liberal (with a small l) tolerance would not include tolerating gay marriage, which the liberal in any case supports, meaning there is nothing to tolerate. Since one only tolerates something with which one is in disagreement, liberal tolerance would have to include something like tolerance of racism, even though one opposes it. Of course, it may be that some things are not to be tolerated, for instance murder, and some anti-abortion advocates would classify abortion as a form of murder and therefore intolerable, and liberal anti-racists might similarly classify racist prejudice as intolerable, to the point of advocating violence to oppose it.

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