New Review of Elham Manea's The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism

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Writing at the Investigative Project on Terrorism website, Phyllis Chesler reviews Elham Manea’s The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism, now available from Telos Press. Save 20% off the list price when you purchase your copy in our store.

An excerpt of the review:

In The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism, her fourth book in English, the University of Zurich political scientist, author, activist, and consultant offers a warning to the West.

In Manea’s view, “nonviolent Islamism” is the basic building block that leads to violent jihad. And our misreading of that reality can lead to real harm.

If we continue “cancelling” politically incorrect ideas and speech, continue “vilifying dissent,” and “insisting upon the infinite guilt of the West” then, as Russell A. Berman writes in the foreword to this work, “we should expect the real-world consequences of this ideology soon to become clearer and rougher.” Manea believes that repressing dissent can easily turn into repressive practices. “Cancel culture” may indeed be our “Islamism.”

Nonviolent Islamism’s insidious nature is one of Manea’s most important points. Westerners have been hopelessly gullible in their choice of “smiling and patient” Saudi-funded Muslim Brotherhood/Salafi representatives as their go-to experts on both Islam and Muslims.

“One cannot combat an ideology and fundamentalism by working with the very groups that promote that ideology,” she writes. Further, Western cultural relativism and doctrines of “multiculturalism” has served us and freedom-loving Muslims very, very poorly.

This battle, she writes, is “the global challenge of the 21st century.”

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New Review of Carl Schmitt's The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts

Writing in the new issue of Philosophy in Review, Adam Sliwowski reviews Carl Schmitt’s The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts, translated by Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, edited by Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, with a preface by David Pan. Order your copy in our online store, and save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.

An excerpt:

The works of Carl Schmitt—a German jurist and political theorist infamous for his involvement with National Socialism—continue to have wide international appeal, influencing scholars in a number of fields from political science and jurisprudence to political-theology and existential philosophy. Nevertheless, much of his prolific oeuvre, written over the span of almost 70 years, remains untranslated into English. With The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts, Samuel Garrett Zeitlin takes a step in filling this gap with an edited collection of finely translated and helpfully annotated texts that appear in English for the first time. This collection of occasional pieces, spanning from the Weimar era to the Cold War, shows Schmitt responding to a diverse array of socio-political exigencies and world-historical developments, while also shedding light on many of the central themes of Schmitt’s work, such as the distinction between legality and legitimacy, land and sea, the nomos of the earth, and the figure of the partisan.

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New Review of Carl Schmitt’s The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts

Writing at Infrapolitical Deconstruction, Gerardo Muñoz reviews the new English translation of Carl Schmitt’s The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts, now available from Telos Press Publishing. Order your copy in our online store, and save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.

An excerpt:

As David Pan correctly observes in the Preface, the Schmitt that we encounter here is one that is confronting the transformations of political enmity in light of a gloomy and dangerous takeover of a global civil war. In fact, one could most definitely argue that the Schmitt thinking within the Cold War epochality is one that is painstakingly searching for a “Katechon,” that restraining force inherited from Christian theology in order to give form to the ruination of modern legal and political order. The global civil war, cloaked under a sense of acknowledged Humanism, now aimed at the destruction of the enemy social’s order and form of life. This thematizes the existential dilemma of a jurist who was consciousness of the dark shadow floating over the efficacy of Western jurisprudence. In other words, the post-war Schmitt is one marked by a profound Hamletian condition in the face of the technical neutralization of every effective political theology. This condition puts Schmitt on the defensive, rather than on the offensive, as his later replies to Erik Peterson, Hans Blumenberg, or Jacob Taubes render visible.

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New Review of Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea

Writing at the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, David Ragazzoni reviews Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, published by Telos Press Publishing. Translated by Samuel Garrett Zeitlin and co-edited by Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, Schmitt’s Land and Sea is now available for purchase in our online store. Save 20% on your purchase by using the coupon code BOOKS20.

Land und Meer appeared in English for the first time in 1997, but the new translation offered by Zeitlin and Berman stands out for its philological accuracy. It takes into account multiple variations between the 1942, 1954, and 1981 German editions, as well as textual changes in the 1952 Spanish translation (in which some passages omitted in the 1954 version were retained). It also explores the historical and intellectual context of Schmitt’s geopolitical thought before Der Nomos der Erde (1950), in which he offered his most systematic analysis of the trajectory of the jus publicum Europaeum from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

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New Review of Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea

In a new review essay in Thesis Eleven, Peter Murphy writes about Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, translated into English by Samuel Garrett Zeitlin and published by Telos Press Publishing. Purchase your copy of Schmitt’s Land and Sea in our online store and save 20% by using the coupon code BOOKS20.

An excerpt from the review:

Samuel Zeitlin’s adroit, elegant translation of Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea is sparkling to read. The book moves along with great energy, vibrant economy, and penetrating succinctness. The translation deftly conveys a book that is as short and direct as it is world-historical in scope. Its inquisitive reach expands as its flinty prose shrinks to the point of pithy, terse deliberateness. In 100-odd crisp pages it moves with panoptic concision from the ‘Potamic’ river cultures of the Middle East to the inland sea of the Mediterranean and across the oceans of modernity. The volume is beautifully produced by Telos Press.

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Essential Reading: Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea

Writing at the Claremont Review of Books, Aaron Zack reviews the new English translation of Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea, now available from Telos Press. Purchase your copy in our online store and save 20% by using the coupon code BOOKS20.

Telos Press’s new edition of Carl Schmitt’s Land und Meer: Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung (Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation) provides an essential guide for understanding sea power. . . . Schmitt provides an intriguing analysis of the link between the sea and the modern project’s culmination in creative, free-thinking individuals moving and acting within a liberal, global order . . .

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