Liberalism between Scylla and Charybdis

In 1972, Irving Kristol noted the striking fact that the New Left seemed to lack a coherent economic critique of the status quo, besides occasional Marxist platitudes borrowed from the Old Left:

The identifying marks of the New Left are its refusal to think economically and its contempt for bourgeois society precisely because this is a society that does think economically.

What really ailed American society, and what the New Left could sense but not articulate, Kristol wrote, was a spiritual malady. Despite the efforts of Burkean conservatives, the “accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral philosophy” had been steadily depleting since the French Revolution, and with its depletion, so too society’s abilities to cope with the material inequalities, resentments, and indignities made inevitable by the free exchange of goods and services.

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Telos 191 (Summer 2020): Going Viral

Telos 191 (Summer 2020): Going Viral is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.

While “going viral” has taken on a new meaning by recuperating an old one, it is the virtual experience that seems to be more enduring. Not only has the pandemic sped up the shifting of human activity onto virtual platforms, but the viral dynamics of social media seem set to outlast the microbial versions: it has turned out to be easier to lock down the Wuhan virus than President Trump’s Twitter feed. Yet in both cases, it is unclear whether it is the actual spread or the fear that is the greater danger. For this fear leads to the call for more authoritarian measures, whether this means censoring Twitter posts or locking down the population. But if viral spread leads to the reassertion of sovereignty, we also come to realize that the freedoms we have taken for granted are in fact the result of a curated space, in which the rules for interaction have always formed the hidden framework within which our lives have unfolded. As these framing conditions come into focus during the crisis, we have the opportunity to reimagine them in such a way as to retrieve sovereignty not as a kind of authoritarian reaction but as an understanding of how our values must inform the boundaries we set. This issue of Telos considers how the experience of going viral has come to dominate our political life as well as how our reflection on this process can free us to consider the alternatives.

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The Reemergence of the State in the Time of COVID-19

Once upon a time, there was an illusion that the state would disappear. It was the fiction Marxists told each other at bedtime, and it was the lie of the Communists, once they had seized state power. For even as they built up their police apparatus and their archipelago of gulags, they kept promising that one day the state would eventually disappear.

Of course, in a sense, they were right because Communism ended and so did the Communist states in Russia and Eastern Europe. Yet the death of those regimes is in no way an argument for the death of statehood itself.

The state is the expression of sovereignty, and sovereignty is the ability of national communities to decide their own fates. Such independence is far from obsolete, and certainly not for the countries on the eastern flank of the European Union. After years of Russian occupation, they have regained their state sovereignty. They will continue to insist on it, and rightly so.

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Telos 189 (Winter 2019): Constitutional Theory as Cultural Problem

Telos 189 (Winter 2019), a special issue on Constitutional Theory as Cultural Problem, edited by Xudong Zhang and David Pan, is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.

The challenges faced by the liberal democratic model of government in the twenty-first century have made constitutional theory into an urgent topic of global concern. Both the second Iraq war and the revolutions of the Arab Spring frustrated hopes of an easy global trajectory toward liberal democracy. If there was the hope that liberation would mean the establishment of liberal constitutional norms, the result has been that emancipation from tyranny does not naturally lead in a particular political direction. Meanwhile, established liberal democracies, from the United States to Europe to India, are facing upheavals that have prompted many to question the stability of the model itself, leading to the need to revise a constitutional theory that up to now has been built around the liberal democratic model. While the constitutional state, as theory and practice in modern Europe, North America, and Asia, continues to be the common point of reference, its stability and legitimacy can no longer be taken for granted, thus requiring renewed thinking about its history and cultural foundations.

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Carl Schmitt, Justice of War, and Individual Citizen’s Obligation

Qi Zheng’s “Carl Schmitt, Justice of War, and Individual Citizen’s Obligation” appears in Telos 187 (Summer 2019). 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.

Carl Schmitt produced the original text of “The International Crime of the War of Aggression and the Principle ‘Nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege‘” in 1945. The fundamental issue of the text concerns an individual citizen’s obligation in international law toward his national government in the event of an unjust war. Schmitt’s analysis of the issue is based on his perception of politics as the relationship between protection and obedience. However, his understanding of this relationship is not consistent with what he proposed in his other major works, i.e., that the relationship is a collective one. In order to support the argument in his 1945 text, Schmitt completely abandoned his collective understanding of the relationship and changed it to an individualistic understanding. This paper explores the subtle but important change in Schmitt’s argument.

This paper is divided into two sections. The first section reconstructs Schmitt’s arguments on an individual citizen’s right to resistance in international law. It focuses on two questions: whether an individual citizen has the right to judge the justice of war and whether individuals have an obligation in international law to disobey the government if they find that their government is conducting an unjust war. The second section examines Schmitt’s argument about the relationship between protection and obedience.

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Telos 187 (Summer 2019): Carl Schmitt and the Critique of Technical Rationality

Telos 187 (Summer 2019) is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.

After a modern era of technological progress that has led humans to believe in their increasing ability to control nature, we are reaching a point at which this power on a small scale has given way to increasing uncertainty and uncontrollability on the large scale. Not only are the specific effects of climate change difficult to predict and control, the only mechanisms available for such control—agreement and cooperation across national and cultural divides—are not the stuff of engineering but of politics. So with every technological advance that promises to bring us more control over our lives, we as a species are facing ever greater risks and uncertainties. The question concerning technology has become the unpredictability and uncontrollability of its development itself. The key difficulty is a problem of a tension between community or national interests and species-wide interests. While there might be an ethical imperative on a species-wide level to exercise self-restraint in pursuing dangerous technologies such as nuclear weapons, gene manipulation, or coal-fired power plants, such self-restraint could very well lead to the decline or even annihilation of the group that exercises it. The path forward will not be revealed by new technological advances, which can easily create more problems than they solve, but through the development of new ethical, political, and affective frameworks by which people understand themselves and their connections to the rest of the world. This issue of Telos, devoted to Carl Schmitt and the critique of technical rationality, investigates the ways in which Schmitt’s critique moved him toward ways of considering law, politics, and human history as fundamentally uncertain movements, requiring strategies that accept such unpredictability even as we try to intervene in our historical development as a species.

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