New from Telos Press: Fred Siegel's The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump

Now available for pre-order from Telos Press Publishing: The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump, by Fred Siegel. Pre-order the paperback edition today in our online store and save 30% off the list price. Offer expires 9/30/20. Also available now in Kindle ebook format. Release dates: October 1, 2020 (paperback), September 15, 2020 (ebook).

The Crisis of Liberalism
Prelude to Trump

by Fred Siegel
With a Foreword by Joel Kotkin

In The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump, Fred Siegel leverages New York City to uncover the key political conflicts and social contradictions in American liberalism over the last century. This wide-ranging collection of essays critically recounts how passionate intellectual debates over how to realize “the good life” in the modern city emerged from the writings of early progressive “thought leaders,” who envisioned a new educated elite capable of enlightened democratic governance. The flaws in this approach, as Siegel shows, expressed themselves most floridly in John Lindsay’s New York, whose flashy limousine liberals were a preview of today’s politically correct gentry liberalism. Its cultural programs over the past half-century repeatedly failed the downtrodden underclass and alienated middle-class New Yorkers trapped in economic stagnation. By neglecting voters’ real concerns over illegal immigration and China’s emerging threats, globalist technocratic liberals ultimately set the stage for Donald Trump’s angry nationalist demand to put “America First.”

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

Now Available! Carl Schmitt’s The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts

New from Telos Press: The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts, by Carl Schmitt. Translated by Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, edited by Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, and 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.

Written during the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, and the Cold War, this collection of occasional pieces provides an instructive look at the ways in which Carl Schmitt employed his theories in order to make judgments about contemporary historical events and problems. Covering topics such as the political significance of universalism and jurisprudence, the meaning of the partisan, the world-historical significance of the Cold War, the deterioration of metaphysics into “values,” the relationship between theoretical concepts and concrete historical situations, and his views on thinkers such as Machiavelli, Bodin, and Rousseau, these essays establish a revealing counterpoint to his more formal work. They react on the one hand directly to contemporary political questions and demonstrate the way in which he saw the immediate historical significance of his ideas. On the other hand, he also feels free to provide in these pieces the kinds of methodological reflections that help us to better understand the particular epistemological framework that makes his thought so unique.

Continue reading →

Now Available! Alain de Benoist's Democracy and Populism: The Telos Essays

New from Telos Press: Democracy and Populism: The Telos Essays, by Alain de Benoist. Edited by Russell A. Berman and Timothy W. Luke. Order your copy in our online store, and save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.

The crisis of democracy, the consequences of neoliberalism and globalization, the limits of sovereignty, and of course the rise of populism: few thinkers have given more sustained attention to these matters than the French author Alain de Benoist. Democracy and Populism collects de Benoist’s essays from the journal Telos, where many of his writings first appeared in English translation. Reading de Benoist in Telos provides access to a distinctive transatlantic intellectual dialogue and to an array of prescient insights into the current political condition on both continents. De Benoist clearly anticipated today’s political condition: the critique of neoliberalism, the contradictions in liberalism created by the postcolonial frictions of identity politics, and the implications of a resurgent populism. The specific forms of populist movements are sure to vary in the coming years, but the crisis of liberal democracy will remain the defining feature of political life for the foreseeable future. De Benoist explains why.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

Independent Publishing Awards for New Telos Press Books by Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt

Telos Press is delighted to announce that two of its recent book publications, Ernst Jünger’s Sturm and Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, have received IPPY Awards in the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards competition. Jünger’s Sturm, translated by Alexis P. Walker and edited by David Pan, received a Silver Award in the Military/Wartime Fiction category, and Schmitt’s Land and Sea, translated by Samuel Garrett Zeitlin and edited by Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, received a Bronze Award in the Religion category. Congratulations to everybody for their outstanding work on these two important books!

You can save 20% on these and other Telos Press books by purchasing them in our online store. Just use the coupon code BOOKS20 during checkout. When you order directly from the Telos Press website, you make it possible for us to publish the kinds of books that you want to read. As a small independent publisher, we rely on the support of our readers to continue producing new, challenging works in politics, philosophy, and critical theory. Visit our store for a complete listing of our books.

Continue reading →