By Alexandre Lefebvre · Wednesday, April 13, 2011 Alexandre Lefebvre’s “Law and the Ordinary: Hart, Wittgenstein, Jurisprudence” appears in Telos 154 (Spring 2011). Read the full version at TELOS Online website.
 This essay argues that H. L. A. Hart’s concept of jurisprudence in the first chapter of The Concept of Law is strongly influenced by the relationship that Wittgenstein establishes between ordinary and metaphysical language. The article is divided into three sections. The first section shows how jurisprudence emerges as a denial of ordinary language in its pursuit of a definition of law. The second section traces Hart’s use of ordinary language to identify idleness or emptiness in jurisprudence. The third section presents Hart’s conception of his work as therapeutic in its attempt to lead jurisprudence back to the everyday.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, April 12, 2011 From the Sharjah Call for Action website:
International and local art community condemns unwarranted dismissal of Sharjah Art Foundation Director Jack Persekian and the censorship of artworks in the Sharjah Biennial.
On April 6th, 2011, Jack Persekian, Director of the Sharjah Art Foundation since 2005, was dismissed without notice by the ruler of Sharjah, HH. Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammad Al Qasimi. The sudden termination of Persekian’s post came after a public outcry over the perceived offensive content in an artwork exhibited in the 10th edition of the Sharjah Biennial by Algerian artist, journalist and activist Mustapha Benfodil.
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By Grant Havers · Friday, April 8, 2011 Grant Havers’s “James Burnham’s Elite Theory and the Postwar American Right ” appears in Telos 154 (Spring 2011). Read the full version at TELOS Online website.
This article discusses the reasons for the postwar American Right’s inattention to elite theory, or the study of the relation between elites and the masses. James Burnham, the most influential elite theorist of the postwar Right, has attracted the greatest interest in his work from the Left rather than the Right. His historicist appraisal of Machiavelli’s analysis of the elitist use of ethics failed to attract “value conservatives” on the Right who believed that the preservation of “timeless” values was unrelated to elite power. While his usage of Machiavelli’s realpolitik might have attracted populists on the Right who were suspicious of elites, Burnham rejected the populist belief in the people’s “virtue.” Yet Burnham’s theory of elite power deserves two cheers from conservatives for understanding both the historic relativity of values as well as the willingness of the masses to obey the elites. Burnham’s historicism and anti-populism might have saved conservatives from pinning their hopes in either the power of values or the people to effect change. Nevertheless, Burnham’s lack of interest in the power of mass religious belief compromises the value of his understanding of power, since, unlike Machiavelli, he underestimated the degree to which popular religion can threaten the power of elites.
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By Samuel Tadros · Tuesday, March 29, 2011 A couple of days ago I was asked about the chances of liberal forces in Egypt after the referendum results. My response was in the negative. The young activists that are often described in the Western media as liberal, democrat, or secular stand no chance in the next parliamentary elections scheduled for next September. My judgment is not only based on the existence, or lack thereof, of those forces or their strength, but also on the nature of the elections system in Egypt and the way the districts are drawn. The overrepresentation of the countryside and the two-candidate district design means that the “liberal” forces only stand a chance in competing in 21 districts out of 222. Even if they win all of those seats, they will represent less than 10% of the members of parliament. Of course some traditional opposition politicians will win elsewhere, but they will totally depend on their family connections in those districts and will run as traditional patriarchal candidates.
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By Álvaro Cúria · Thursday, March 17, 2011 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2011 Telos Conference, “Rituals of Exchange and States of Exception: Continuity and Crisis in Politics and Economics.”
 This work results from the development of a Master’s thesis for the Master in Communication Sciences, at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto. My thesis was under the theme “The Communication of Communist Ideology after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Limitations, Disruptions and Opportunities. The Portuguese Case: The Image of the Portuguese Communist Party in the 21st century.” Our main question is whether communism is recognized as being valid today. The thesis is based on a theoretical and methodological approach on the identity, historical background, and validity of certain vectors related to communist ideology in today’s society. The object of the work is the communist ideology, mainly the European communism and the Portuguese Communist Party. A second part of this research work is complemented with a study of the party’s image made after conducting a survey of 600 students from the University of Porto.
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By Richard R. Weiner · Monday, March 14, 2011 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2011 Telos Conference, “Rituals of Exchange and States of Exception: Continuity and Crisis in Politics and Economics.”
Whereas the new millennium brought with it a focus on “collision rules” within global governance and corporate governance, the economic crises emerging out of 2008 turned the focus to the failure of regulatory practices. The current crises challenge not only a neoliberal hegemony but the New Deal/Great Society coordinating state model as well; as we have moved not only beyond a society of individuals to a society of organizations. We live now in a society of transnational network contracting and corporate governance practices. This society of networks can no longer be clearly associated with traditional conceptions of state, market or civil society/public versus private. Amidst this crisis, emerging legal challenges can no longer be coped with by institutions and ritualized routines of laissez-faire liberalism, social liberalism, or neoliberalism. This paper redirects focus to an increasingly disembedded style of contracting amidst multi-polar and multi-rational regimes of conflict regulation/dispute resolution. In doing so this paper starts from the prism of contracting practices and rituals: arguing that an understanding of how the discourse of “governing contracts” is continually and irreversibly implicated in the evolution of a network of heterarchical private relationships and public institutions.
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