Since their defeat at the polls last November, Republicans have been desperate to recruit more racial minorities to their side. Some, like former Secretary of State Colin Powell, have exhorted the Republican Party to become more moderate and more “inclusive.” Others, like Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, have suggested giving the party a “hip-hop” makeover. President Barack Obama’s recent nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court should remind Republicans that a better approach would be a wholesale rejection of the perverse but pervasive framework of identity politics championed by the left.
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The Third Annual Telos Conference is scheduled for Saturday, January 16, 2010, in New York City. The topic will be “From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama.” In the context of a dramatic reorganization of the relationships among state, market, and society, the 2010 Telos conference will turn its attention to competing accounts, both theoretical and empirical, of the new modalities of administration, domination, and power. Facing the authoritarian state and a politicized market, how does one “defend society”? While it may come as little surprise to many, Leo Strauss’s (1899–1973) legacy remains today at the center of a rather heated and ongoing controversy. His powerful indictments of social scientific relativism and historicism, beginning in the 1930s and spanning the rest of his career into the 1960s, charge the social and political sciences with an ignorance, or, what is even worse, with an active denial of founding principles in the break with natural right. President Barack Obama swept into office promising to replace American hubris with humility and diplomacy. Instead of George W. Bush’s visions of a democratic revolution in the Middle East and an end to tyranny in the twenty-first century, President Obama vowed to bring back love for America in foreign capitals from Paris to Tehran. Three and a half months into the new U.S. presidency, however, Beijing has presented numerous complications for Obama’s wishful thinking and self-adulation. Since Obama’s inauguration, Chinese leaders have been busy complaining about U.S. policies. Modern liberalism has been defined conceptually as the experimental method applied to politics and as the mentality which insists that culture, not nature, puts the future of humanity in its own hands. In terms of American history, modern liberalism is presented as an adaptation of nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberal individualism to the growth of big business, and as an updated expression of Jacksonian animus to vested interests. There is something substantial in all of these approaches. But, even taken together, they leave out a great deal. Michèle C. Cone’s review of Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine’s Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: l’oubli du fascisme: trois intellectuels roumains dans la tourmente du siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002) appears in Telos 146. Nicole Burgoyne followed up with some questions. Nicole Burgoyne: In discussing the success of Ionesco, Cioran, and Eliade in postwar France, despite their earlier ties to the Fascists, you postulate that in addition to the authors’ successful hiding of their past, a “conscious or unconscious complicity” of France’s postwar intellectual community provided a supporting network. Do you subscribe to such historical accounts of postwar France’s national narrative as Henry Rousso’s The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944? Rousso’s history traces the development of Gaullist myth as a political creation, but credits creative works like The Sorrow and the Pity with shattering it. Where do Lavastine’s three subjects, and her research itself, fit into this history? |
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