By Russell A. Berman · Monday, March 8, 2021 To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
 A distinctive feature of public debate in Germany involves prominent literary authors, especially novelists, expounding on current political matters in major newspapers. Thomas Brussig’s essay “Risk More Dictatorship,” translated here, belongs to this genre. Known especially for his satire of East Germany, Heroes Like Us, Brussig chose a provocative title that seems to echo and respond to Chancellor Willy Brandt’s appeal more than fifty years ago to “risk more democracy.” Brandt was speaking in 1969 at a pivotal moment in the history of West Germany, indeed of the whole world, in the face of the protests during the previous year; Brussig in contrast appeals for “more dictatorship” in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, which he depicts as a potentially similar turning moment, with an accelerated “learning process,” that calls old certainties into question. These include the “end of history” claim that liberal democracy is inevitable; Brussig suggests that the “impotence” of democracies in the face of the pandemic raises the question as to whether other forms of government might be superior. The Chinese model of dictatorship casts a shadow across the essay.
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By Telos Press · Monday, February 22, 2021 In the Spring issue of American Affairs, Blake Smith writes at length about Carl Schmitt’s “The Tyranny of Values,” the title essay of the collection The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts, published by Telos Press. Edited by Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, translated by Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, and with a preface by David Pan, Schmitt’s The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts is now available for purchase in our online store. Save 20% off the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.
An excerpt from the review:
 To those familiar with his most famous writings, it may seem that Carl Schmitt is an enemy of liberalism. In texts such as The Concept of the Political (1932) and Legality and Legitimacy (1932), Schmitt critiqued the Weimar Republic and the liberal tradition, the weaknesses of which Weimar seemed to embody. Liberalism, Schmitt argued, depends on systematic neutralizations—fictions by which all individuals and points of view are imagined to be equal, and by which the confrontations of political life seem to be transformed into peaceful, rule-governed debates with open-ended, undetermined outcomes. His writings during the Nazi era endorsed a new understanding of politics in which such deceptive procedures are replaced by the decisions of a charismatic leader who acts on behalf of a homogeneous people against its internal and external foes. Radicals of the Right and Left have found inspiration in Schmitt’s analysis of liberalism and calls for moving beyond it to a realistic and engaged theory that recognizes the insuperable conflicts at the heart of politics.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, December 29, 2020 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with David Pan about his article “State, Movement, People: Representation and Race in the Construction of Political Identity,” from Telos 189 (Winter 2019). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 189 in our online store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By Telos Press · Thursday, December 10, 2020 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Devin Singh about his article “Exceptional Economy: Sovereign Exchanges in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 191 in our online store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By Telos Press · Friday, February 21, 2020 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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By Qi Zheng · Wednesday, July 24, 2019 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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