By Telos Press · Friday, September 4, 2026 Karl Wittfogel’s 1957 magnum opus, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, came out at the peak of the Cold War. As a former Marxist, Wittfogel saw analysis of what he called “hydraulic despotism” in premodern Asian bureaucratic empires as of more than merely regional or historical interest. With an eye to Soviet and Maoist developments, he argued that “[t]otal power, far from merely meekly withering away, is spreading like a virulent and aggressive disease. It is this condition that recalls man’s previous experience with extreme forms of despotic rule.”
Wittfogel contrasted “hydraulic societies” with feudalism and modern capitalism. Driven by ecological imperatives of irrigation and flood control, bureaucratic systems emerged in much of Asia and achieved sustained domination over rival power centers in society. Just as private property existed on the sufferance of political power, so too did individual ambition and social prestige gravitate to state service. While this model prevailed longest and most consistently in settings like ancient Egypt, Mughal India, and premodern China, it found analogues elsewhere whenever material conditions and rulers’ convenience converged, including the Roman and Inka Empires. No part of the world, Wittfogel warned, was immune to hydraulic taming of free peoples; they succumbed on the frontier more easily than they might imagine. In the Cold War context of modern state socialism, indeed, such hierarchical systems could penetrate even more deeply into daily life: “The industrial despotism of the fully developed and totally managerial apparatus society combines total political power with total social and intellectual domination.”
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By Telos Press · Monday, August 24, 2026 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Telos editor David Pan talks with Alvise Capria about his article “Sous l’œil des Chinois: The Reception of Carl Schmitt in Contemporary Chinese Political Thought,” from Telos 215 (Summer 2026): China and Sovereignty. An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the primary reasons that Chinese scholars look to Schmitt when thinking about political theory; the distinct currents in the Chinese reception of Schmitt, including Taiwan, Liu Xiaofeng, political constitutionalism (Chen Duanhong and Gao Quanxi), and the New Left (Wang Hui and Cui Zhiyuan), and how these currents are distinguished from each other; how the Chinese engagement with Schmitt is part of an attempt to develop an indigenous political theory, and how successful that attempt has been. 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. Print copies of Telos 215 are available for purchase in our online store.
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By David Pan · Friday, July 17, 2026 Telos 215 (Summer 2026): China and Sovereignty is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 China remains the inscrutable elephant in the room for the world’s political theorists and policymakers. Its growing importance to the world’s economy and politics compels us to continue to analyze its ideological currents and political conflicts. While scholars inside and outside of China struggle with the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to censor debate, it is all the more necessary to engage scholars in productive discussions that provide real analysis rather than talking points. The essays in this issue on China and sovereignty discuss how China has engaged with Western thinkers, in particular Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Carl Schmitt, to develop its own basis for sovereignty and its vision for world order. Subsequently, our authors offer conflicting perspectives on the nature of the Chinese government and how the United States should respond to China’s rise.
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By Eric Hendriks and David Pan · Friday, April 3, 2026 Telos 214 (Spring 2026): China Keywords II is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 Modern China emerged through the struggle with the customs and traditions of imperial China. This struggle continues in present-day attempts to think through how earlier customs, on the one hand, remain active in Chinese culture and, on the other, have been transformed by China’s modernization. And then there are the customs that have been cut off by modernity; to what extent and in which ways can or should they be revived?
The central challenge is that China has undergone spectacular political and social transformations over the past century, meaning that older ideas and customs must now operate within an entirely new sociopolitical context. Consider how different the political imagination was in imperial (neo-)Confucian China, which placed the imperial court at the center of the cosmos. Before the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China saw itself as Zhongguo (中国) or Zhonghua (中华), meaning the “Middle Kingdom” and the “central civilization,” respectively. Thus, far from conceiving itself as merely one country among others, it imagined itself as the morality-carrying center of the tianxia (天下), “all under heaven,” which could only be harmoniously ordered if its Chinese center itself was properly ordered.
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By Eric Hendriks and David Pan · Tuesday, December 30, 2025 Telos 213 (Winter 2025): China Keywords I is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 China saturates Western media and academic discourse, invoked incessantly as a force remaking the world, while the political and social-theoretical ideas through which China thinks, judges, and interprets that world remain largely unheard. Western discourses on China exhibit a persistent tendency toward objectification and reification. Chinese phenomena figure as objects of analysis, yet such analyses rarely delve into their subjective-interpretative depth. Were they to do so, they would encounter these “objects” as subjects who actively make sense of their worlds, carrying ideas, ideals, and self-conceptions embedded in distinct interpretive traditions. At the same time, Western media and academics are often unaware that their own views are actively influenced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which spends $10 billion per year on international propaganda efforts that include advertising, news production, and social media campaigns.
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By David Pan · Monday, June 30, 2025 Telos 211 (Summer 2025): Dispatches from the Culture Wars is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 As we survey the landscape of war today, it has become truer than ever that hot wars are a consequence of culture wars. Trump’s support for Israel against Iran contrasts with the discourse on college campuses that opposes Israel as a white supremacist, settler-colonial state. In opposing the most egalitarian liberal democracy in the Middle East, this left-wing perspective poses a major threat to the liberal values that the United States has always stood for. But the anti-Israel protests at colleges represent only the tip of the iceberg of a more widespread form of hierarchical rule that has established itself globally through a “new class” of managers. Looked at in this way, the culture war at U.S. universities will have far-reaching consequences for the future of the world. At stake are not merely research funding and tax breaks, but a social structure that privileges expert opinion over popular rule in all areas of our society. Colleges and universities are the key to this system, as the social sciences train the professionals that go on to manage the lives of the uncredentialed, while the humanities develop the perspectives that justify this form of managerial rule. In this issue of Telos, we consider how today’s culture wars over universities will shape the global future.
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