By David Pan · Monday, October 19, 2026 Telos 216 (Fall 2026): Dangers to Democracy is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 We are still living in the shadow of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, when the theological and monarchical justifications for political authority began to lose legitimacy. Individual autonomy, open debate, and evidence-based reasoning were to replace adherence to traditions and established authorities as the basis for political order and decision-making in a democracy. Almost immediately after the enunciation of this new perspective, though, left-wing and right-wing reactions developed. On the left, there was a critique of liberal proceduralism on the part of those French revolutionaries who sought to engineer egalitarian social outcomes, even against democratic majorities. On the right, thinkers such as Joseph de Maistre defended established religions and traditions, which were held to be essential for maintaining moral constraints on otherwise purely self-interested decision-making in a democracy. While religious conservatives continually lost ground in the process of secularization, socialism and nationalism gained importance to the extent that they provided secular theologies to replace the religious ones.
Socialism and fascism became important in the twentieth century but then were discredited as key political theologies. Meanwhile, the victory of liberalism at the end of the Cold War actually presaged its crisis. When liberalism could finally implement the Enlightenment project on a global scale, the focus on rational methods in fact could not answer the political theological question of legitimacy. In the twenty-first century, nationalism, religion, and a revived socialism have reasserted themselves as the mythic bases for political identity, while liberal rationalism deteriorated into the ideology of the new class of bureaucratic managers of human life. Against the liberal new class, populist identity politics has gained ground in nationalist, religious, socialist, and anti-imperialist variants, or combinations thereof.
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By David Pan · Monday, January 6, 2025 Telos 209 (Winter 2024): Democracy Today? is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 Since the supposed triumph of liberal democracy with the end of the Cold War, democracy seems now to be in retreat. The hung parliaments in France and Germany, reminiscent of the divides of Germany’s Weimar Republic; the just-in-time reversal of the declaration of martial law in South Korea; the increasing authoritarianism of China, Iran, and Russia; and the deterioration of democratic norms in the United States are all indications that the liberal democratic end of history was a chimera.
What is the situation of democracy today? Are the present problems simply growing pains in the inevitable march of history, or are there fundamental limitations of this political form? Is democracy a stable form of government or a delicate balancing act that will always be at risk of deteriorating and being replaced by some form of authoritarianism?
These current indications of the precarity of democracy also coincide, however, with an intense concern for its future. Never has there been such a focus on democracy as a political goal. During the Cold War, the United States, more concerned about promoting capitalism than defending democracy, supported capitalist authoritarianism in places such as Chile, South Korea, and Taiwan. But as it turned out, capitalism did not really need such political backing. In the Cold War between capitalism and communism, the latter lost based on its inability to produce economic growth. Insofar as communism’s undermining of private property and market mechanisms proved to be economically catastrophic, even nominally communist governments in China and Vietnam have since voluntarily embraced capitalist economic policies. Aside from U.S. college campuses, the only diehard Marxists left are in Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, all of whose governments are presiding over the immiseration of their peoples.
While it was the Soviet Union, and not capitalism, that collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, the general recognition of these contradictions meant that communism could only maintain itself by using repressive methods. Communism has been one of the surest ways of moving toward and cementing authoritarianism and totalitarianism. By contrast, capitalist authoritarianism has sometimes led to democratic reforms, and we can point again to Chile, South Korea, and Taiwan, but also to the countries of Eastern Europe, as successful transitioners to democracy within a capitalist framework. Unfortunately, while communism might correlate strongly with authoritarianism, the link between capitalism and democracy does not seem to be so tight.
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By Telos Press · Wednesday, May 3, 2023 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Matthew Dal Santo about his article “Russia, the Ukraine War, and the West’s Empire of Secularization,” from Telos 201 (Winter 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss Augusto Del Noce’s view of twentieth-century secularization as the unfolding of the philosophy of atheism; how Del Noce understood secularization; why, if Marxism is atheistic, Del Noce sees the West as more atheistic than the Soviet Union; why the alliance between the United States and Ukraine is a secularist one; why it is necessary to link religion and politics to avoid secularization; how the idea of the Holy Rus’ presents a politics that realizes a religious project rather than one that replaces a religious project with a nationalist political one, and how we might differentiate between the two possibilities; the distinction between the causality of (or immediate reasons for) the war in Ukraine and its meaning (or higher causality); and how to make sense of a contradiction between the two in the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 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 201 are available for purchase in our online store.
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By Telos Press · Monday, May 23, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Martin Tomszak about his article “‘With Desire I Have Desired’: Enjoying the Face of the Other as Political Theology: John Caputo and Dorothy Day Situating Hospitality as Divine Encounter,” from Telos 198 (Spring 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the basic tenets of the theology of divine weakness, as developed by John Caputo; how this theology arises out of Caputo’s reading of Derrida and his rereading of scripture, specially Luke’s description of the life of Jesus of Nazareth; how Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement translated this theology of divine weakness into practice; how this theology relates to the writings and praxis of Peter Maurin; and how Day and Maurin understood the idea of state sovereignty and why they were opposed to state-sponsored forms of welfare. 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 198 are available for purchase in our online store.
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By Telos Press · Friday, July 2, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Beau Mullen about his article “Turmoil in Egypt: Faith, Nationalism, and the Apparent Inadequacies of Liberalism,” from Telos 194 (Spring 2021). 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. Print copies of Telos 194 are available for purchase in our online store.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, April 20, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with David A. Westbrook about his article “Social Capitalism: A Descriptive Sketch,” from Telos 194 (Spring 2021). An excerpt of the article appears here, and we are providing free open access to the full article at the Telos Online website. To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 194 are available for purchase in our online store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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