Whether you attended or not, you’ll want to see this wonderful collection of photos from the recent Telos in Europe Conference, held in L’Aquila, Italy, in early September. Below is a sample, but you can view the full set over at our Facebook page. And just a reminder, there’s still time to submit your abstract for the upcoming 2015 Telos Conference in New York. For complete details, visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website.
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At the recent Telos Conference in L’Aquila, Italy, Associate Editor Adrian Pabst discussed his new article “Commonwealth and Covenant: The West in a Neo-Medieval Era of International Affairs,” which appears in Telos 168 (Fall 2014), a special issue on the theme of “The West: Its Past and Its Prospects.” Telos 168 is now available for purchase in our online store. Telos Press Publishing is pleased to announce that Matthias Küntzel’s Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold is now available for pre-order. The book will be released on November 1, 2014. Pre-order your copy today, and we will ship it as soon as it is in stock. The following paper was presented at the recent Telos in Europe conference on “The Idea of Europe,” held in L’Aquila, Italy, on September 5–8, 2014. In this short video, filmed at the recent Telos Conference in L’Aquila, Editor Russell A. Berman talks about the central themes and concerns of Telos 168 (Fall 2014): The West: Its Past and Its Prospects. We have posted Russell’s full introduction here, and you can order your copy of the issue in our online store. |
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When Karl Marx described the commodity, he invoked the language of faith. For him, the commodity remained “a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”[1] Marx, a dedicated secular economist, hesitated to pinpoint the exact power of the commodity. He could not fully understand it without recourse to a mythology he abhorred, one that far predated his radical recasting of accepted historical narratives. Here religion colors economics: the logic of exchange resembles a curious mysticism. 
In a paragraph of Daybreak, Nietzsche spoke of Romanticism’s “great reaction”[1] to the Enlightenment. Zeev Sternhell has brought out two distinctive elements of this centuries-long European revolt against the “rationalist modernity”:[2] the rejection of the claim to “mold people’s lives” by means of enlightened reason, and the reevaluation of faith as “an essential foundation of society”[3] accompanied by the idealization of the spiritually united medieval civilization as contrasted with the atomized modern society in the grip of decadence. This current of thought was the symptom of the crisis of the pre-Enlightenment traditional societies, described by Professor Pellicani as closed, static, rigidly prescriptive cultural universes in which, to cite Jaspers, “everything is under the control of symbols of being, held fast in unquestioned orders.”[4] The anti-Enlightenment movement aimed precisely at refounding these collapsed civilizations. One thinks of Novalis’s picture of medieval Europe pacified by the all-binding force of Christendom embodied by the clergy exercising a pastoral power in order to reshape men into salvation-worthy subjects. 
