By Mathieu Slama · Monday, August 8, 2022 These remarks on the French Science Council were published in Le Figaro on July 7, 2022 and appear here with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
The Science Council met for the last time this week and has issued its 75th and final opinion. It will disappear officially on July 31. In its final statement, it underscored the importance of better scientific education for the youth, who will be the public leaders of the future, and it recommended the creation of a “Council of Science,” which would consist of a “group of scientists of the highest quality” to advise the head of state. Whether these recommendations are followed or not, it is likely that some new organ will be established in the coming months. In any case, we are at the end of an institution that played a decisive role throughout the public health crisis, and it is useful to offer a preliminary evaluation of it.
Composed of brilliant individuals and our best scientists, the Science Council—despite all the talent that it has included—has been one of the principal architects of the democratic debacle of the health crisis. And if there is a lesson to be drawn from this fiasco, it is that science should never be a substitute for politics and that political decisions cannot result simply from scientific expertise—at the risk of profoundly degrading our democracy.
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By David Pan · Monday, August 1, 2022  Concerns about inflation can lead us to exaggerate the role of money in the economy. In his essay on “Three Rival Versions of Monetary Enquiry,” in Telos 194, Edward Hadas argues that money is not at the center of economics. Instead, economics is fundamentally about what he calls the “Great Exchange,” in which people offer labor that changes the world and the world in return provides gifts to people in the form of goods and services. At its basis, this exchange involves the relationship between humans and nature, as well as the ways in which humans decide to manage this relationship. Though it can go on with or without money, money is very useful for managing the individual elements of the Great Exchange. As the mediator of the details of the Great Exchange, money is in fact neutral, neither a nefarious underminer of human relations nor a key to prosperity.
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By Telos Press · Monday, July 25, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Mark G.E. Kelly and Timothy W. Luke about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its consequences for world order. Our current issue, Telos 199 (Summer 2022), features essays by Luke, Kelly, and Pan on the war in Ukraine, excerpts of which appear here. Click through to read the full articles at the Telos Online website (subscription required). To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 199 are also available for purchase in our online store.
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By David Pan · Monday, July 18, 2022  The extended nature of the war in Ukraine stems from the long-term political and ideological developments that have led up to it and will continue to dominate it. In Russia, the government has maintained support for the war through the promotion of a civilizational narrative about Russian culture that has been established over the last twenty years. As Marcin Skladanowski describes in “Criticism of Western Liberal Democracy by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus'” (Telos 193), the Russian Orthodox Church has set up the conflict between Russia and the West as a moral one, in which Russia defends a divinely grounded morality against the amoral secularism of the West. This religiously grounded idea of a civilizational conflict exists alongside a philosophical explanation. In “The Ethnosociological and Existential Dimensions of Alexander Dugin’s Populism” (Telos 193), Michael Millerman describes Dugin’s Heideggerian attempt to establish civilizational differences between peoples as the basis for an anthropological theory of human existence. As Nikolai-Klaus von Kreitor recounts in “Elements of the New Russian Nationalism” (Telos 96), Dugin was already at work in the early 1990s on such ideas when he developed Carl Schmitt’s theory of the Grossraum in order to criticize U.S. imperialism and justify a Eurasian regional hegemony to counter the dominance of the Western liberal order.
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By Telos Press · Monday, July 4, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Courtney Hodrick about her article “From Neoreaction to Alt-Right: A Schmittian Perspective,” from Telos 198 (Spring 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss Carl Schmitt’s understanding of the relationship between liberalism and democracy, and how the separation of the two from each other leads to two versions of extreme right thinking; the general outlines of Mencius Moldbug’s rejection of politics in favor of markets and the relationship between this approach and Schmitt’s understanding of politics as based in the friend/enemy distinction; why Moldbug is an example of what Schmitt defines as liberal; how Moldbug’s ideas contrast with those of Richard Spencer and the extent to which Spencer is a Schmittian; and Curtis Yarvin’s recent shift away from his previous rejections of nationalism and whether this shift represents a merging of neoreaction with alt-right populism. 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 · Monday, June 27, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Georges Van Den Abbeele about his article “Can the Precariat Be Organized?: The Gig Economy, Worksite Dispersion, and the Challenge of Mutual Aid,” from Telos 198 (Spring 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the history of the welfare state in the context of mutual aid, the idea of the “precariat” and how it relates to the idea of the working class and the question of mutual aid, and the new forms of mutual aid that are now possible with the rise of both the gig economy and new forms of social interaction. 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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