By Arno Tausch · Tuesday, April 14, 2020  The global fallout from the miserable phytosanitary conditions at the Huanan Market in Wuhan, China, will change the fortunes of the twenty-first century. The countries at the center of the global economy, especially the eurozone, are now heading not only toward being at the receiving end of the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu of 1918–20, but also toward the abyss of an unprecedented economic recession. Amidst all this, in March 2020, the core of the European Union’s neoliberal fiscal policy framework, the Maastricht criteria, were put out of action. But what will follow next?
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has already called, with good reason, for special “corona bonds” to help EU states finance desperately needed health spending and economic rescue programs. With 20,465 coronavirus deaths as of April 14, 2020, Italy has ample reason to call for such “corona bonds.” The same applies to the other most seriously affected EU countries, Spain (18,056 deaths) and France (14,967 deaths). The idea is also welcomed by a growing number of leading global economists—but not by Austrian Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, one of the European leaders whose country and whose banks, like those of Germany and the Netherlands, were among the absolute winners in the eurozone redistribution of wealth since the 2008 crisis, to the detriment of the European South. Kurz, in many ways now the absolute trendsetter of center-right politics in Europe (at the pace that Germany’s Angela Merkel, by her perennial indecisiveness, leaves an ever bigger vacuum), was very quick to refer the suffering in Italy back to the same old European Stability Mechanism (ESM) that already caused so much stagnation in the European South since 2008.
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By Alain de Benoist · Friday, April 10, 2020 The following essay originally appeared in Valeurs actuelles on April 2, 2020, and is published here in English translation by permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman.
History is always open, as everyone knows, and this makes it unpredictable. Yet in certain circumstances, it is easier to see the middle and long term than the near term, as the coronavirus pandemic shows well. For the short term, one surely imagines the worst: saturated health systems, hundreds of thousands, even millions of dead, ruptures of supply chains, riots, chaos, and all that might follow. In reality, we are being carried by a wave and no one knows where it will lead or when it will end. But if one looks further, certain matters become evident.
It has already been said but it is worth repeating: the health crisis is ringing (provisionally?) the death knell of globalization and the hegemonic ideology of progress. To be sure, the major epidemics of antiquity and the Middle Ages did not need globalization in order to produce tens of millions of dead, but it is clear that the generalization of transportation, exchanges, and communications in the contemporary world could only aggravate matters. In the “open society,” the virus is very conformist: it acts like everyone else, it circulates—and now we are no longer circulating. In other words, we are breaking with the principle of the free movement of people, goods, and capital that was summed up in the slogan “laissez faire,” i.e., let it go, let it pass. This is not the end of the world, but it is the end of a world.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, April 9, 2020 Once upon a time, there was an illusion that the state would disappear. It was the fiction Marxists told each other at bedtime, and it was the lie of the Communists, once they had seized state power. For even as they built up their police apparatus and their archipelago of gulags, they kept promising that one day the state would eventually disappear.
Of course, in a sense, they were right because Communism ended and so did the Communist states in Russia and Eastern Europe. Yet the death of those regimes is in no way an argument for the death of statehood itself.
The state is the expression of sovereignty, and sovereignty is the ability of national communities to decide their own fates. Such independence is far from obsolete, and certainly not for the countries on the eastern flank of the European Union. After years of Russian occupation, they have regained their state sovereignty. They will continue to insist on it, and rightly so.
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By Anna G. Keller · Tuesday, April 7, 2020 Social and economic disruptions in the wake of this spring’s virus will be unevenly distributed in intensity and time. Socially distanced rural suffering will long outlast the news cycle and panic.
COVID-19 is a real crisis. It is unique for being concentrated for once in places where global travelers, professionals, and creatives live. When risk for those populations is controlled to a level they can accept, expect panic and restrictions to ease. Our world happily tolerates death tolls far in excess of the worst projected for COVID-19 when only rural people or people with a high school education or less are at high risk.
Kentucky, where I live, expects our COVID-19 crisis to peak on Saturday, May 16, with 1,600 hospitalized and 240 in ICU beds on that day. By then, New York is expected to no longer need any COVID-19 beds. Their peak will have been a month and a half previous. Kentucky (more accurately, Lexington and Louisville) will probably be fine when we peak. Tennessee (e.g., Nashville and Memphis) probably won’t. Expect the news to have moved on by then.
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By Arthur Bradley · Wednesday, April 1, 2020 Arthur Bradley’s “Terrors of Theory: Critical Theory of Terror from Kojève to Žižek” appears in Telos 190 (Spring 2020): Economy and Ecology: Reconceiving the Human Relationship to Nature. 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.
 This essay seeks to offer a new genealogy of contemporary critical theory of terror from Alexandre Kojève to Slavoj Žižek. It is clear that critical theory’s response to the volatile post-9/11 geopolitical landscape takes many forms, but one of its most controversial tasks has been a reclamation of the fatal signifier “terror” itself for the radical Left. According to thinkers such as Žižek and Alain Badiou, we must redeem the emancipatory core of the Jacobin Terror from its “Thermodorean” betrayal by two centuries of political and economic liberalism. Yet my claim is that this critical attempt to recuperate terrorism can only be understood in the context of a much longer debate about the meaning of “terror” within twentieth-century European philosophy, which stretches back to Kojève’s lectures on Hegel in the 1930s. This essay tracks the evolution of critical theory of terror from Kojève’s political ontology of terror in his (famously or notoriously) idiosyncratic interpretation of the Hegelian master–slave dialectic to its contemporary conclusion in Žižek’s embrace of Jacobin terror. If Kojève’s lectures effectively introduced Hegel into twentieth-century European philosophy, I will argue that they were also the platform for a wave of neo-Hegelian reflections on the historical, political, and philosophical stakes of terror including, most importantly, Emmanuel Lévinas’s Time and the Other (1947) and Maurice Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death” (1949). In conclusion, I contend that Žižek’s neo-Hegelian defense of the Jacobin leader Robespierre in recent works like In Defense of Lost Causes (2008) might, for better or worse, be read as the latest manifestation of this Kojèvean terrorist legacy.
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By Sean Winkler · Tuesday, March 24, 2020 Sean Winkler’s “Practice and Ideology in Boris Hessen’s ‘The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia’” appears in Telos 190 (Spring 2020): Economy and Ecology: Reconceiving the Human Relationship to Nature. 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.
In this paper, I examine the meaning of and relationship between “practice” and “ideology” in Boris Hessen’s “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia.” I propose that for Hessen, practice can be defined as the transformation of things-in-themselves into things-for-us, as well as the transformation of things-in-themselves into things-for-themselves. Ideology, for Hessen, refers to the specific difference between practice and theory, when the practical roots of theory are concealed. In section 1, I explain the Hessen theses and identify means and relations of production as the two kinds of practice presented in the Newton paper. In section 2, I trace the history of the composition and reception of the Hessen theses, showing that any attempt to understand practice and ideology in Hessen’s work requires incorporating his not only Marxist but Deborinite background. In section 3, I explain conceptions of practice and ideology from previous Marxist thinkers and how Hessen, as a Deborinite, may have integrated aspects of these conceptions into his own view. In section 4, I show that Nikolai Bukharin’s “Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism” provides the proper complement for understanding the remaining elements of Hessen’s account.
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