Karl Jaspers' Concept of Universal History in the Context of his Age and Ours

Already in the first third of the 20th century, Karl Jaspers began formulating a philosophy that addressed the collapse of Enlightenment concepts of universal history and offered a perspective that could help us reformulate “universal history” as a viable concept. Jaspers’ work in this area is, I believe, underappreciated, and constitutes a realistic “cosmopolitan vision” that could help us address many of the thorny issues of global cultural conflict and diversity that we face today.

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More Scenes from the 2015 Telos Conference

Here are a few more photos from the 2015 Telos Conference, held last month in New York City. We will be posting conference papers and a few videos in the near future, so stay tuned. Special thanks to our photographer/videographer Gabe Miller for capturing the conference on film.

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Joel Kotkin on the New American Oligarchy

In an incisive and thoughtful review essay in Quadrant (March 2015), Peter Murphy examines Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict and the prognosis for America in the “post-creative economy.” Read the full essay (subscription required) at Quadrant Online. Purchase your copy of The New Class Conflict in our online store.

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The Contradictions of Power

In November 1939, gangs of German civilians and Nazi operatives stormed Jewish stores, synagogues, and homes, killing or arresting those who could not escape. The Nazi leadership had carefully planned the assault—Kristallnacht would become only one among many instances of unimaginable horror. In the coming years, the Nazis proceeded to murder thousands of disabled Germans; when Germany invaded Russia, groups of special units—known as Einsatzgruppen—followed closely behind the German army, liquidating Jews, Communists, and Roma.[1] By 1942, the Nazi death camps had initiated yet another gruesome and terrifying phase of the Reich’s program of anti-Semitism and racial purity.[2]

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Scenes from the 2015 Telos Conference in New York

Here are just a few of the photos we took at last weekend’s Telos Conference in New York City. By all accounts the conference was a tremendous success, filled with lively conversation, thoughtful debate, delicious food, and our usual dose of February snow. We will be posting more media and writing from the conference shortly, so stay tuned!

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Schmitt, Hamlet, and Aesthetic Idlers

In his essay “Political Aesthetics: Carl Schmitt on Hamlet,” David Pan puts forward an interpretation of the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Schmitt’s discussion of Hamlet. Today the question about the relationship of aesthetics and politics in the thought of German jurist is a widely discussed topic. According to one interpretation, which is best represented by a sentence of Jürgen Habermas, “Carl Schmitt’s polemical discussion of political Romanticism conceals the aestheticizing oscillations of his own political thought.” But according to Schmitt’s self-understanding, this interpretation could not be further from the truth.

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