By David Pan · Friday, October 18, 2024 Telos 208 (Fall 2024): Carl Schmitt and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 It hardly needs mentioning that liberal democracy is facing a number of threats today, both internal and external. Even if the political parties in the United States cannot agree on the main source of the threats, they both believe that democracy is in danger. Democrats point to the January 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s role in it as examples of the way in which liberal democratic procedures are being directly attacked. Republicans point to the Democratic-backed court cases against Trump as well as the FBI’s favoritism toward Democrats in their public announcements before elections as evidence that the legal system and the administrative state are being used to shut out political opponents. Both parties point to violations of free speech rights at college campuses, yet they also both seek to establish limits to those rights in defense of liberal democratic values.
Meanwhile, authoritarian governments in places such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have becoming increasingly aggressive in opposing liberal democracies as threats to their own legitimacy. In doing so, they have attempted to provide theoretical justifications for their authoritarian rule that are based in anti-Western and anti-colonial discourses that align with critiques of the West advanced by left-leaning academics in liberal democracies.
Because they are based on freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, liberal democracies must allow open public spheres whose dynamics could take unforeseen directions that end up undermining the cultural and procedural foundations of liberal democratic governance. While the American Revolution provides the best example of the success of liberal democracy, the French Revolution and the Weimar Republic demonstrate spectacular failures. Outside of the West, the contrast between Taiwan and China and between Indonesian democracy and the Iranian Revolution indicate that we can find the same contrasts between failure and success in East Asia and in the Islamic world.
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By David Pan · Friday, July 12, 2024 Telos 207 (Summer 2024): Politics and the University is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 There is a fundamental arbitrariness about the work that is done at colleges and universities, which stems from the relationship between academic work and the political parameters of this work. The key issue is that the most basic aspect of our humanity involves having a sense of right and wrong. This sense of values sets the framework for all our other thoughts, actions, and decisions, providing direction and meaning for our lives.
The feeling that we are doing the right thing can motivate us to great achievements, and the loss of that feeling can lead us into inescapable despair. At the same time, when we perceive that others are doing wrong, we have a feeling of indignation at such injustice and seek to redress it. We will also judge the wrong doer in the same harsh light that we might use against ourselves when we fail to live up to our own ideals. Consequently, our sense of values will color all our perceptions and determine our decisions and judgments.
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By David Pan · Wednesday, April 24, 2024 The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative  Columbia University president Nemat Shafik’s recent testimony to Congress indicates an important shift in our conception of academic freedom. While affirming the legal principle of free speech, she clearly accepted limits on academic freedom by stating that calls for genocide have no place at the university. Since at least one issue would disqualify someone from participating in Columbia’s educational project, she opens up the question of the limits of academic freedom and the duty of a university to enforce such limits through decisions on hiring and dismissal of faculty as well as suspension of students. While the American Association of University Professors seeks to criticize such restrictions on academic freedom, its 1940 statement on academic freedom stipulates that “[i]nstitutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole.” The congressional hearings have demonstrated that the common good may require restrictions on academic freedom, and such restrictions indeed are already part of the way universities see their mission.
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By David Pan · Friday, April 5, 2024 Telos 206 (Spring 2024): The Intuitive and the Conceptual is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 We often have the experience of intuiting something without being able to precisely define what that intuition is. Sometimes this intuition leads to a more well-defined insight, and sometimes it might lead to some kind of action, even in the absence of clear conceptual definitions. Yet it is difficult to ascertain what kind of knowledge or awareness such intuitions consist of. What is an intuition as opposed to a defined concept of something? How seriously should we take such intuitions? Are they something separate and qualitatively different than concepts? Are they just fuzzy concepts? Do they really exist at all? These are crucial questions because they lead to conclusions about the status of concepts themselves. If the alternative to clear concepts is nothing at all, then the sociopolitical corollary would be that the alternative to conceptual knowledge and the holders of such knowledge would also be nothing at all. By contrast, if intuitions are separate from concepts and real, then expert knowledge might possibly have some deficiencies in comparison with intuitions. The essays in this issue of Telos explore in one way or another this question of the status of conceptual knowledge as opposed to intuitive awareness.
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By David Pan · Monday, February 12, 2024 
As much as war has become automated and mechanized, the subjective experience of the horror of war remains central to its meaning today. Russia, through its intentional bombing of civilians, and Hamas, with its massacres, have both sought to manipulate personal experience by terrorizing their enemies to achieve their war aims. Such tactics have also become the basis of their rule, in which they use fear to intimidate domestic political opponents to maintain their power. While they seek to create fear, the response of Ukrainians and Israelis alike has been to respond to subjective horror with the courage to maintain resistance while also affirming their values. War continues to be grounded in the way in which the participants’ most personal experiences can create a unified political will.
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By David Pan · Friday, January 12, 2024 Telos 205 (Winter 2023): Forms of War is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 One of the most challenging aspects of the wars in Ukraine and Israel is the way in which the conflicts have been constantly shifting in form. In the first place, there is a conventional ground war between Russia and Ukraine, in which the identity and will of the two peoples are at stake. Yet Russia has used weapons supplied by Iran and North Korea, and Ukraine relies on NATO for its own supplies, indicating that this war depends on the maintenance and expansion of alliances. The stability of these alliances in turn depends on a combination of Realpolitik and shared values as the glue that holds them together. This logic of alliances motivates the energy war that Russia is waging with Europe, revealing that, unbeknownst to Europe, Russian energy policy over the last decade was an early form of the war. Similarly, the threat of nuclear war also tests the resolve of NATO, forcing it to consider the values at stake in the conflict. Is the war about Ukraine’s sovereignty or the principle of nation-state sovereignty itself? Is it about human rights for Ukrainians or the entire human rights project? For Russia, is it about self-defense or a pan-Slavic identity? Is it about the protection of Russian minorities in Ukraine or the threat of Western secularization? The answers to these questions will determine the will to fight on each side and thus the length and ferocity of the war.
Similarly, the war between Israel and Hamas began with Hamas’s use of terror and rape as instruments of war. The idea was to provoke Israel into attacking Hamas and causing civilian casualties. Because the terrain of war extends to public opinion in the West, Hamas’s use of Israeli hostages and Palestinian human shields becomes part of its strategy of increasing civilian casualties in the war. Even though Hamas is the ultimate cause of such casualties, Hamas is able to pressure Israel by placing civilians in the path of Israel’s war effort. The conflict on the ground in Gaza is thus overshadowed by the struggle for hearts and minds across the globe.
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