By David Pan · Monday, August 8, 2022 Dear Telos readers,
I’m excited to invite you to attend a special event at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City on October 14–15, 2022, to celebrate the 200th issue of Telos, which will be appearing in Fall 2022. You can register for the event at the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website, at www.telosinstitute.net/telos200. The event will take place from 3 pm to 6 pm on October 14 and from 9 am to 5 pm on October 15. The admission is $100 for both days and includes a reception on October 14 and lunch on October 15.
The event will feature Joel Kotkin (author of The New Class Conflict) and Michael Lind (author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite) as keynote speakers, who will discuss the new politics of class.
Continue reading →
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.
Continue reading →
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.
Continue reading →
By David Pan · Monday, June 20, 2022 Telos 199 (Summer 2022): China and the West is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 The comparison of China and the West is in the first place a cultural problem to the extent that it requires a knowledge of both traditions and the ways in which they have related to each other. There has been a long history of interaction that has shaped the global economy from the times of the silk routes to the early modern push to find an alternative trade route to China in the European age of discovery and conquest. But the cultural comparison between China and the West today is inevitably overshadowed by a political dynamic in which the opposition reveals a rivalry that no longer exists, for instance, between Japan and the West. Indeed, the “West” in the opposition between China and the West could even be interpreted to include Japan or Taiwan. While the political opposition between China and the West may be reduced to the difference between authoritarianism and liberal democracy, this political dichotomy leads to cultural differences that result from the incompatibility between the two public spheres. While different public spheres will always manifest inconsistencies in terms of the problems and concerns that structure discussion and debate, China’s contemporary restrictions on free expression have separated it from the rest of the world in a more fundamental way by establishing an alternative version of historical facts. China’s alternative reality is not a consequence of its grounding in its distinctive cultural tradition but of the political decisions that have cut it off from the rest of the world. The attempt to compare China and the West must therefore take into account this politically enforced disjuncture.
It would be a mistake, though, to see China and the West as polar opposites or competing civilizations, separated by their opposing political interests on the one hand and by the history of each of their cultural traditions on the other hand. Even if they had separate long histories, the recent past has seen many more opportunities for interaction and orientation around common projects and problems. Moreover, since the past is always a projection from out of the present, the idea of a clash of civilizations is not a legacy but a project. An alternative endeavor would be to conceive of the relationship between China and the West as existing within a larger totality. The definition of such a totality must occur within a particular perspective, however, and therein lies the problem. China and the West are clearly competing to define the framework of global order. Consequently, any attempt to consider the relationship between the two must look to the vision of universality that each side is trying to establish against the other. This issue of Telos considers a variety of ways of defining the overarching perspective from which the comparison between China and the West makes sense.
Continue reading →
By David Pan · Wednesday, March 16, 2022 Telos 198 (Spring 2022): Challenging State Sovereignty: Mutual Aid or Civil War? is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 State sovereignty has a complicated relationship to individual rights. They are clearly in opposition, and both left-wing anarchist and right-wing libertarian critiques of the state have attempted to defend individual freedoms against the power of the state. Yet more traditional liberals and conservatives often see the state as the guarantor of individual rights, the left looking to the state as a provider of welfare services to the disadvantaged, and neoconservatives defending state power as the guarantor of individual rights against foreign aggressors as well as domestic enemies. These four different approaches map out a political landscape that is divided not just into left–right but also into pro- and anti-state tendencies.
In spite of this fragmentation, though, there are two main concerns that are shared. In the first place, there seems to be a general recognition among these different perspectives that the inhabitants of a state are not completely homogeneous and that the internal heterogeneity of a state should be at least in part the basis for domestic order. If libertarians prefer market-based structures and traditional conservatives look to family and religion, liberals seem to have gravitated toward identity-based groupings, and anarchists might prefer mutual aid organizations as independent places of sovereignty within which individuals can define themselves. The disagreements concern the type of heterogeneity that is being called for as well as the precise mechanisms for supporting diverse organizations within the state.
Continue reading →
By David Pan · Monday, September 20, 2021 Telos 196 (Fall 2021): Thinking vs. Doing is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 The dichotomy of thinking versus doing seems to arise out of our own sense of the difference between our minds and our bodies. On the one hand, the gap between mind and body is the basis of the perspective with which the mind can step back, criticize, and improve the world. Without this gap, we would be trapped in an eternal present, unable to imagine anything but what currently exists. On the other hand, the dichotomy can lead to a sense of detachment from the world. Such detachment can be negative if it leads to an isolation from the world, or to a sense of alienation if the world is such that its influence on the body becomes oppressive for the mind. The opposition between thinking and doing directs our attention toward this fundamental gap between the mind and the body within the human condition that is the source of both all human achievement as well as human debasement. As we focus on thinking, our detachment from our actions can allow us to make judgments about the wisdom of our actions, but such detachment can also lead us to bury ourselves in contemplation and ignore our responsibilities for acting, or even allow us to act with a kind of cruel coldness in trying to realize an abstract idea. This issue of Telos considers such different possibilities for the way in which we relate our thinking to our actions.
Continue reading →
|
|
