Though his defense of National Socialism has earned him the reputation of being an ideologue, the most striking aspect of Carl Schmitt’s political career is the changeable nature of his political loyalties, in which he defended both Roman Catholicism and then the Weimar Republic before he came to ally himself with the Nazis. If a certain amount of opportunism may have also played a part in his decision-making, his promiscuity also testifies to a basic agnosticism in his political beliefs that is grounded in his theoretical approach to the notion of culture. Because this approach begins with a Nietzschean delegitimation of value systems with a universal and preordained claim to truth, Schmitt’s thinking develops as an attempt to understand politics in a multicultural world. His theories of decisionism and representation presume a world in which diverse value systems compete in order to establish the metaphysical foundations for order in a given time and place.
|
Rituals of Exchange and States of Exception: January 15-16, 2011 Whether they allow the circulation of ambassadors or of capital, exchange networks provide the basis for global cross-cultural relationships. Though liberal democratic governments pride themselves on the rationality of their procedures, diplomatic protocols and the give-and-take of parliamentary politics attest to complex customs that lie at the heart of such practices. Similarly, recent crises have demonstrated that international financial markets cannot be reduced to a numbers game, however complex, but function on the foundation of a network of promises whose dependability is a matter of habits. Focusing on the contemporary world, this conference will investigate the rituals and protocols that regulate political and economic relations in areas of stability and the underlying forces that come to the fore in periods of crisis. We encourage submissions of paper proposals from scholars in a variety of disciplines including critical theory, philosophy, literature, politics, theology, anthropology, political economy, and cultural studies. The 2010 Telos Conference is scheduled for Saturday, January 16, 2010, in New York City. The topic will be “From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama.” Click here to register at the Telos Institute website. This talk was presented at the 2009 Telos Conference. As we consider U.S. foreign policy for the next several years, there seems to be a growing consensus that the United States will have to adjust to a less unilateral role in maintaining world order and that we will be living in a more multipolar world. This is the conclusion of Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, recently published by the National Intelligence Council. But this report’s view that such a multipolar world will lead to both an end of ideology and a return to the kind of balance of power politics of the nineteenth century overlooks major ideological differences between different cultures that will likely become more prominent in global politics. To understand why, we should consider both the motivations of recent U.S. engagements with the rest of the world and the ideological implications of shifting power constellations in the future. Though it is still premature to speak of a victory in Iraq, there seems to be no question that the tide of the war has turned against al-Qaeda and Muqtada al-Sadr’s militias and toward the Iraqi government. As Kimberly Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan remark, “where the U.S. was unequivocally losing in Iraq at the end of 2006, we are just as unequivocally winning today.” This turn of events in the last 18 months, and particularly since March, confirms the wisdom of the U.S. military’s turn to a classic counterinsurgency approach to the war, involving a focus on protecting the civilian population and building close relationships with local groups. Their ability to effect this turnaround so quickly is a tribute to their flexibility and resourcefulness in shifting their basic stance. But it is also an indication about some of the ideological realities in Iraq. Though different enemies have come and gone, the ideological underpinnings of U.S. foreign policy have remained fairly consistent from the Vietnam War to the present War in Iraq. The goal of this foreign policy has been to defend liberal democracy against its opponents, but this goal has been undermined both in Vietnam and in Iraq by the neoconservative belief that the aspiration to democracy is universal because everyone is interested in freedom. This argument neglects the fact that the U.S. is not promoting democracy per se, but a particular form of democracy dominated by liberal principles of government. Because liberal democracy consists of a set of procedures like elections and legislative decision-making, neoconservatives assume that it is a universal and rational form of government that can be implemented anywhere and anytime in order to create human freedom. But procedures such as elections and legislatures are not in fact a part of a universal aspiration toward freedom but make up a set of specific traditions and rituals. The establishment of liberal democracy consequently is not simply a matter of allowing a natural development to occur in the absence of violence, but consists in the establishment of a certain form of political representation and liberal procedures. |
   |
|||
|
Telos Press Publishing · PO Box 811 · Candor, NY 13743 · Phone: 212-228-6479 Privacy Policy · Data Protection Copyright © 2024 Telos Press Publishing · All Rights Reserved |
||||
In the context of a dramatic reorganization of the relationships among state, market, and society, the 2010 Telos conference will turn its attention to competing accounts, both theoretical and empirical, of the new modalities of administration, domination, and power. Facing the authoritarian state and a politicized market, how does one “defend society”? Has the strong state and a repoliticization of society returned in the name of left populism in the United States? How does international power operate in new forms of empire? How will Obama’s foreign policy and the economic crisis affect the structure of global relations? 
