By Telos Press · Wednesday, May 22, 2019 Writing at the American Interest, Matthias Küntzel analyzes the divide between the United States and Germany regarding Donald Trump’s decision last year to withdraw the U.S. from the nuclear deal with Iran. In his book Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, published by Telos Press Publishing, Küntzel presents an extensive and detailed historical account of German-Iranian relations from the early twentieth century to the present, which provides essential context for understanding this split. Save 20% on your purchase of Küntzel’s Germany and Iran in our online store by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during checkout.
An excerpt from Küntzel’s recent essay:
 Trump’s decision is not without risk. Given the nature of the Iranian regime, irrational responses and war scenarios can’t be ruled out. Exactly one year after the United States left the deal, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced a partial withdrawal, saying Iran would keep excess enriched uranium and heavy water instead of selling it. Continuing the policy of nuclear blackmail, he threatens to resume higher uranium enrichment after 60 days. However, at least for the time being, Tehran seems not to be interested in a massive escalation.
Trump’s alternative approach—to put sufficient economic and political pressure on the Iranian leadership to compel it to sign a new agreement that would address not only Iran’s nuclear ambitions but also its missile program and regional warmongering—may be a long shot, but it is worth trying. Effective sanctions, however, require the cooperation of Iran’s most important trade partners, Germany and the European Union. And that is where the problem starts.
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By Telos Press · Friday, February 1, 2019 Writing at Infrapolitical Deconstruction, Gerardo Muñoz reviews the new English translation of Carl Schmitt’s The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts, now available from Telos Press Publishing. Order your copy in our online store, and save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.
An excerpt:
 As David Pan correctly observes in the Preface, the Schmitt that we encounter here is one that is confronting the transformations of political enmity in light of a gloomy and dangerous takeover of a global civil war. In fact, one could most definitely argue that the Schmitt thinking within the Cold War epochality is one that is painstakingly searching for a “Katechon,” that restraining force inherited from Christian theology in order to give form to the ruination of modern legal and political order. The global civil war, cloaked under a sense of acknowledged Humanism, now aimed at the destruction of the enemy social’s order and form of life. This thematizes the existential dilemma of a jurist who was consciousness of the dark shadow floating over the efficacy of Western jurisprudence. In other words, the post-war Schmitt is one marked by a profound Hamletian condition in the face of the technical neutralization of every effective political theology. This condition puts Schmitt on the defensive, rather than on the offensive, as his later replies to Erik Peterson, Hans Blumenberg, or Jacob Taubes render visible.
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By Telos Press · Monday, December 17, 2018 New from Telos Press: The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts, by Carl Schmitt. Translated by Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, edited by Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, and with a preface by David Pan. Order your copy in our online store, and save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.
 Written during the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, and the Cold War, this collection of occasional pieces provides an instructive look at the ways in which Carl Schmitt employed his theories in order to make judgments about contemporary historical events and problems. Covering topics such as the political significance of universalism and jurisprudence, the meaning of the partisan, the world-historical significance of the Cold War, the deterioration of metaphysics into “values,” the relationship between theoretical concepts and concrete historical situations, and his views on thinkers such as Machiavelli, Bodin, and Rousseau, these essays establish a revealing counterpoint to his more formal work. They react on the one hand directly to contemporary political questions and demonstrate the way in which he saw the immediate historical significance of his ideas. On the other hand, he also feels free to provide in these pieces the kinds of methodological reflections that help us to better understand the particular epistemological framework that makes his thought so unique.
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By Telos Press · Saturday, September 1, 2018 New from Telos Press: Democracy and Populism: The Telos Essays, by Alain de Benoist. Edited by Russell A. Berman and Timothy W. Luke. Order your copy in our online store, and save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.
 The crisis of democracy, the consequences of neoliberalism and globalization, the limits of sovereignty, and of course the rise of populism: few thinkers have given more sustained attention to these matters than the French author Alain de Benoist. Democracy and Populism collects de Benoist’s essays from the journal Telos, where many of his writings first appeared in English translation. Reading de Benoist in Telos provides access to a distinctive transatlantic intellectual dialogue and to an array of prescient insights into the current political condition on both continents. De Benoist clearly anticipated today’s political condition: the critique of neoliberalism, the contradictions in liberalism created by the postcolonial frictions of identity politics, and the implications of a resurgent populism. The specific forms of populist movements are sure to vary in the coming years, but the crisis of liberal democracy will remain the defining feature of political life for the foreseeable future. De Benoist explains why.
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By Telos Press · Friday, August 31, 2018 In a new opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post, Sean Durns discusses Matthias Küntzel’s Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, published by Telos Press. Pick up your copy of Germany and Iran in our online store, and save 20% with the coupon code BOOKS20.
 As the German historian Matthias Küntzel detailed in his 2014 book, Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, close ties between the two countries go back to the pre-World War I era.
In the late 19th century, Persian hopes for industrial development hinged on German know-how and technological prowess. After the ascension of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1888, “economic relations between the two countries began to expand swiftly” and “it became fashionable for young Persian intellectuals to be pro-German,” Küntzel notes.
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By Telos Press · Friday, August 10, 2018 Telos 50th Anniversary Sale! To help celebrate the 50th anniversary of Telos, we are offering a 20% discount on individual subscriptions and books purchased through the Telos Press website! Just use the coupon code TELOS50 during the checkout process. Offer expires August 31, 2018.
Writing at City Journal, Fred Siegel reports on the lively conversations at the Telos 50th anniversary event, held in June in New York City. An excerpt:
 Describing the vibrant intellectual life of New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage is one of my favorite books. “Alienated from alienation,” Broyard was fascinated by the lively parties where people debated so intensely that “we didn’t know where books ended and we began.”
Recently, I had the good fortune to attend such a gathering: a celebration held in honor of the 50th anniversary of Telos, the lively, unpredictable highbrow magazine founded in 1968 by Paul Piccone, then a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Buffalo. Piccone died in 2004, but Telos, unsubsidized by any university and unwilling to bend to any ideology, has continued as an independent journal under the talented tutelage of his widow, Mary, and the current editor, Russell Berman, who has written insightfully about the great German writer Ernst Jünger. Telos began as part of the New Left but later broke with all orthodoxy, publishing the Schmittians of the Left and Gramscians of the Right (referring to hard-Right 1930s German political philosopher Carl Schmitt and 1930s Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, both back in vogue today, but in unexpected places).
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