By Carlos Gasperi · Friday, May 9, 2014 The following paper was presented at the Eighth Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–16, 2014, in New York City.
 In the following, I address the question of Venezuelan democracy under the fourteen-year mandate of recently deceased President Hugo Chávez from the philosophical perspective of Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire to Louis Bonaparte. Recent Latin American history of the past twenty years has seen a resurgence of leftist governments sympathetic to Cuba’s Marxist revolutionary ideals of the 1960s, where Venezuela is no exception. Focusing on one particular event in Venezuela’s contemporary history, I wish to accomplish two things. The first is to convince my audience that Nicolás Maduro’s inauguration ceremony of his then newly appointed presidential cabinet in late-April 2013 is the sharpest expression of the current failed state and non-direction of Chavismo in Venezuela, or more precisely, what I call the dissolution of its sensus communis. Second, I wish to advance a philosophical question for discussion among audience members, namely, does replicating a historically prior political ideology ever secure success for democracy within present historical circumstances; more succinctly, in other words, do anachronistic political experiments produce volatile democracies?
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By Matthew Bagot · Monday, May 5, 2014 The following paper was originally prepared for the Eighth Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–16, 2014, in New York City.
In this paper, I will try to show the positive potential of religion for democracy in light of some theoretical and practical considerations. At the theoretical level, a debate on the proper relation of religion to politics has taken place between certain “liberal” political theorists who are suspicious of religion for good historical reasons and a number of Christian authors who argue that religion can enrich our public life.[1] One such author, David Hollenbach, S.J., bases his argument on an approach to the common good—defined in Catholic teaching as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment”[2]—that he discerns at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and calls “dialogic universalism.”[3]
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By Richard R. Weiner · Friday, April 25, 2014 The following paper was presented at the Eighth Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–16, 2014, in New York City. It develops ideas that the author previously explored in “The Changing Forms of Contracting in a Society of Transnational Networks,” a paper delivered at the 2011 Telos Conference.
Can Critical Theory—rooted in the observation and dialectical understanding of the tensions and contradictions within the totality of interactions—bind itself like Odysseus in studying neoliberal social forms, so as to learn from them? And in so doing, discern in a Durkheimian manner emergent practices of self-binding and mutual bonds? Without foundering on neoliberalism’s reefs and rocks of sovereignty? Without falling prey to the collective addictions of the self-destructive financialized manipulations some neoliberal thinking spawns?
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, April 22, 2014 At the recent 2014 Telos Conference in New York City, we sat down with Marcia Pally, Professor at NYU, and Ulrike Kistner, Professor at University of Pretoria in South Africa, to discuss the importance of Telos conferences to their work. Here’s what they had to say.
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By James King · Friday, April 18, 2014 The following paper was presented at the Eighth Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–16, 2014, in New York City.
In the perspective of many, the prime criticism of liberal theories of democratic politics is that such theories proceed with a certain false and idealized individual in mind—these are great theories, elegant or hubristic, but at bottom, theories and not “real politics.” Political liberalism wrongly imagines the citizen to be a rational individual, sure of his will and life plans—or is this imagining wrong? The deeper critique holds that liberalism describes a peculiar individual, and that this individual really exists, but looks strangely like the liberal theorist and his class. Thus, for example, John Rawls’s theory of justice is suggested to fail women and the profoundly disabled. My critique today follows in this vein; I wish to add to this characterization of liberalism’s presumed political actor by showing him to be antiheroic.
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By Mark S. Weiner · Thursday, April 10, 2014 The following paper was presented at the Eighth Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–16, 2014, in New York City.
As the final speaker after a fascinating day of talks, I’ll keep my comments brief. I’ll be addressing two questions about democracy raised by our conference description: first, “the reasons for its rarity and volatility”; and, second, “the factors that are essential for its stability.” For each question, I’ll try to provide a concise, mildly provocative answer from my perspective as a writer and scholar about constitutional law and comparative legal history.
So why is democracy so rare and volatile? I think one answer we could give to this question is that democracy is volatile because the modern self is a legal achievement. There is nothing outside of law, including individual subjectivity. Instead, the modern self that lies at the center of liberal democratic practice developed only after a long historical process of dialectical negation and synthesis. In that process, a handful of societies, beginning in western Europe, transcended what in my most recent book I call the “rule of the clan.”
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