The Telos Student Seminars provide a forum for students around the world to engage with critical theory by discussing a common set of paired texts from Telos—one current essay and one pertinent essay from our archives. The following reports from our first Telos Student Seminars at Concordia University in Irvine, California, and the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China, compare Paul Kahn’s “Law and Representation: Observations from an American Constitutionalist” (Telos 195, Summer 2021) and Paul Piccone’s “The Crisis of Liberalism and the Emergence of Federal Populism” (Telos 89, Fall 1991). The Irvine seminar advocates addressing the political challenges highlighted by Kahn and Piccone through a new American civil religion “built on mysticism,” while the Nanjing group took the seminar as an occasion for a wide-ranging, cross-cultural discussion about society and politics. Telos Student Seminars participants across the globe will gather virtually for a discussion with Paul Kahn at the end of this month. For more details about the Telos Student Seminars, including summaries of the two essays under discussion, click here.
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Telos 197 (Winter 2021): The Modern City in World Cinema, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Sheldon Lu, is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
The following essay originally appeared at The Hill. It is republished here by permission of the author. The Biden administration promised to return American foreign policy to reliability and international leadership after the disruptions of the Trump years. Yet its egregious mismanagement of the exit from Afghanistan has damaged America’s global standing and undercut the credibility of three of the administration’s foreign policy planks. President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were supposed to repair transatlantic relations by reassuring our European allies, give priority to human rights in all decisions, and counter Chinese ambitions. The deeply flawed execution of the Afghanistan withdrawal undermines all those aspirations and leaves the Biden foreign policy vision in shambles. The diplomatic team that was supposed to bring professionalism has left America rudderless. Telos 195 (Summer 2021): Global Perspectives on Constitutionalism and Populism is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
This essay was published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on February 9, 2021, and appears here in translation with permission of the author. Footnotes have been added for clarification. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here. The author intends the title as an ironic reference to Chancellor Willy Brandt’s 1969 statement that Germany “must risk more democracy.” To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
Sigmund Freud spoke of “three blows to humanity”: first, the Copernican worldview that pushed us out of the center of the universe; second, Darwinism, according to which we did not descend from God but from monkeys; and third, psychoanalysis, which teaches that we are not self-determined but only act due to hidden, unconscious, and instinctual motivations. Now we can speak of three blows to democracy, although it was only thirty years ago when liberal self-consciousness stood at its high point. According to the popular thesis of an “end of history,” market economies and democracy had achieved such an indisputable victory that nothing would stop their spread around the world. To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
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The corona crisis remains an experience of helplessness, even though infection rates are falling. Despite all the limitations on everyday life and despite the start of the vaccinations, an end to the restrictions is nowhere in sight—even though a few countries have succeeded in stopping the virus. The feeling of helplessness in the face of corona is due to the fact that we have had to surmount the corona crisis with the tools of democracy. 
