By Otfried Höffe · Thursday, February 11, 2021 Otfried Höffe is a philosopher known especially for his writings on Aristotle, Kant, and ethics. In April 2020 he was appointed to the twelve-member Corona expert commission to advise the government of Nordrhein-Westfalen. The University of Chicago Press has recently published a translation of his Critique of Freedom: The Central Problem of Modernity. The following essay appeared in Die Welt on February 3, 2021, and is translated here with permission of the author.
 It is hard to believe. More than seventy years after the adoption of the Basic Law, a constitution opposed to all dictatorships, two principles have ceased to be self-evident: the content of the basic freedoms and the separation of powers in the organization of the state.
That the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the policies of all states is obvious, as is the fact that one could hardly expect to reach an optimal strategy spontaneously. However one should not forget that the virus, and consequently COVID-19, has been known since December of 2019. Therefore the experts and, prompted by them, the media and the politicians should have started making plans already then. One should not have waited for the pictures from Bergamo from February and March 2020 and then react in the sort of panic that disturbing images make inescapable. In any case, there was significant time for preparation that was just not used. Nor did one bother to ask if there were not important difference between the German and Italian healthcare systems.
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By Telos Press · Thursday, November 19, 2020 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with John Milbank about his article “In Triplicate: Britain after Brexit; the World after Coronavirus; Retrospect and Prospect,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 191 in our online store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By Isaac Lopez · Thursday, October 15, 2020 Donald Trump will win in November because the same forces that propelled him to victory in 2016 are even stronger today in 2020. This year is shaping up to be the most turbulent in American history since at least 1968, if not 1941: we are living in the era of black swans. But if you keep spotting them, are black swans still so rare? Common sense dictates that Trump will lose resoundingly in November given the chaos of the past eight months, public fatigue from the last four years, and near-daily October surprises. Then again, common sense also dictated that Trump and his campaign would have gone the way of the 9-9-9 Plan and Original Mavericks within three weeks of descending the escalator at Trump Tower. At the risk of eating my own words in a bit less than one month, here is the quant- and wonk-free case for why Trump will win, poll numbers be damned.
The reason for Trump’s 2016 victory is simple: support of Donald Trump was and is a reactionary backlash against eight years of progressive overreach during the Obama administration and twenty-five years of weak Republican leadership. Donald Trump is crude, ill-tempered, unprofessional, and unfit to be president—much less a cultural figure—but was elected almost exclusively for these reasons. Contrary to the media catechism, Russia did not throw the election to Donald Trump, fake news articles from Macedonian click farms did not convince hordes of Baby Boomers on Facebook that Hillary Clinton leads a ring of satanic pedophiles, and 46.1% of voters in 2016 were not white nationalists. Trump won because a plurality of voters hated the elite class so much that they were willing to vote for such a man just to humiliate the GOP in the primary and the overall political establishment in the general. Trump’s victory was because of voters’ frustrations, and any retrospective analysis of 2016 applied to the current election year must start and end with them.
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By Norbert Bolz · Wednesday, October 14, 2020 Are we living once more in a Weimar Republic that no longer knows a center? The toxic climate of public opinion suggests just that. The language of irreconcilability allows some to speak of “covid idiots,” while others see our politics as heading toward dictatorship. And even government pronouncements are sounding more authoritarian, as with the call for a “tightening of the reins” that Bavarian Prime Minister Söder repeated after the chancellor.
Panic and hysteria are the reliable companions to nearly every major political theme today. But of course, corona is central. The most important political effect of the pandemic could well be the growing readiness to endure whatever may come. By contrast, the “corona rebels” wanted to set an example over the weekend. Their protest drew motivation from the impression that with the slogan “because of corona,” one can at any time call a state of emergency, in which freedom and democracy then no longer play a role.
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By Norbert Bolz · Wednesday, October 7, 2020 Nietzsche once said that culture was only a thin apple peel over a glowing hot chaos. That is probably to say that even a small shock suffices to confront us anew with barbarism and dizzying stupidity. And now we are actually dealing with a worldwide pandemic. In effect, the thin apple peel tore at once and an abyss of the most dangerous folly has opened up. Thus one headline read in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit: “Mankind takes a break—the planet exhales.” One might simply accept as childish impudence calling the lockdown, the curfew that has practically brought the entire global society to a standstill, a “break.” But the madness lies in the presumptuousness of assuming a perspective above humans and of making oneself the voice of the “tortured” earth. Giovanni di Lorenzo, an intelligent, educated man, is the editor-in-chief of that newspaper. But today he evokes Hermann Melville’s captain Benito Cereno: The barbarians have his ship in their hands—and he can do nothing about it.
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By Norbert Bolz · Thursday, September 17, 2020 Worse than the concrete fear of some life-threatening reality, such as in the past the Spanish flu or today COVID-19, is the anxiety nourished by the imagination of terror. This is the business of the modern prophets of the apocalypse, who usually show up in the guise of science. They lend support to the great religion-substitute of an infinite environmentalist worry, with which the Party of Prohibitions exploits the guilty conscience of an affluent society. Instead of “What can I hope for?”—a question for which one used to expect an answer from Christianity—they ask: “What must I fear?” This accords to the presumed wisdom of children who want to carry out a world tribunal to save the earth.
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