By David Pan · Friday, October 18, 2024 Telos 208 (Fall 2024): Carl Schmitt and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 It hardly needs mentioning that liberal democracy is facing a number of threats today, both internal and external. Even if the political parties in the United States cannot agree on the main source of the threats, they both believe that democracy is in danger. Democrats point to the January 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s role in it as examples of the way in which liberal democratic procedures are being directly attacked. Republicans point to the Democratic-backed court cases against Trump as well as the FBI’s favoritism toward Democrats in their public announcements before elections as evidence that the legal system and the administrative state are being used to shut out political opponents. Both parties point to violations of free speech rights at college campuses, yet they also both seek to establish limits to those rights in defense of liberal democratic values.
Meanwhile, authoritarian governments in places such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have becoming increasingly aggressive in opposing liberal democracies as threats to their own legitimacy. In doing so, they have attempted to provide theoretical justifications for their authoritarian rule that are based in anti-Western and anti-colonial discourses that align with critiques of the West advanced by left-leaning academics in liberal democracies.
Because they are based on freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, liberal democracies must allow open public spheres whose dynamics could take unforeseen directions that end up undermining the cultural and procedural foundations of liberal democratic governance. While the American Revolution provides the best example of the success of liberal democracy, the French Revolution and the Weimar Republic demonstrate spectacular failures. Outside of the West, the contrast between Taiwan and China and between Indonesian democracy and the Iranian Revolution indicate that we can find the same contrasts between failure and success in East Asia and in the Islamic world.
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By Andrei S. Markovits · Monday, April 29, 2024 The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative The following text is an expanded English-language version of the German article “Palestine Avenue,” published in Konkret 2/24, pp. 38–39.
 I remember it well. It was in the spring of 1987 when I commenced my lecture in Osnabrück on the German left with these remarks: “So that we understand each other: Regardless of my heavy criticisms and profound objections to many facets of its current affairs, I fully accept the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany and do not want its destruction!” People looked at me as if I had lost my mind!
But I said: “Such a fundamental statement of situating the speaker’s normative orientation is de rigueur at the beginning of every discussion involving anything relating to Israeli politics, society, and culture. The very existence of the country has simply never been accepted as a matter of course. Thus, it must be affirmed in every case.” Nothing has changed in the ensuing forty years. None of the 193 UN members must experience this every day in the most varied discussions all over the world, be it about their politics or society, culture or food, language or habits. None of these items are legitimate in Israel’s case. Just witness the bitter conflicts involving “inauthentic” Israeli food and its alleged appropriation of “authentic” Palestinian food, conveniently forgetting that all foods everywhere are appropriations and amalgams of various cultures. The more appropriation, the better, I would argue. Look at how much better food in Germany has become by appropriating Italian, Turkish, and Greek food.
Following violent conflicts, hostile neighbors may not accept each other’s post-conflict existence for a while, but none have had the temporal length (seventy-five years and counting) or the spatial dimension (reaching across the globe, far from the respective country’s borders) that pertains in the case of Israel. Serbia may not accept the existence of Kosovo, nor Georgia that of Abkhazia, but either’s alleged nonexistence does not matter in a discussion about them in Nigeria or Thailand. What makes the Israeli situation so unique is that this ubiquitous unacceptance exists in all corners of the globe and among the most varied publics. Making it more pernicious still is that this unacceptance is perhaps more prominent in spaces of civil society than in those of governments. Even in the case of apartheid-ruled South Africa from the 1960s to the 1990s (with which Israel is always associated), it was South Africa’s apartheid regime that was anathema, not the country’s existence per se. One did not have to begin any discussion about South African apartheid by stating that one did not desire the destruction of South Africa as a country.
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On today’s episode of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute podcast, TPPI’s Mark G. E. Kelly, organizer of the 2024 Telos conference on “Democracy Today?,” speaks with Salvator Babones of the University of Sydney about democracy in India, asking him in particular about his sympathetic reading of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The podcast is available in both video and audio-only formats.
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By Telos Press · Monday, August 29, 2022 Forthcoming in Educational Philosophy and Theory is a collection of reviews of Timothy W. Luke’s recent book The Travails of Trumpification, published by Telos Press Publishing. Excerpts from the reviews appear below, and the full set of reviews can be read here (subscription required). Save 20% on the paperback edition of The Travails of Trumpification by purchasing it in our online store and using the coupon code BOOKS20 during checkout.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, August 8, 2022 The following comments refer to Mathieu Slama’s “How Brilliant Scientists Damage Democracy,” which appears here.
Among the many features of the COVID crisis, one stands out as particularly consequential: the attribution of ultimate and exclusive authority to science. Public statements abounded urging that we “follow the science,” and signs popped up on front lawns across the country advertising that the residents “believe in science”—as if science were a matter of belief rather than skepticism, observation, and experimentation. There was of course little attention to alternative scientific claims or debates within science. Instead of a scientific event, we witnessed the assertion of authority by way of the invocation of science or of what came to pass as “science.” The mandate to “follow the science” blindly has come to mean “follow the leader,” with no questions asked.
For large swaths of the public, the scientific label carries with it the implication of veracity: science, as opposed to religion (which is otherwise the proper subject matter of belief), is truth. Indeed the equation is a formula for modernity, which is why bizarre variants of modernization repeatedly cast themselves in the role of science: for Communism, the “science of Marxism-Leninism,” and for Nazis, “race science.” Nor do we have to look that far afield to those extreme cases in order to find reason to question the absolute truth claim of science. One can point to scandals like the Tuskegee experiment and to the regular reports of fraud and retractions, even in the most prestigious scientific journals. Just recently one reads that research reported in the journal Nature concerning Alzheimer’s may have been fraudulent. Following that science probably wasted millions of research dollars.
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By Mathieu Slama · Monday, August 8, 2022 These remarks on the French Science Council were published in Le Figaro on July 7, 2022 and appear here with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
The Science Council met for the last time this week and has issued its 75th and final opinion. It will disappear officially on July 31. In its final statement, it underscored the importance of better scientific education for the youth, who will be the public leaders of the future, and it recommended the creation of a “Council of Science,” which would consist of a “group of scientists of the highest quality” to advise the head of state. Whether these recommendations are followed or not, it is likely that some new organ will be established in the coming months. In any case, we are at the end of an institution that played a decisive role throughout the public health crisis, and it is useful to offer a preliminary evaluation of it.
Composed of brilliant individuals and our best scientists, the Science Council—despite all the talent that it has included—has been one of the principal architects of the democratic debacle of the health crisis. And if there is a lesson to be drawn from this fiasco, it is that science should never be a substitute for politics and that political decisions cannot result simply from scientific expertise—at the risk of profoundly degrading our democracy.
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