By David Pan · Monday, June 17, 2019 Telos 187 (Summer 2019) is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 After a modern era of technological progress that has led humans to believe in their increasing ability to control nature, we are reaching a point at which this power on a small scale has given way to increasing uncertainty and uncontrollability on the large scale. Not only are the specific effects of climate change difficult to predict and control, the only mechanisms available for such control—agreement and cooperation across national and cultural divides—are not the stuff of engineering but of politics. So with every technological advance that promises to bring us more control over our lives, we as a species are facing ever greater risks and uncertainties. The question concerning technology has become the unpredictability and uncontrollability of its development itself. The key difficulty is a problem of a tension between community or national interests and species-wide interests. While there might be an ethical imperative on a species-wide level to exercise self-restraint in pursuing dangerous technologies such as nuclear weapons, gene manipulation, or coal-fired power plants, such self-restraint could very well lead to the decline or even annihilation of the group that exercises it. The path forward will not be revealed by new technological advances, which can easily create more problems than they solve, but through the development of new ethical, political, and affective frameworks by which people understand themselves and their connections to the rest of the world. This issue of Telos, devoted to Carl Schmitt and the critique of technical rationality, investigates the ways in which Schmitt’s critique moved him toward ways of considering law, politics, and human history as fundamentally uncertain movements, requiring strategies that accept such unpredictability even as we try to intervene in our historical development as a species.
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By David Pan · Monday, March 18, 2019 Telos 186 (Spring 2019) is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 This issue is devoted to the question of universal history and is based in part on a 2015 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference organized by Greg Melleuish. As this event suggested, universal history today imagines the convergence of humanity around a single trajectory of capitalist technological progress coupled with the defense of liberal rights. But as much as technology has increasingly linked the world into a single movement of history, we cannot say the same about liberal rights. Rather than pointing us toward the liberal light at the end of the historical tunnel, world politics seems to be casting us into the blazing arena of the “clash of civilizations” presaged by Samuel Huntington, with different regions of the world—Africa, America, Asia, Europe, the Muslim world—increasingly at odds, each region with a dominant civilization pursuing its own cultural and political hegemony. This divergence between a materialist unity of development and a cultural fragmentation frames the problem of universal history.
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By Haerin Shin · Monday, September 24, 2018 Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea, edited by Haerin Shin, is now available for purchase in our store.
 While Korea’s history as a modern nation-state has always been a tumultuous reel of socio-political unrest, never has it drawn the globe’s attention to the degree and extent to which the press coverage of the past two years attests. South Korea’s candlelight demonstrations in the fall of 2016 were widely regarded as a newly arisen form of celebratory civil protest culture, and news of the progressive party’s subsequent rise to power stood out amid the global turn toward conservative politics. Meanwhile, with North Korea’s nuclear threat becoming a palpable reality, media outlets began clamoring with predictions of a major military outbreak across the Pacific. (I remember being inundated by concerned emails from acquaintances abroad during my breaks in South Korea last year.) Then came the dramatic shift toward prospects of denuclearization and North–South collaboration this past summer. Millions watched in awe as Kim Jong Un took President Moon’s hand and walked over the Military Demarcation Line. The meeting in Singapore was viewed with skepticism in the United States, but more pertinently such attempts to reestablish channels of communication were greeted warmly in South Korea.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, June 11, 2018 Telos 183 (Summer 2018), celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the journal Telos, is now available for purchase in our store.
 Telos began this anniversary year with our previous issue’s exploration of the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., tragically assassinated fifty years ago in April. That too was 1968, the excitement of profound social change and the bitter taste of disappointment. So much in our culture today remains framed by that specific polarity. Now, in this issue of the journal, we take stock more broadly: not a judgment on that one year but a return to some of the key themes that have defined Telos. We have been able to carry on these discussions thanks to the vision of the founder, Paul Piccone, the support of our publisher, Mary Piccone, the dedication of our editorial group, the intellectual agility of our authors, and the loyalty of our readers. Thanks to all.
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By Kenneth D. Johnson · Monday, March 19, 2018 Telos 182 (Spring 2018), a special issue commemorating the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., is now available for purchase in our store.
 1968 was a tough year for the United States and for many around the world. The Tet Offensive in Vietnam started in January, and the My Lai massacre occurred there in March. In Paris, the student uprising started in May. The Prague Spring, during which Czechoslovakian activists sought a measure of greater freedom for their country from the Soviet Union, was crushed by Warsaw Pact military forces in August. Police rioted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, beating student protestors indiscriminately in the streets. The Weather Underground emerged in October, and black American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave their gloved Black Power salute as a protest during the Mexico City Olympics that same month. Richard M. Nixon was elected as president in November. And, there were two pivotal deaths: Robert F. Kennedy in June, and Reverend King in April. After King’s assassination, many U.S. cities erupted in flames as their African American residents protested his killing and the moribund state of civil rights progress at the time of King’s death.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, December 13, 2017 Telos 181 (Winter 2017): War and Civil War is now available for purchase in our store.
 Consider the question: has American political life ever been as polarized as it is today? If the most appropriate answer is: yes, of course, in 1861, then the problem has been named and we are left with little comfort. The evaporation of anything like a bipartisan consensus in the political class leaves us staring at a battlefield, with few common bonds or shared attachments. Politics has become the internalization of war by other means. This is our version of the crisis of parliamentary democracy that Schmitt described in the Weimar years. Congressional Democrats are unwilling to cross the aisle to find room for compromise in the Trump era, but this only repeats the animosity among Republicans toward the Obama agenda eight years ago. Each party seeks its own advantage, which exclusively means the other party’s disadvantage, as the national good slips beneath the horizon. Each party focuses on mobilizing its base for votes and fund-raising, which means that each has an irresistible incentive to avoid solving those problems that are the most effective vehicles for rallying their supporters: when they held the majority, the Democrats preferred to keep the “dreamers” vulnerable, so as to be able to recycle them in future campaigns, just as the Republicans chose to punt on health care. Each issue is too successful in attracting voters, too valuable to give up.
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