Telos 188 (Fall 2019): Theology and World Order is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
It would be naive to consider the question of global political order without engaging in debates about theology. Not only has it become clear that religious conflicts drive political ones, the very attempt to move “beyond” religion must be understood in terms of its theological meaning. The postsecular turn has not meant a return to religion so much as a realization that secularization was never a turn away from religion in the first place but rather itself a specific theological alternative among many. Accordingly, if our deepest political conflicts arise as consequences of theological disputes, we must address theology directly in order to get to the roots of major conflicts. Not only clear cases, such as conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians or between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, but also those between the United States and China revolve around theological issues that shape political and military conflict. Yet, our current approaches rely on political scientific and military calculations that have not yet been able to evaluate theology as a key and deciding factor in such conflicts. As the U.S. military and intelligence agencies debate the threat that Islamic State poses in Afghanistan, for instance, a key consideration should be the character and prospects of Islamic State’s theology, as well as the broader question of the role of theology in deciding political conflict. This issue of Telos engages in this discussion by considering how conceptions of world order arise from specific theologies.
The discipline of critical theory, originating in the work of the Frankfurt School, attempts to move from pure description of society toward a critique of society with the goal of bringing about change. In recent years, this discipline has itself been criticized. One of the leaders of this anti-critical theory crusade was Jean Baudrillard, whose intellectual legacy in relation to the state of modern theory Anthony King evaluates in his article “Baudrillard’s Nihilism and the End of Theory.” 
Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind is unrivalled by other theoretical and abstract treatises in its sheer ability to grasp the criminal essence of political reality under communism. The Captive Mind, which was published in 1953 by the 1980 recipient of the Noble Prize in literature, chronicles and dissects the mind and soul of Marxist intellectuals and their readiness to embrace communism. Focusing his attention on the life-trajectory of real writers and thinkers who were acquaintances of Milosz’s, the Polish writer is able to pinpoint the many rewards that communism offers the intellectuals who embrace it. In this and other respects, Miłosz keeps some very distinguished company, with writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Karl Popper, Leszek Kołakowski, Arthur Koestler, Jean-Francois Revel, and Paul Hollander, some who lived under communism. These writers have enlightened western democracies about the structure of realpolitiks and dialectical materialism, and the necessary outcome of what some naïvely like to call “praxis.” Miłosz’s formation as a writer and thinker took place during the 1930s, a time that saw Europe in the grasp of the two dominant totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century: fascism and communism. This historical context was to form the backbone of The Captive Mind. From a historical and humanistic perspective, this context remains very important today, for it gives us an opportunity to revisit the essential human qualities and virtues that have to be subsumed by totalitarianism in order for such governments to rule with an iron fist. 
