By David Pan · Monday, January 6, 2025 Telos 209 (Winter 2024): Democracy Today? is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 Since the supposed triumph of liberal democracy with the end of the Cold War, democracy seems now to be in retreat. The hung parliaments in France and Germany, reminiscent of the divides of Germany’s Weimar Republic; the just-in-time reversal of the declaration of martial law in South Korea; the increasing authoritarianism of China, Iran, and Russia; and the deterioration of democratic norms in the United States are all indications that the liberal democratic end of history was a chimera.
What is the situation of democracy today? Are the present problems simply growing pains in the inevitable march of history, or are there fundamental limitations of this political form? Is democracy a stable form of government or a delicate balancing act that will always be at risk of deteriorating and being replaced by some form of authoritarianism?
These current indications of the precarity of democracy also coincide, however, with an intense concern for its future. Never has there been such a focus on democracy as a political goal. During the Cold War, the United States, more concerned about promoting capitalism than defending democracy, supported capitalist authoritarianism in places such as Chile, South Korea, and Taiwan. But as it turned out, capitalism did not really need such political backing. In the Cold War between capitalism and communism, the latter lost based on its inability to produce economic growth. Insofar as communism’s undermining of private property and market mechanisms proved to be economically catastrophic, even nominally communist governments in China and Vietnam have since voluntarily embraced capitalist economic policies. Aside from U.S. college campuses, the only diehard Marxists left are in Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, all of whose governments are presiding over the immiseration of their peoples.
While it was the Soviet Union, and not capitalism, that collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, the general recognition of these contradictions meant that communism could only maintain itself by using repressive methods. Communism has been one of the surest ways of moving toward and cementing authoritarianism and totalitarianism. By contrast, capitalist authoritarianism has sometimes led to democratic reforms, and we can point again to Chile, South Korea, and Taiwan, but also to the countries of Eastern Europe, as successful transitioners to democracy within a capitalist framework. Unfortunately, while communism might correlate strongly with authoritarianism, the link between capitalism and democracy does not seem to be so tight.
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By Antonio Lecuna · Tuesday, December 5, 2023 Argentina was among the wealthiest economies at the beginning of the twentieth century, according to the “Argentine Paradox” case study by Harvard Professor Rafael di Tella and New Change FX Chief Operations Officer Ingrid Vogel. The authors claim that under the global gold standard, international capital flooded into the country to exploit the unbounded investment opportunities. The economy maintained an average annual inflation rate of just 1.5 percent for fifty years after 1890. Parallel to low inflation, from 1900 to 1930, Argentina’s economy grew at an average annual rate of 4 percent—faster than the United States, Australia, or Canada. However, over the turn of the new millennium, Argentina no longer featured among the group of richest nations but rather languished toward the bottom of the middle-income group. This demise came despite the country’s natural resources and fertile land, the large flows of ambitious immigrants, and the high level of education. The political development of Argentina during this period had gone through several phases. Among the dominant figures were President Juan Domingo Perón and his charismatic wife Evita. Their populist policies had fundamentally shaped Argentina’s political, economic, and social evolution. Among the most notorious and devastating is a trade and economic policy that advocates replacing imports with domestic production known as industrialization through the substitution of imports. In addition to closing the economy to foreign trade mainly by increasing tariffs and quotas (including export tariffs), a variety of private companies and natural resources were nationalized.
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By Eric Hendriks · Monday, November 27, 2023 The PVV, the anti-Islam party of parliamentary veteran and avid Israel supporter Geert Wilders, overran the Dutch general election. Wilders’s mega victory, which the polls had not predicted, sent Dutch polite society into turmoil. Still, it has a certain logic, at least in retrospect. The last six weeks of the Dutch election season overlapped with the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and attendant Muslim and leftist protests in Europe and the Netherlands. The public focus on Islamist violence and Islamic culture war issues played into Wilders’s hands.
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By David Pan · Wednesday, October 18, 2023 Telos 204 (Fall 2023): Quandaries of Race and Gender Theory is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 Old-style leftists have puzzled over how today’s left-liberals have abandoned traditional left-wing goals such as reducing class inequality and improving working-class standards of living. A key reason lies with the shifting of the politics of class. As Paul Piccone and Fred Siegel argued over thirty years ago in these pages, the problem of class is no longer a question of capitalists against workers. According to a recent Gallup poll, 61 percent of U.S. adults own stock, and such capitalist ownership, while a good way to increase wealth, is no longer the preserve of the ruling class and does not by itself confer much power. Rather, the ruling class that exercises real power consists not of owners but primarily of a bureaucratic class of managers in corporations, government, non-profits, universities, and the media. In spite of this shift, theories developed over a century ago continue to shape current leftist perspectives. Dominated by a socialist perspective, left-wing social policy fails to recognize and address the new contours of class division. As a result, it continues to employ a framework that is based on an anti-capitalist and anti-market agenda that tries to manipulate outcomes to promote socialist goals, precisely the methods of a managerial class.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, April 25, 2023 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with John Milbank about his article “A Tale of Two Monsters and Four Elements: Variations of Carl Schmitt and the Current Global Crisis,” from Telos 201 (Winter 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the three idioms into which Milbank divides Carl Schmitt’s thought; why they should be seen as separate idioms rather than different aspects of a single perspective; the extent of overlap between the idioms; whether the decisionist Schmitt is as arbitrary as he is made out to be; the characteristics of a medieval European conception of nomos that Schmitt wishes to retrieve; the similarities between Schmitt’s third idiom of global regions and both Nazism and Russian theorists like Gumilev, Panarin, and Dugin; Schmitt’s decisionism, basic values, identity, and thinking through popular sovereignty. 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. Print copies of Telos 201 are available for purchase in our online store.
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By Florindo Volpacchio · Wednesday, December 28, 2022 If a journal manages to survive for 100 issues, it is reasonable to assume that the editorial board has managed to reach some sort of internal consensus and can finally rest on its laurels. Such is not the case with Telos. . . . After all these years, nothing seems to be settled and [Telos] remains a hopelessly heterogeneous group still trying to come to some agreement concerning many crucial and not-so-crucial issues. . . . This is why this theoretical bellum omnium contra omnes may be interpreted as evidence of lingering internal vitality, an unwillingness to take anything for granted, and a suspicion of all positions even faintly resembling conformism and passivity.
 With those words from Telos 101 (Fall 1994), Paul Piccone launched his critique of those who felt Telos had lost its direction and had settled into the role of the cranky old uncle of intellectual journals. Having just celebrated its 200th issue in its 54th year, those words still speak to the current state of the intellectual project he launched back in 1968.
Piccone’s critique of his critics, “From the New Left to the New Populism,” was intended not to lay claim to any settled doctrine for Telos but to demonstrate the journal’s ability to constantly rethink its position among current debates along the entire ideological spectrum. While the bellum omnium contra omnes Piccone refers to in his article specifically refers to Telos‘s own family, I think it is more than fair to say it was applied to any and all who asserted a suspicious and artificial ground for emancipation. Toward this end, Piccone begins by providing his own critique of the Western Marxist tradition out of which Telos arose. This in itself, in its pure compactness, is a tour de force of intellectual history and should be read by all those who seek an origin story, or who simply need to have their revision revised.
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