Reckoning with October 7: Panel 2 Announcement

The second webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s yearlong series reckoning with the response to October 7 will take place on Wednesday, February 7, 2024, at noon Eastern Standard Time. The title of the panel will be “Historians on Ideology and Politics in the 1948 War: October 7 and the Aftershocks of World War II.”

Click here to register for the event.

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Israel, Hamas, the University, and the Problem of Critical Theory

The first webinar in our yearlong series reckoning with the response to October 7 is available here. Panelists included Cary Nelson, Abe Silberstein, and Manuela Consonni. Their conversation was moderated by Israel initiative director Gabriel Noah Brahm. Eighty audience members heard their illuminating conversation, which provided a model of respectful engagement amidst disagreement, and many stayed for another hour for a casual, after-panel discussion.

The next webinar in the Israel webinar series will take place on Wednesday, February 7, at noon ET.

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Israel, Hamas, the University, and the Problem of Critical Theory: A Webinar Series

Updated Schedule and Format, Registration Information

Panel 1: “Critical Theory in Light of October 7”

The first panel in our series of webinars in response to October 7 will take place on Sunday, January 7, 2024, at noon Eastern Standard Time. Register for the webinar here.

In light of the vigorous response we received to our recent conference announcement, the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute is enhancing the format and expanding the schedule of its initiative about Israel, Hamas, critical theory, and the university. These changes will allow us to cultivate and refine a carefully sustained conversation while events in the Middle East and on campus continue to unfold.

Rather than—as originally announced—hosting just a single, digital gathering on January 12–13, we will instead be hosting a webinar series on different aspects of the topic each month for one full year.

We continue to plan for an in-person conference on the subject as well, to be convened in early October 2024, and we expect to make an announcement about its location shortly.

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Marking Telos 200: The New Politics of Class

Dear Telos readers,

I’m excited to invite you to attend a special event at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City on October 14–15, 2022, to celebrate the 200th issue of Telos, which will be appearing in Fall 2022. You can register for the event at the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website, at www.telosinstitute.net/telos200. The event will take place from 3 pm to 6 pm on October 14 and from 9 am to 5 pm on October 15. The admission is $100 for both days and includes a reception on October 14 and lunch on October 15.

The event will feature Joel Kotkin (author of The New Class Conflict) and Michael Lind (author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite) as keynote speakers, who will discuss the new politics of class.

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Thoughts on the History of Telos, 1968–2018

On June 8, 2018, Telos celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at a special event held in New York City. Speakers included Telos editors Russell Berman, Tim Luke, David Pan, and Adrian Pabst, as well as Jacob Siegel, who delivered a talk on “Telos, Post-liberal Politics, and a Veteran’s Reading of Ernst Jünger.” Videos of the event are available at the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website. Telos 183 (Summer 2018), our fiftieth anniversary issue, is available for purchase in our store. Presented below is a transcript of Tim Luke’s remarks at the anniversary event.

To address the history of Telos, I will open this brief account tonight about the journal by recalling my history with Telos since 1975. As a new cadre in “the St. Louis TELOS group,” I began by unloading boxes of Telos 26 (Winter 1975–76) from a panel truck early on a Saturday morning during the winter break outside of McMillan Hall, where Paul Piccone and the Telos office were embedded in the Sociology Department of Washington University, St. Louis. Working then as what we call an “intern” today, I soon was translating “into” the American English various versions of different draft manuscripts. Many articles at that time came through the mail as pages of disorderly text that another individual, like the author or an associate, with some English skills translated “out of” Czech, German, Hungarian, Italian, or Polish into a global semi-Anglophonic creole.

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Liberal Democracy and “Other” Democracies

The following paper was presented at the conference “After the End of Revolution: Constitutional Order amid the Crisis of Democracy,” co-organized by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute and the National Research University Higher School of Economics, September 1–2, 2017, Moscow..

The idea of liberal democracy only makes sense because of a basic contradiction between liberalism and democracy. As a description of a form of government, democracy designates a government by the people, whose decision-making power would not be restricted by any higher authority. The power of democracy derives from its ability to mobilize a majority of the members of a political order for collective goals. This rule by popular will can also entail a freedom from higher authorities, including such entities like monarchs and aristocrats, but also ecclesiastical or moral authorities that would establish basic values for guiding decision-making. Since democracy alone would lack constraints on the popular will, liberalism, as a set of principles that include protection of minorities and freedom of expression, is needed to provide the limitations on democratic decision-making that protect democracy from erratic and changes in the public mood. As such, liberalism sets a limit on democratic power, and the basic contradiction between democracy and liberalism maintains a dynamic equilibrium between popular will and liberal principles that can be stabilizing due to its flexibility.

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