By Johannes Grow · Tuesday, November 19, 2013 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Johannes Grow looks at Russell A. Berman’s “Saddam and Hitler: Rethinking Totalitarianism” from Telos 125 (Fall 2002).
 In “Saddam and Hitler: Rethinking Totalitarianism,” Russell A. Berman examines the limits of current efforts to understand totalitarianism in light of the juxtaposition of Nazi Germany and Baathist Iraq. He questions the “cultural approaches” often implemented when approaching the study of the Nazi years. Berman doubts whether the German people, under the increasingly violent and fanatical Nazi regime, were truly a Volksgemeinschaft, a happy population believing in every word of the leader, be it true or false, or as the Baathist regime in Iraq demonstrated, a regime of violence, with the party and the leader as the center node propagating terror throughout the state. The author examines three problems present in contemporary discussions of the Nazi regime that may be further elucidated through a juxtaposition of Hitler’s “movement” with the old Saddam regime. The first involves the futility of defining these regimes as either “Left” or “Right.” These types of distinctions do not allow for a full exploration of the effects of these regimes. The second problem is the aligning of Nazism with a sort of “cultural hegemony” rather than with an environment of coercion, violence, and politics. The third concern involves limiting the question of totalitarianism to a certain period history rather than examining its effects on the present.
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By Telos Press · Monday, November 4, 2013 We’re pleased to announce that Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11 is now available for purchase as a Kindle eBook. To purchase the eBook, visit the Amazon.com product page or buy it from within your Kindle reader or mobile Kindle app.
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By Jeffrey W. Robbins · Friday, April 5, 2013 The following paper was presented at the Seventh Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–17, 2013, in New York City.
 With the confirmation hearings of John Brennan as director of the CIA fresh in the news, who can doubt the accuracy, or at least the resonance, of Carl Schmitt’s conception of the sovereign—the sovereign is “he who decides on the exception.” With sovereignty so conceived, it has effectively been cast outside the law, introducing a certain arbitrariness and creating a legal limbo that undermine the principles of a liberal democracy.
Enhanced interrogation. Drone attacks on foreign soil. Targeted assassinations. And now, a 16-page white paper from the Department of Justice outlining the legal authority to kill a U.S. citizen without trial. In the words of the New York Times report, the legal brief “adopts an elastic definition of an ‘imminent’ threat, saying it is not necessary for a specific attack to be in process when a target is found.” It also asserts that the decision to kill is not subject to judicial review or restraint.
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By François Debrix · Wednesday, July 18, 2007 This is the final part of a review of Jean-Claude Paye’s Global War on Liberty, recently published by Telos Press Publishing and available in our store. Part 1 of the review is here, and part 2 is here. The review will soon appear in full in the journal.
 There is much to be admired in Paye’s path-breaking reflection on the nature of a new normative order that comes to life after the implementation of a permanent state of exception. And he must be congratulated for taking seriously what so many others have only announced, imagined, or theorized, and for performing the painstaking “archeological” work of uncovering the basic rules of formation of the new political regime that hides behind legal exceptionality. Still, towards the end of Global War on Liberty, Paye’s inability to provide a more innovative and thought-provoking critical conclusion is disappointing. Instead, Paye needlessly insists on retrieving the ideas of dictatorship and totalitarianism, as if those concepts could provide a grand conceptual finale to his study. Closing with these obsolete political concepts and labels does not do justice to the originality of Paye’s contribution and potentially diminishes its value. But there are two other errors that become obvious at the end of Global War on Liberty, and they are hard to reconcile with the rest of Paye’s analysis.
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By François Debrix · Tuesday, July 17, 2007 This is the second part of a review of Jean-Claude Paye’s Global War on Liberty, recently published by Telos Press Publishing and available in our store. Part 1 of the review is here, and part 3 is here. The review will soon appear in full in the journal.
Beyond the Suspension of the Law
Paye writes that “the rule of law becomes increasingly formal, not only because its content, the protection of private life and the defense of individual and public liberties, turns out to be very limited, but also by the practical possibility offered to the executive power to free itself completely from the last safeguards of legal order” (34). He adds: “The strengthening of the executive relative to the other powers makes possible the general and permanent suspension of the law. It is the instrument for setting up a state of exception” (34). For Paye, the state of legal/constitutional exception implemented in most Western democracies is not about a temporary suspension of the law, one that might guarantee a preservation of existing democratic principles in countries like the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, or the European Union in general (the cases that Paye spends his time detailing in Global War on Liberty). More importantly, it is also more than a suppression of democratic legal and judicial systems, and of the individual rights that these normally guarantee, that would become a new rule of permanence, a new long-lasting condition of suspension of the rule of law, whereby politics could become the product of a succession of ad hoc decisions made by government officials and bureaucrats (as Agamben and others have intimated).
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By François Debrix · Monday, July 16, 2007 The following review will soon appear in Telos, and we are presenting it here on the Telos Press blog in three installments. Jean-Claude Paye’s Global War on Liberty is available in our store.
Jean-Claude Paye. Global War on Liberty. Trans. James H. Membrez. New York: Telos Press, 2007. Pp. 261.
The state of emergency exists for the long term. It emerges as a new type of political system, dedicated to defending democracy and human rights. . . . [T]he citizen must be willing to renounce his/her concrete freedoms for a lengthy period of time in order to maintain a self-proclaimed and abstract democratic order. [1]
Belgian sociologist Jean-Claude Paye has collected several of his recent essays about the suspension of the rule of law, the emergence of a permanent state of exception, abuses of authority, and the generalized condition of restriction of freedom in Western societies since 9/11 in a single volume, La fin de l’état de droit, now translated, updated, and published by Telos Press under the title Global War on Liberty. [2] Paye’s essays over the past five to six years have positioned him as one of the leading critical voices of the post-9/11 era. His critique of the so-called democratic state—from the United States to Europe—and of the transformation of liberal systems of constitutional governance into police, military and security orders actually had been initiated before 9/11. [3] Unfortunately most social, political, and legal theorists (particularly in the English-speaking world) paid little attention to Paye’s incisive reflections prior to the terrorist attacks in the United States. The recent translation of some of his texts into English has given Paye’s scholarship the visibility it deserves. With the publication of Global War on Liberty, Paye finds a place among the critical theorists who must be read if one is to make sense of, carefully reflect upon, and devise challenges to the contemporary condition of state abuse, imperial domination, and proliferation of daily insecurities.
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