Telos 210 (Spring 2025): Rethinking State Power is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
Frustrating the hopes of cosmopolitans and globalists, state power is back. Rather than imagining a replacement of sovereignty with law, political debates now revolve around the particular forms that state sovereignty might take. Even Europe, long seeing itself as the place from which a new international legal order might expand its reach, is reinvesting in military power to protect its sovereignty from the threats posed by Russia, China, and, in some ways, the United States. Yet this realization about the continuing centrality of the state does not mean an abandonment of the moral imperatives and prejudices of the people. On the contrary, state power is being recognized as the instrument through which the people can exercise their will, even as the state places constraints on popular sovereignty. The essays in this issue of Telos consider the ways in which state power interacts with popular attitudes and social institutions in order to establish the basis for sovereignty and law.
Against commentators who argue that Rousseau’s Social Contract provided the intellectual basis for the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution as well as for forms of totalitarianism today, Mikkel Flohr contends that the book provides a framework for understanding the dynamics of popular sovereignty. Rather than viewing the government as the establisher of the sovereignty of the people, Flohr argues that in Rousseau’s conception there is a doubling of the people into both a multitude of individuals and a collective that expresses the general will. The interaction between these two manifestations of the people then determines the structure of popular sovereignty. Since there is consequently no law or sovereign that stands above the people, this conception of popular sovereignty sees the people itself as not self-identical. Rather, the general will remains in a continuous process of open-ended transformation in its establishment of a law for itself.
Wolfhart Totschnig recognizes this self-transformative aspect of the people as the key aspect of a human nature. The essence of the human is that there is no essence because humans are continually transforming themselves and thus defining themselves anew. However, Totschnig then suggests that this capacity for creative self-transformation could be suppressed by a totalitarian state. George Orwell’s 1984 provides evidence for this stance in its depiction of the effectiveness of violent repression in suppressing all spontaneity in the people. Even possible innovations by ruling party members can be eliminated through the proliferation of “doublethink.”
While liberal democracies seek to maintain protection for their citizens from arbitrary state repression, there are nevertheless also cases in which states face real enemies, such as terrorists and combatants, who pose an enduring threat to state structures. Beau Mullen analyzes the possibility of establishing enemy criminal law as an alternative set of legal procedures that could be used against such enemy combatants who are found to be existential threats to the state, rather than treating them as common criminals. Noting that the detentions in Guantanamo Bay and the use of military-style tactics by current law enforcement agencies have already created a de facto set of alternative legal procedures, Mullen argues that it would be better to explicitly recognize this situation and lay out rules for when such methods would be appropriate.
Yuxiao Han describes the conflict in modern states between the need to maintain order and the countervailing importance of shifting power to the market and society. She lays out a framework of a small but strong state that can establish the rule of law but shifts governance away from state structures and toward civil society. Such a model must arise, however, through a progression in which strong state structures are established and stabilized first before power can then be distributed in a more democratic way in a second stage of a state’s development. Han cites the examples of the twentieth-century developments of South Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore as demonstrations of this process.
Rumy Hasan describes an example of this balancing act of state power in a situation where the state is carrying out reforms in the face of resistance from a more conservative society. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 project, led by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is an attempt to both move the economy away from its reliance on oil production and alleviate the repressive aspects of Saudi society. Because Saudi Arabia’s Sharia law is not codified and ultimate authority is left to the monarch, the Crown Prince has a great deal of latitude in deciding whether or not to enforce rules such as the Islamic prohibition against usury and the tight restrictions on women’s rights. While the Saudi state is funding high-profile entertainment and sports events to draw attention away from its miserable human rights record and promote foreign investment, this campaign must contend with the conservatism of Saudi society, in which 56 percent of the youth population wants the legal system to continue to be based on Islamic law. Since the current reform project is a top-down endeavor and must work against fundamentalist social attitudes, its trajectory could be easily derailed by a change of monarch or protests from religious authorities.
Changing moral attitudes are also the topic of Jay Mens’s analysis of the United Kingdom’s reconsideration of its past participation in the slave trade. He describes the debate at Jesus College, Cambridge, about whether to remove the monument to Tobias Rustat, a seventeenth-century benefactor of the college who invested in the Royal African Company and therefore benefited from the slave trade. Mens argues that, rather than applying our moral standards to a past epoch or accepting every moral standard as equally legitimate, the historian’s task is to evaluate past actions with reference to the moral context within which they are embedded. By this standard, Rustat cannot be condemned today for profiting from the slave trade in a historical context where there were no voices opposed to slavery as an institution. As it is impossible to filter out the moral from the immoral historical actions that led to our present condition, it might be preferable to preserve in memory those elements that attest to the always checkered nature of our past.
The contrast between the dominant social attitudes in Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom suggests that part of state sovereignty might involve restrictions on the introduction of perspectives that would offend local attitudes. As opposed to calls to maintain the free and open global space of the internet, Johannes Thumfart argues that liberal democracies will need to start thinking about ways to protect their public spheres by emphasizing their digital sovereignty. The possible U.S. ban on TikTok is an example of how such a reassertion of digital sovereignty will be important for defining national identity. As opposed to allowing private media companies to dictate the parameters of public discourse, Thumfart argues that nation-states will need to reassert their sovereignty in order to protect free speech while also defending the integrity of their public spheres from outside influence. Unfortunately, those two goals will often contradict each other.
In our special section on the prospects for Trump’s second presidency, our editors, as usual, reach divergent conclusions about the future.
Mark G. E. Kelly argues that the second Trump administration is returning to the goals of the first, but with a much clearer sense of the challenges ahead as well as of the kind of people necessary to truly dismantle the administrative state. The overall trajectory is toward a nation-based citizen-republic that would replace the promotion of an imperialist cosmopolitan liberalism while also eschewing an equally imperialist ethnonationalism. The tenor of this project is not revolutionary but restorationist in its attempt to reestablish the national imaginary of an earlier era.
Similarly, Greg Melleuish points out that Trump’s rhetoric of a golden age is restorationist rather than progressivist, and he compares this project with Augustus’s attempt to reestablish the values of the Roman Republic through a new emphasis on public religion and family values. Melleuish argues that, just as Augustus failed in the endeavor to preserve the status of the small landowner over the long term, it will be difficult to restore the American middle class, even if Trump can restore American prestige.
Several of our editors warn that the Trump administration is eroding liberal democratic norms.
Jay Gupta contends that Trump’s actions constitute a kind of iconoclastic destruction of the ideals and values of the Constitution without any sense of what would replace them other than an expression of brute power.
Similarly, Paul Kahn criticizes the Trump administration for carrying out a destruction of the administrative state without the consent of Congress and in a way that undermines the rule of law. Moreover, in attacking science and expertise, Trump’s policies are degrading both university research and professional knowledge within the bureaucracy, replacing them with propaganda and rhetoric, which are manifestly inadequate for solving the problems of a complex society.
Tim Luke characterizes the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the attempt to reduce the administrative state as, on the one hand, a reprisal of previous attempts by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton to make the government more efficient. On the other hand, since DOGE is headed up by Elon Musk, it could also be the implementation of an accelerationist plan to replace constitutional democracy with a high-tech corporate culture of efficiency and control.
Jesse Whitfield argues that if the Democrats want to regain power, they will have to address the populist concerns that Trump has mobilized. Because the old gods of individualism and international capitalism have lost their legitimacy, Trump has been able to achieve success by becoming the “Lord of Misrule,” enacting a Dionysian and carnivalesque overturning of established pieties. In order to challenge Trump, Democrats will have to abandon their dour demeanor and provide their own version of a populist narrative that can appeal to the working class.
Michael Marder sees the Trump administration as pursuing a “politicization of economy” by imposing tariffs that are being used as a tool for extracting political concessions from other countries. Meanwhile, Marder notes an “economization of politics” in the plan to move the Palestinians from Gaza in order to develop its real estate. The consequences for Marder will be an exacerbation of existing problems worldwide.
In my essay, I argue that, rather than leading the United States toward authoritarianism, Trump’s efforts to reduce the administrative state have the anti-authoritarian goal of returning lawmaking to Congress by eliminating the law by administrative orders that has taken over the federal government over the last century. At the same time, Trump’s realignment of U.S. foreign policy around nation-state sovereignty can oppose the attempts by Russia, China, and Iran to lead the world into a permanent conflict between great powers, each of which exercises repressive control over its neighbors.
David Pan is Professor of European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, Penn State University, and McKinsey and Company. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (2001) and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth (2012). He has also published on J. G. Herder, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Schmitt, and Theodor Adorno. He is the Editor of Telos.
