By Telos Press · Monday, February 22, 2021 In the Spring issue of American Affairs, Blake Smith writes at length about Carl Schmitt’s “The Tyranny of Values,” the title essay of the collection The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts, published by Telos Press. Edited by Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, translated by Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, and with a preface by David Pan, Schmitt’s The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts is now available for purchase in our online store. Save 20% off the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.
An excerpt from the review:
 To those familiar with his most famous writings, it may seem that Carl Schmitt is an enemy of liberalism. In texts such as The Concept of the Political (1932) and Legality and Legitimacy (1932), Schmitt critiqued the Weimar Republic and the liberal tradition, the weaknesses of which Weimar seemed to embody. Liberalism, Schmitt argued, depends on systematic neutralizations—fictions by which all individuals and points of view are imagined to be equal, and by which the confrontations of political life seem to be transformed into peaceful, rule-governed debates with open-ended, undetermined outcomes. His writings during the Nazi era endorsed a new understanding of politics in which such deceptive procedures are replaced by the decisions of a charismatic leader who acts on behalf of a homogeneous people against its internal and external foes. Radicals of the Right and Left have found inspiration in Schmitt’s analysis of liberalism and calls for moving beyond it to a realistic and engaged theory that recognizes the insuperable conflicts at the heart of politics.
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By Telos Press · Thursday, February 18, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Ruth Starkman about her article “Making Human Rights Readable: The Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights,” one of a group of essays from Telos 192 (Fall 2020) on the U.S. State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. An excerpt of the article appears here. 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. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, February 16, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Russell A. Berman about his article “Reflections on Rights,” one of a group of essays from Telos 192 (Fall 2020) on the U.S. State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. An excerpt of the article appears here. 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. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By Telos Press · Friday, February 12, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with David Pan about his article “Unalienable Rights, the 1619 Project, and Nation-State Sovereignty,” one of a group of essays from Telos 192 (Fall 2020) on the U.S. State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. An excerpt of the article appears here. 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. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, February 11, 2021  Both sides of the transatlantic alliance, America and Europe, pride themselves on their commitment to freedom. And rightly so: these political communities emerged out of histories of extended emancipation struggles, laying claim to rights against pre-democratic authoritarian states, just as they have done battle with modern, totalitarian dictatorships. The fundamental assumption that individuals have a right to freedom against the state as part of their catalogue of human rights defines the political self-understanding of this Western community, and this assumption has spread around the globe far beyond the geographical West. It has however not spread everywhere to be sure: neither Putinist Russia nor Xi’s China embraces freedom, although in both countries there are brave regime critics who risk their lives in freedom’s pursuit. They deserve our support.
Yet although liberty is so central to the Atlantic community, we have seen it suddenly and strictly curtailed in the current state of emergency response to the spread of the coronavirus. German philosopher Otfried Höffe examines this alacrity with which liberty has been abandoned here and subjects it to perceptive criticism. Of course public health measures to limit the spread of the virus are necessary, but Höffe points to the disturbing eagerness with which policies have been imposed, which may go beyond appropriate measures. One might dwell on the particular policy failings everywhere—Höffe naturally focuses on Germany and the EU—but his analysis points to several conceptual points that apply broadly and to the United States especially.
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By Otfried Höffe · Thursday, February 11, 2021 Otfried Höffe is a philosopher known especially for his writings on Aristotle, Kant, and ethics. In April 2020 he was appointed to the twelve-member Corona expert commission to advise the government of Nordrhein-Westfalen. The University of Chicago Press has recently published a translation of his Critique of Freedom: The Central Problem of Modernity. The following essay appeared in Die Welt on February 3, 2021, and is translated here with permission of the author.
It is hard to believe. More than seventy years after the adoption of the Basic Law, a constitution opposed to all dictatorships, two principles have ceased to be self-evident: the content of the basic freedoms and the separation of powers in the organization of the state.
That the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the policies of all states is obvious, as is the fact that one could hardly expect to reach an optimal strategy spontaneously. However one should not forget that the virus, and consequently COVID-19, has been known since December of 2019. Therefore the experts and, prompted by them, the media and the politicians should have started making plans already then. One should not have waited for the pictures from Bergamo from February and March 2020 and then react in the sort of panic that disturbing images make inescapable. In any case, there was significant time for preparation that was just not used. Nor did one bother to ask if there were not important difference between the German and Italian healthcare systems.
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