Writing at the National Interest, Alex Hu reports on the recent 2022 Telos Conference, entitled “Civilizational States and Liberal Empire—Bound to Collide?” An excerpt from the article:
How do obscure ideas from the ivory tower enter the halls of power? In 2019, London School of Economics professor Christopher Coker published a book on “civilizational states,” describing a new ideological threat to the world order emerging from Russia and China. Three years later, on April 1-3, 2022, four policy advisors to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke at a conference in New York City on the theme of “Civilizational States and Liberal Empire—Bound to Collide?”
Convened by Telos, a quarterly journal—oddly enough—for “critical theory of the contemporary,” the conference attracted a crowd of around thirty academics and intellectual oddballs. Not much consensus was reached. The Pompeo officials themselves disagreed. But their very participation at the event confirms that Coker’s ideas have caught on in a big way.
Launched in 1968, Telos founder Paul Piccone dreamt of articulating a radical political theory for the American Left. The journal translated key works of critical theory in the 1970s and 80s, before controversially turning to Carl Schmitt and religion in the 1990s after the New Left dissolved. Since Piccone’s death in 2004, his widow Mary has kept Telos afloat through institutional subscriptions and book sales. The journal now defies simple Left/Right distinctions as it continues to theorize about liberalism’s discontents.
What attracts the attention of the Telos circle to the so-called civilizational states is that their regimes openly defy what radicals call “liberal empire”—the worldwide acceptance of liberal norms on issues from free trade to human rights. To those on the Left who equate liberal capitalism with Western imperialism, civilizational states may look like models of indigenous self-assertion. To those on the Right who associate liberalism with excessive self-expression and immigration, civilizational states may seem like stalwart defenders of tradition against cultural degeneration.
Read the full article at the National Interest website.
