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  1.  13
    A Moral Core in a Political Realist: A Centennial Reappraisal of Carl Schmitt’s.Joseph W. Bendersky - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (208):7-26.
    ExcerptTo invoke the term “morality” in the same sentence as Carl Schmitt will undoubtedly baffle some of his critics. Indeed, his more strident ones will probably be greatly offended by any such juxtaposition of Schmitt and morality. His name is still too often associated with a theory of—even despicable admiration for—the exercise of amoral political power, or an equally repugnant supple amoral opportunism emanating from a kind of nihilistic existentialism.
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  2.  12
    Max Stirner, Identity Politics, and the Demand for Conformity from Its Opponents.Jorn Janssen - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (208):130-149.
    ExcerptWe are currently witness to a new rise of identity politics, only the content of which is prone to partisanship. On the one side of the political aisle, we are supposed to care about our particular place in a social hierarchy based on race, gender, or sexual orientation, while on the other side we are supposed to identify with our original geographical lineage. This approach to politics, which we commonly refer to as identity politics, has drawn the ire of liberal (...)
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  3.  5
    Notes and Commentaries.Antonio Lecuna - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (208):151-157.
    ExcerptIncome inequality has terrible consequences for individuals, families, and communities. It can lead to poverty, crime, social unrest, and a decline in the overall quality of life. Chile has consistently been ranked among the most unequal countries in the world; however, between 1990 and 2020, Chile’s Gini index coefficient fell from 57 to 45.1 The top 1 percent of earners in Chile receive over 20 percent of the country’s income, while the bottom 20 percent of earners receive less than 5 (...)
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  4.  9
    Schmitt and the Rising Sun: The Early Reception of Carl Schmitt’s Thought in Imperial Japan.Todd Maslyk - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (208):102-115.
    ExcerptIn 1930, the right-wing Japanese scholar Ōgushi Toyoo published an article on “Carl Schmitt’s Theory of Sovereignty” in a memorial volume for his teacher, the reactionary political theorist Uesugi Shinkichi.1 We now live in a world where there is widespread, international interest in Schmitt’s work, ranging from the decades-long surge in interest in the United States that accelerated in the 1980s to the more recent “Schmitt Fever” that has been reported in China.2 This state of affairs often features scholars looking (...)
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  5.  7
    The Infinite Conversation: Carl Schmitt on Parliamentarism and Romanticism.Jakob Norberg - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (208):27-41.
    ExcerptCarl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy is a work of conceptual clarification. The thesis of the book is that democracy and parliamentarism must be differentiated rather than confused and conflated. In the nineteenth century, it may have seemed like a democratic system must have a parliament, but Schmitt contends that democracy and parliamentarism embody distinct and separable principles: “democracy can exist without... parliamentarism and parliamentarism without democracy.”1 Since popular sovereignty and democracy are the most powerful political ideas of the (...)
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  6.  5
    (1 other version)Introduction.David Pan - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (208):3-6.
    ExcerptIt hardly needs mentioning that liberal democracy is facing a number of threats today, both internal and external. Even if the political parties in the United States cannot agree on the main source of the threats, they both believe that democracy is in danger. Democrats point to the January 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s role in it as examples of the way in which liberal democratic procedures are being directly attacked. Republicans point to the Democratic-backed court cases against Trump as (...)
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  7.  20
    Myth and the Sovereignty of the People in Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy.David Pan - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (208):87-100.
    ExcerptIn The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Carl Schmitt describes the multiple ways in which parliamentarism can be beset by forces that undermine its coherence and legitimacy.1 Writing in the context of a fledgling Weimar Republic and few historical examples of successful transitions to republican and democratic government, he analyzes the structures of parliamentary democracy in order to evaluate its claims to legitimacy as well as the practical threats to its endurance as a system of government. His thinking was premised upon (...)
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  8.  9
    Carl Schmitt, Rousseau, and the French Revolution.William L. Patch - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (208):43-64.
    ExcerptNow a century old, Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy still provides useful training for historians in the necessary task of making distinctions between “liberalism” and “democracy,” two movements that arose with overlapping but distinct core principles in eighteenth-century Europe, often competed with each other, and sometimes came into bloody conflict. Schmitt makes one highly controversial assertion, however, near the beginning of this book. After agreeing with Alexis de Tocqueville that the spread of democracy was the most powerful political (...)
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  9.  6
    Some Politics are Local: Homogeneity, Identity, and Legal Revolution in American Democracy.Jeffrey Seitzer - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (208):65-85.
    ExcerptModern mass democracy, in Carl Schmitt’s telling, is a “confused combination” of democracy and liberalism.1 Democracy is based on substantive equality, which is incompatible with the universal equality of liberalism. Even with such contrary principled foundations, “democracy and liberalism could be allied to each other for a time.” Yet “as soon as it achieves power, liberal democracy must decide between its elements.”2 For there can be “‘heterogeneity of purposes’” but “no heterogeneity of principles.”3.
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  10.  11
    What Connects Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Josef Redlich?Hubert Treiber - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (208):117-128.
    1. IntroductionIn his dissertation written under Wilhelm Hennis in 1991, Franz-Josef Ehrle was the first to write about the lecture “Probleme der Staatssoziolo-gie” (“Problems of State Sociology”) that Max Weber gave to the Vienna Sociological Society on October 25, 1917.1 Ehrle used as his source the report on the lecture published in the Neue Freie Presse on October 26, 1917.2 Ehrle also mentions a diary entry made by Josef Redlich, who was among the audience: “Thursday evening, a brilliant lecture by (...)
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  11.  14
    The Prospects for Higher Education after October 7.Russell A. Berman - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):95-110.
    ExcerptIn the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks on October 7, and then again during the spring, coordinated protests have spread through colleges and universities. The rapidity with which normal functioning was disrupted and the helplessness of administrators, on poignant display in the congressional hearing, point to fundamental weaknesses in higher education. I doubt that there can be a return to a pre-October 7 normalcy. Public dismay with universities was already pronounced before the protests, and the campus chaos has triggered (...)
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  12.  11
    Postcolonial Activism: An Infantile Disorder.Julius Bielek - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):173-181.
    ExcerptWhen a student at the well-known Berlin art school Universität der Künste (UdK) used psychoanalytic terms to question her teacher’s assertion that we should listen to the “trees talking” more, she was attacked for her “colonial racist thinking,” using concepts of the white man, Sigmund Freud, to delegitimize “indigenous knowledge.”.
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  13.  14
    Introduction to the Special Section on Contemporary American Academe before and after October 7, 2023: Uncritical Theory and Antisemitic Semiotics. [REVIEW]Gabriel Noah Brahm - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):63-73.
    ExcerptThere might have been no need to theorize “October 7” in southern Israel and its ghoulish afterlife, far away, on the American college campus, but for the bitter irony that receptions of the Hamas pogrom were already laden, from the start, with what academics these days are calling “critical theory.” It ought to have been sufficient unto the day (דיה לצרה בשעתה, as the rabbis say) that such horrors be rendered straightforwardly in journalistic accounts, scientifically in forensic studies, colloquially in (...)
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  14.  11
    The Jewish Body and the Trans Community after October 7: A Tale of Misidentification.Corinne E. Blackmer - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):183-188.
    ExcerptRecently, I bore witness to events on the Yale campus that made me wonder about the meaning of being Jewish at the present, and that recollected to my mind the tales of the Mishnah, which delineate, in tractate Nezikin, judicial actions for damages. Section one explores how humans should behave in relation to the famous “goring ox.”1 Amidst the many concrete cases stands one in which the ox of a man of “sound sense” gores the ox of a “deaf-mute, an (...)
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  15.  18
    In Our Name: A Message from Jewish Students at Columbia University.Eliana Goldin, Elisha Baker, Rivka Yellin & Eden Yadegar - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):89-93.
    ExcerptTo the Columbia Community:Over the past six months, many have spoken in our name. Some are wellmeaning alumni or non-affiliates who show up to wave the Israeli flag outside Columbia’s gates. Some are politicians looking to use our experiences to foment America’s culture war. Most notably, some are our Jewish peers who tokenize themselves1 by claiming to represent “real Jewish values,” and attempt to delegitimize our lived experiences of antisemitism. We are here, writing to you as Jewish students at Columbia (...)
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  16.  11
    The Return of the Two Cultures in the Israel–Hamas War Protests.Peter C. Herman - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):111-115.
    ExcerptIn 1959, C. P. Snow delivered the Rede Lecture on “The Two Cultures.”1 Snow’s fundamental point was that humanists and scientists speak past each other, assuming that they communicate at all. “[I]ntellectual life,” Snow writes, “is increasingly being split into two polar groups.” At one end, “literary intellectuals,” at the other, “scientists,” and between the two “a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.” Scientists don’t read any imaginative literature (...)
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  17.  12
    Stand Columbia.Michael S. Kochin - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):189-193.
    ExcerptHow should American universities foster enlightening and challenging debates on matters of public, faculty, and student concern while maintaining a university community that is as politically, religiously, ethnically, and racially diverse as the country in which they sit? In the century or so that the leading American universities have wandered, unguided by their previous Christian mission, this problem—balancing academic freedom and diversity—has become the principal challenge for their administrators, from presidents and trustees down to dorm counselors.1.
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  18.  19
    Understanding Chinese Political Study: Historical and Fieldwork Political Study Revisited.Rongxin Li - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):39-61.
    ExcerptThis paper aims to demonstrate how political study in China contributes to and facilitates debates among Chinese and Western authors by fostering a plural understanding of political science generally, conceptually, and methodologically that goes beyond the simple dichotomization of democracy and authoritarianism. Over the last four decades (1978 to the present), Chinese political study has been shaped by two indigenized schools, among others: historical political study (lishi zhengzhi xue 历史政治学) and fieldwork political study (tianye zhengzhi xue 田野政治学). Some stimulating debates (...)
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  19.  24
    Is Communist China a New Type of Civilization? The Civilizational Argument in Contemporary Chinese Ideology.Alexander Lukin - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):7-37.
    ExcerptEvery new Chinese leader considers it his duty to make his contribution to state administration theory, which, while formally considered to be Marxist, is moving ever further away from the classical doctrines of Marx and Engels and from their Soviet, Leninist-Stalinist version. Chinese party theoreticians explain that it is the changing situation and specific nature of Chinese society, and not just the ambitions of the country’s leaders, that create the need for new theories. It is no coincidence that a whole (...)
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  20.  8
    Palestine Avenue.Andrei S. Markovits - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):75-79.
    ExcerptI remember it well. It was in the spring of 1987 when I commenced my lecture in Osnabrück on the German left with these remarks: “So that we understand each other: Regardless of my heavy criticisms and profound objections to many facets of its current affairs, I fully accept the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany and do not want its destruction!” People looked at me as if I had lost my mind!
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  21.  13
    The Columbia University Encampment: Joseph Massad, Peter Beinart, and the Future of Campus Antisemitism.Cary Nelson - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):117-140.
    IntroductionEvery day, it seems, we advance into darkness we have not known before. It is not a journey we have sought out or chosen for ourselves. We are swept along by a current of malice that can only be avoided if we hide from the news. The spectacle of a mass anti-Zionist and antisemitic “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on Columbia University’s central quad and elsewhere has structural predecessors, to be sure, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, but parallels with mass antisemitism (...)
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  22.  12
    Reforming Higher Education.David Pan - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):153-171.
    ExcerptAs we consider the recent turmoil at our colleges and universities, it seems nearly incomprehensible that college students, faculty, and many politicians have been supporting Hamas’s terrorism against Israel. The disconnect between the anti-Israel and the pro-Israel perspectives has revealed to the world both that there is a profound rift in our educational establishment and that what is happening is symptomatic of a larger problem that has grown over many decades. Since the problem has exceeded the limits of the academy (...)
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  23.  13
    The End of the Academy as We Knew It.Andrew Pessin - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):81-87.
    ExcerptI try to be sympathetic to the anti-Israel activists roiling campuses everywhere, including Columbia University, my graduate alma mater, lately perhaps the most roiled. I do that because of my quaint conception of the academy as a place where, in the pursuit of truth, people should freely express their opinions but also be willing to listen to the opinions of others. And I think about how I would act, say, during the early 1940s, when I learned that a genocide against (...)
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  24.  21
    Why Palestinian Violence Fails.Alex Stein - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):194-199.
    Excerpt“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “We don’t want no two states, we want 1948” are two of the slogans that have been heard on American campuses during the protests in recent weeks. These reflect the idea that Israel should be replaced by a Palestinian-Arab state and violence should be used to achieve this goal if necessary. While much of the discourse since October 7 has focused on the nature of Hamas’s attack—the rapes, the burnings, (...)
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  25.  11
    What Is Islamo-Leftism? Its Origins and Current Developments.Pierre-André Taguieff - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (207):141-152.
    ExcerptIn France for several years now, the universities, including the top ranking ones [grandes écoles], have been subjected to increasing pressure by active minorities, who can be characterized as “woke” or Islamo-leftist and who are able to exert, here and there, a genuine ideological dictatorship. On a number of questions, starting with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict or the Islamist menace, freedom of expression and freedom of debate are de facto forbidden. A pluralism of opinion has been replaced by the imposition of (...)
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  26.  31
    Carl Schmitt and Friedrich Hölderlin on the Earth.Hugo E. Herrera - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (206):55-78.
    1. Two Approaches to the EarthIn several postwar texts, the earth increasingly receives attention from Carl Schmitt.1 In The Nomos of the Earth, the most important of these texts, he refers to Friedrich Hölderlin, a much earlier, very different author, who also considers the subject of the earth. Even though the positions of both are, ultimately, quite similar, they maintain significant terminological differences. Schmitt and Hölderlin both employ the word “nomos,” but in very different ways. Hölderlin regards “nomos” as “law” (...)
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  27.  28
    Carl Schmitt, Don Quixote, and the Public: A Commentary.Hannah Hunter-Parker & Nikolaus Wegmann - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (206):105-127.
    ExcerptCarl Schmitt (1888–1985) is known as the most consequential German legal and political mind of the twentieth century.1 Many crimes of the Nazi regime found support in his conceptual justifications, and Schmitt is called the “Crown Jurist” of the Third Reich with good reason. Historians, political scientists, and sociologists must grapple with the author in order to understand the course of totalitarianism in modernity. Whether literary historians should do so is far less settled, though he was fascinated by their object (...)
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  28.  20
    The New Class Conflict Gets Worse.Joel Kotkin - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (206):35-53.
    ExcerptOver the past decade, class divisions have grown across the globe. This class structure is not exactly like that described in Marx’s time; it is more complex, shaped by both new technology and the legacy of globalization.
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  29.  27
    The Jüngerian Question of Technology.Ryan Li - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (206):179-182.
    ExcerptAlain de Benoist, Ernst Jünger: Between the Gods & the Titans. Edited by Greg Johnson. Translated by Greg Johnson and F. Roger Devlin. Budapest: Middle Europe Books, 2022. Pp. 180. The central figure in Alain de Benoist’s introductory volume on the life and work of Ernst Jünger is the Worker. He is an intelligent anchor for the volume, for he, of all of Jünger’s metaphorical symbols, most extensively occupies his thoughts throughout his long career. He also most fully characterizes modernity: (...)
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  30.  37
    Realist Internationalism and the Issue of Legitimacy.Anatol Lieven - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (206):9-33.
    ExcerptWeak government is a negation of liberty.Francis LieberAfter the experiences of the past generation, it should be apparent that all too much of liberal internationalist thinking in America is not “internationalist” in any real sense at all. Internationalism, if it is to have any meaning as a word, must mean peace and cooperation between different nations, which by nature will have not merely different interests that must be reconciled but different political systems that must coexist.
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  31.  16
    (1 other version)Introduction.David Pan - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (206):3-7.
    ExcerptWe often have the experience of intuiting something without being able to precisely define what that intuition is. Sometimes this intuition leads to a more well-defined insight, and sometimes it might lead to some kind of action, even in the absence of clear conceptual definitions. Yet it is difficult to ascertain what kind of knowledge or awareness such intuitions consist of. What is an intuition as opposed to a defined concept of something? How seriously should we take such intuitions? Are (...)
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  32.  27
    Pre-reflective Self-awareness and Polyperspectivity in Chinese Landscape Painting.Shiqin She - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (206):79-103.
    I. The Paradox of “Judgment” and Pre-reflective Self-AwarenessIn “Fichte’s Original Insight” (1982), Dieter Henrich, the founder of the Heidelberg School, delivered a diagnosis of why three hundred years of Western explication of the internal structure of subjectivity proved to be fruitless. As Manfred Frank noted, “Seldom has so much food for thought been put in a nutshell.”1 Fichte had the “insight” that his predecessors, in their totality (and “nearly all his successors”2), including Kant, misconceived the reality of our self-consciousness as (...)
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  33.  24
    The Anaesthetic Crisis of Work and Leisure: On Byung-Chul Han’s The Palliative Society.Ethan Stoneman - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (206):171-177.
    ExcerptDrawing on the quasi-legal human experimentation programs designed and implemented by the CIA between the 1950s and 1970s, the television series Severance envisions the possible corporate uses of brainwashing and mind control. The narrative centers on employees of a technology company, Lumon Industries, who agree to undergo a medical procedure (“severance”) that separates non-work memories from work memories by implanting a microchip into the brain. Unfolding like a science fiction psychological thriller, the narration falls somewhere between omniscient and restricted. Viewers (...)
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  34.  34
    Narrative with Commentary: Levinasian Discourse Theory.Shira Wolosky - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (206):129-150.
    ExcerptNarrative today is a commanding term for individual and group definition. Within literature and literary discussions, narrative structure has been treated in increasingly complex and multifaceted ways. However, as narrative has moved from literature into wider cultural circulation, such multiplicity and complexity can be lost. Narrative is embraced as the form in which experience takes meaningful shape. Each individual or each group has a story as their version of who they are, interpreted in each one’s terms and affirming each one’s (...)
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  35.  43
    Social Media Cannot Be the Public Sphere: On Network Opinion Field from Habermas’s Public Sphere.Zheng Zang & Yueqin Chen - 2024 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2024 (206):151-169.
    1. IntroductionFirst and foremost, the public sphere is the sphere of our social life. Social media’s naturally low barrier to entry and strong participatory attributes have made it more deeply rooted in human social life than any other media before it. Consequently, many scholars have put forward views and theories arguing that the web is essentially a public sphere.
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