He is not bullish on Russia and China as he sees their desire for top-down control as equally damaging, but he still sympathizes with their revolt against global rootlessness.Īccording to Pabst and Coker, Russian and Chinese leaders are trying to legitimize their illiberal behavior by claiming to inhabit and represent a different moral universe than the rest of the world. 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.Ĭonference organizer and Telos associate editor Adrian Pabst exemplifies both tendencies in a 2019 essay castigating “liberal capitalism” for “cultural standards that glorify greed, sex and violence.” “Ultra-liberalism,” he claims, is destroying the West’s “heritage of Greco-Roman philosophy and law Judeo-Christian religion and ethics” and the humane traditions of other world cultures.

To those on the Left who equate liberal capitalism with Western imperialism, civilizational states may look like models of indigenous self-assertion.

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. The journal now defies simple Left/Right distinctions as it continues to theorize about liberalism’s discontents. Since Piccone’s death in 2004, his widow Mary has kept Telos afloat through institutional subscriptions and book sales. 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. Launched in 1968, Telos founder Paul Piccone dreamt of articulating a radical political theory for the American Left.

The status civilization