ExcerptIn his second inaugural address, President Donald J. Trump proclaimed, “For American citizens, January 20, 2025, is Liberation Day. It is my hope that our recent presidential election will be remembered as the greatest and most consequential election in the history of our country.” Trump’s now far more organized Executive Office of the President then sat him on the dais of his indoor inaugural parade/rally to sign a stack of highly publicized executive orders directly aimed at disrupting the offices and (...) staff of the “deep state” he had pledged to upend in his first term. (shrink)

This study reassesses the concept of the Anthropocene as a new geological age as it is influencing contemporary debates in social theory. As a unit of geological time whose changes are allegedly caused, directly and indirectly, by human beings, this scientific concept challenges the existing constructions of theoretical binaries, such as nature/culture, environment/society, objectivity/subjectivity or happenstance/design, in social theory. The analysis suggests many understandings of the Anthropocene in social theory are politicized over-interpretations of natural events, and these moves appear to (...) be developing moral rhetorics of, and operational plans for, managing the Anthropocene to create specific outcomes for those who are the managers as well as the managed. The fact that human beings do not, in fact, have this measure of technical control is ignored by advocates of Anthropocenarian politics to advance their policy agendas. (shrink)

ExcerptThe return of former president Donald J. Trump as president-elect following the 2024 election is a fascinating study in revenge, relentlessness, and perhaps what will soon be retribution. Trump’s wily efforts during his 2020 reelection campaign to cast doubts on any electoral outcome other than his total victory were decisive preparations for his triumphant return to the White House in 2025. His gaslighting overshadowed the legitimacy of Democratic candidates’ 2020 win over him in both the popular and Electoral College votes (...) during President Biden’s entire term, in addition to framing Vice President Harris as a suspiciously synthetic vice president who appeared as the elitist epitome of the party’s preachy “woke” wing in the Democratic establishment. Then, as the campaign took shape after Trump’s overwhelming primary victories, fate intervened twice. (shrink)

In Democracy and the Claims of Nature, the leading thinkers in the fields of environmental, political, and social theory come together to discuss the tensions and sympathies of democratic ideals and environmental values. The prominent contributors reflect upon where we stand in our understanding of the relationship between democracy and the claims of nature. Democracy and the Claims of Nature bridges the gap between the often competing ideals of the two fields, leading to a greater understanding of each for the (...) other. (shrink)

ExcerptOne of the longest engaged and most loyal participants in the development of what is now known as Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary, David L. Gross passed away on June 28, 2025.

ExcerptThe first months of President Donald J. Trump’s second term in office are continuing to be extraordinary in almost too many ways to count. On January 20, 2025, harsh winds and below-freezing temperatures abruptly forced Trump’s second inauguration from the west front of the U.S. Capitol, where President Reagan took his first oath of office in 1981, to the interior spaces of the Capitol Rotunda. Instead of looking out over crowds of thousands of citizens, spectators, and tourists milling around below (...) on the sprawling National Mall, as he did in 2017 as POTUS 45, Trump was sworn into office as POTUS 47 on an improvised stage under the Capitol Dome. Ironically, this circular space brought the “Trump 2.0” inaugural ceremonies back to the location where scores of his ardent “J6” supporters had waved “Trump Nation” and other MAGA movement flags during their January 6, 2021, assault on Congress—an attempt to halt the Electoral College’s certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory during the final days of “Trump 1.0.” Four years later, on his first day in office, Trump announced pardons and commutations for most of the 1,500 individuals convicted of offenses related to those violent 2021 events, fulfilling a promise he had made during his 2024 campaign. (shrink)

As the suspect interview is one of the key elements of a police investigation, it has received a great deal of merited attention from the scientific community. However, suspect interviews in child sexual abuse (CSA) investigations is an understudied research area. In the present mixed-methods study, we examine Swedish (n= 126) and Norwegian (n= 52) police interviewers' self-reported goals, tactics, and emotional experiences when conducting interviews with suspected CSA offenders. The quantitative analyses found associations between the interviewers' self-reported goals, tactics, (...) and emotions during these types of suspect interviews. Interviewers who reported experiencing more negative emotions were more likely to employ confrontational tactics. Specifically, anger was positively associated with the goal of obtaining a confession and with aggressive tactics like raising one's voice and emphasizing the seriousness of the crime. Frustration and disgust displayed similar patterns. Somewhat contrasting these quantitative results, the thematic analysis identified a strong consensus that emotions should not and do not affect the police interviewers' work. Furthermore, the police interviewers described a range of strategies for managing emotions during the interview and for processing their emotional reactions afterwards. The present findings highlight the relevance of emotional processes in CSA suspect interviews and provide an initial exploration of the potentially complex relationship between the goals, tactics, and emotional experiences of police interviewers who question CSA suspects. (shrink)

A collection of essays by Timothy W. Luke discussing social and political issues related to ecology, environmentalism, ecocriticism, global climate change, and the Anthropocene.

This study explores conceptual conflicts embedded in the thematic grounding of classical realism. To establish conditions of consistent normality in human political behaviour for realist analysis, the rhetoric of originary political wisdom usually ties its claims, as a research framework, to myth and enlightenment. Because Thucydides, Machiavelli or Hobbes articulated the premises of political realist analysis in the contexts of state formation, anarchic regional politics and perpetual war, these first figures of political authority seem to have set terms of geopolitical (...) analysis that erase context, arrest temporality and homogenise space by pointing analysis back to classical events, thinkers and struggles in mythic terms. Critical theorists ask if such mythic styles of reasoning are a credible approach, even though many accept such modes of analysis. Consequently, this study explores how myth affects political realist studies to question how statecraft perpetuates itself on reason, myth and their contradictions. (shrink)

ExcerptWhat factors lead to any war being fought in a particular manner? How and why do those factors become institutionalized, or abandoned, as prime forms of war for typifying other armed conflicts in changing world orders? When and why do the prevailing parameters of world order shape the conduct of war? Questions about the forms of war became highly salient in 1945 when, by virtue of the United Nations Charter, “the peoples of the United Nations determined” to organize stronger institutions (...) for global governance with an elaborate apparatus of multiple functional agencies “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” by establishing conditions “under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained” as well as to “promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”1. (shrink)

ExcerptWhat is “the place of truth at the university”? This is more than a metaphysical question. To address it, this analysis first considers broader facets of this question and then examines more specific qualities in the concern with truth by focusing on how particular universities in the United States situate themselves with respect to this issue. Only by considering their everyday operations, as the contemporary creators and curators of the truths they tout in their workings today, can a more concrete (...) critical sense of this question be crafted. (shrink)

This Introduction presents the seven closely interlinked papers that explore the theme of this Special Issue, and one of the enduring existential questions for International Relations: the nuclear...

Choice overload is the phenomenon that increasing the number of options in an assortment makes choosing between options more difficult, sometimes leading to avoidance of making a choice. In this pre-registered online experiment, choice overload was tested in a charitable behavior context, where participants faced a monetary donation choice. Charity organization assortment size was varied between groups, ranging between 2 and 80 options. The results indicate that there were no meaningful differences in donation likelihood between the 16 organization assortment sizes, (...) neither for individuals with high preference certainty nor for individuals with uncertain preferences among charitable causes. Having more charitable organizations to choose from did not affect donation behavior. (shrink)

Reading James O'apos;Connor's Accumulation Crisis is very confusing. At certain junctures, it reads like the “sequel” to The Fiscal Crisis of the State, elaborating the expanding of his 1973 critique of modem macroeconomic management as a spoils system of special interests. At odier turns, it comes across as a “prequel” to the earlier work, oudining a tortuous logic for the underproduction and accumulation crises that set off the “fiscal crises” he described over a decade earlier. Although not all that new, (...) the plot of the sequel is occasionally interesting. The prequel side of the narrative, however, is very questionable and as old as the hills because, once again, the ancient apparatus of theories of surplus value is trundled out and fired up to “explain” the roots of the current crisis. (shrink)

The world that was revolutionized by industrialization is being remade by the information revolution. But this is mostly a revolution from above, increasingly shaped by a new class of technocrats, experts, and professionals in the service of corporate capitalism. Using Marx as a touchstone, Timothy W. Luke warns that if communities are not to be overwhelmed by new class economic and political agendas, then the practice of democracy must be reconstituted on a more populist basis. However, the galvanizing force for (...) this new, more community-centered populism will not be the proletarian as Marx predicted, nor contemporary militant patriotic groups. Rather, Luke argues that many groups unified by a concern for ecological justice present the strongest potential opposition to capitalism. (shrink)

The rebirth of Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. since 1945 must be acknowledged as a key shift in the post-World War II American political scene. Every president from Truman to Reagan, in one way or another, has recognized the power of Christian symbolism and values as a legitimating animus for the Pax Americana underwritten across the globe by American technology, military force, and culture. While Christian religiosity figured prominently in the classic republican myths of America's Puritan founding and its divine (...) writ of manifest destiny, the U.S. did not officially pledge itself to be “one nation, under God,” or collectively in “In God We Trust,” until the mid-1950s, following congressional action in the age of Ike and Senator McCarthy. (shrink)

. ‘Moving at the speed of life?’ A cultural kinematics of telematic times and corporate values. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 320-339.

The review symposium on Soviet-type societies in Telos 60 sought to address a broad range of important questions raised by Zaslavsky s The Neo-Stalinist State and The Dictatorship Over Needs, by Feher, Heller and Markus. In response to this, Zaslavsky has taken exception to my brief characterization of Soviet political economy in his article, “Soviet Society and the World Systems Analysis.” I had argued that Zaslavsky could improve his case by discussing the position of the USSR in the world economy (...) as well as the role played by East-West trade in reproducing the neo-Stalinist state. Zaslavsky admits this weakness and says such remarks are well-taken. But then he turns around and claims, first, that my viewpoint on the USSR, like that of many “within the Amerian community,” is ethnocentric. (shrink)