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Our contemporary history is marked by the end of Communism and the rebirth of democratic politics in its stead, the moderate left differentiating itself from the old left, which it criticized as soft on human rights.and after the virtual disappearance of the radical left from contemporary European and North American politics, if not academia. The backdrop was It was an Enlightenbd utopian ideology that used promises ofan impossible future heaven on earth in order to create hell in the meanwhile. The alleged means for the creation of utopia was the totalitarian state that used
patently unethical means in which t the state agents perpetrated unethical atrocities in the name of a
utopian vision.

Where to then in the searching for a third way between capitalism and communism, when there has been the return of religion in the last quarter of a century? That return brings to the foreground the Enlightenment's division between faith and knowledge, religion, and science, the infinite and the finite. Kant separates the world of religion from the worlds of science and politics, unties ethical value from religious dogma and ritual, places ethical motivation before religious determination, and then reties ethicsto politics in terms of analogical orientation. Science is handed
over to the empirical method of verification and consensus. Religion is contained in its form as personal conscience and collective dogma and ritual. The ethical norms untied from it are expounded as transcendental ideas of freedom/autonomy, humanity, and universality

The standard political response to the collapse of the utopian Left has been to civil society. The dissident concept of civil society was anti-political as an alternative against the state coupled to the realization that capitalism and the market endanger civil society just as the centralized, bureaucratized state did. Civil society seems to imply personal integrity, voluntary organizations and what Hegel called concrete ethical life. This ignored the technological refashioning of the life world by an instrumental reason.

That leaves the diremption (“splitting into two”) of modernity between faith and knowledge , or the Enlightenment schema that opposes critical reason to religion, untouched. Hegel argued that three were common contents between the two. Thus Critical rationality lacks foundation: it must demand implicit or explicit trust, and it must appeal, at one point or another, to others. All these acts exceed reason in that they reveal how rational deliberation must resort both to an act of faith and to an initial relation to an other in order to form, in the first place, a body of critical knowledge and/or a scientific community and corpus.

Jean-Claude Paye in Dictatorship as the Empire’s Mode of Governance?* in Telos (Summer 2007) says:

The state of emergency becomes a lasting form of government. It comes to be seen as a new political regime that is called upon to stand firm for democracy and human rights. In other words, citizens must be ready to give up immediate rights and a well-defined freedom for the sake of an abstract and self-proclaimed democratic order, not only today and tomorrow, but for an indefinite period. As it suspends aw and inscribes such suspension into a new legal order, war on terrorism gives legitimacy to a change in the political regime.

They establish a permanent and generalized surveillance and control of individuals

In this review of Cécile Laborde and John Maynor (eds.), Republicanism and Political Theory, Hans Oberdiek says that we need to distinguish "old" and "new" republicanism partly because liberalism largely displaced it in the 19th and 20th centuries in Anglophone nations and partly because contemporary republicanism is liberal in that it accepts moral individualism, value pluralism, and an instrumental view of political life. Oberdiek says that:

There are two strands of old republicanism: one represented by Aristotle's concern for the good life to be realized in and through participation in self-governing communities, the other a neo-Roman tradition that emphasizes freedom (or independence) from the arbitrary will of an "alien power" under the rule of law. If Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor represent contemporary neo-Athenian interpretations of republicanism, Skinner and Pettit represent neo-Roman contemporary interpretations.

Liberty, as they conceive it, consists in non-domination, not non-interference, under the rule of law, and has nothing to do with individual self-mastery. American revolutionaries, for example, sought independence from Britain: they wanted to be free not only from the actuality and the probability but also and essentially the very possibility of domination by the British. They wished to live under laws of their own making and a government of their own devising. What they rightly resented, according to republican thought, was living under arbitrary alien power; power, that is, that not only lies in alien hands, but also that can be exercised completely at their discretion or prerogative.

Norman Naimark says that despite their differences Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, the two great tyrannies of the twentieth century, simply share too much in common to reject out of hand attempts to classify and order them in the history of political systems and genocide. the very concept of totalitarianism, as we use it today, depends on our understanding of these two paradigmatic totalitarian dictatorships.

Our understanding is based on the barbarism of mass murder, expulsion, and oppression and transformatiion of the population, because Nazism and Stalinism—were essentially revolutionary, meaning they sought radically to reconstruct the economies, polities, societies, and morality of their respective countries.

Early Critical Theory held that liberal free-market economy was no longer feasible after the crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression.

“Civil society” has become a key term in modernpolitical discourse. Those who use the term refer back to, and seek to resuscitate the 18th century notion of civil society — an elusive term encompassing all voluntary association, often concerned with public matters, extending all the way from local sport clubs to the free press. In addition, it denotes not so much organization as idioms of behavior characterized by civility; in other words, codes of formal manners and sophisticated,often ironic forbearance, owing nothing to the lure of the good.

In this review of John Keane's Civil Society: Old Images, New Images in Telos (Spring 1999) Catherine Pickstock says:

Keane outlines both the advantages and disadvantages of the tradition of civil society. On the positive side, it can be seen as a way of securing peace in an inevitably pluralistic world, without recourse to naked state intervention. On the negative side, Keane appreciates Norbert Elias’s realization that codes of civility are the other side of the state’s imposition of a purely formal order and its monopoly of violence. He shows how such a thesis is extended by Zygmunt Bauman to show how civility is consistent with totalitarian horror.

These are the two basic options in the 20th century, which on the surface seem to operate in tension, although, at a deep level, collaborate with each other. Here, civil society is no genuine third way. All it does is reinforce both the market and the state through codes of politeness and innocuous, yet sinister clubs for the successful.

How should one deal with what is passing away (or with what remains present,but at the price of being treated as non-contemporaneous)? In Vanishing Worlds: On Dealing with What is Passing Away in Telos ( Summer 2002) David Gross says that there appear to be four ways in which to respond to historical evanescence. The first,

and arguably [the] most prevalent response today is the one presciently described by Nietzsche more than a century ago: i.e., pushing what is already falling....The main reason why this aggressive stance has won acceptance is that many people now believe that only by getting rid of the old can the new come into its own. The regulating assumption is the following: Because the new is almost by definition a good in itself, it needs to be encouraged and nourished. But so long as old attitudes, worldviews, or practices stemming from the past continue to be honored, such encouragement or nourishment is impossible. Thus, the antiquated or out-dated must be dispatched as quickly as possible so that the new can gain a foothold, which means that a virtual war needs to e waged against all remainders from previous but now surpassed ways of being, thinking, and experiencing.

Gross says that the second way to respond to evanescence is very nearly the reverse of the first:

Instead of letting go of the past or attempting to erase it entirely, this option clasps on to exactly what is fading away or has just departed, and not only invests in it emotionally, but makes it the locus of value itself. The assumption embedded in this position is that individuals need some foundation, some grounding to hold their lives together, since without something firm and dependable to rely on, everything falls apart and existence becomes little more than pure contingency

Gross says that the third way to respond to what is waning, holds that both of he positions mentioned so far need to be rejected: the first, because it is too brutally dismissive of what is passing away, and the second, because it is too uncritically accepting of what has survived.

A more credible position than either of these, or so it is claimed, is one which (1) accepts the truth of most of what has been said so far (i.e., that the present is slipping into the past at a more quickened pace than ever before, that this slippage cannot be slowed down, and that consequently the experience of evanescence is necessarily an experience of deprivation, since it implies the gradual loss of so many of the meanings, symbols, or practices that once seemed so comforting), but then (2) goes on to establish a more discriminating position regarding the numerous losses that unavoidably accompany late modernity.

In the 1920s Carl Schmitt provided a clear account of “political theology,” an approach to politics that very few modernists understood and systematically confused with theology as such. Schmitt's theory of political theology simply claimed that all political concepts are secularized versions of theological concepts, and, consequently, to attempt to vindicate their universality and uniqueness would have been an unwarranted recycling of theology.

This is why Schmitt always emphasized the Eurocentric character of Western political theory, and claimed that liberals, mired in a universalism that regarded any particularity as variations on the same theme, could not really deal with politics.The liberals’ commitment to a fictitious universalism and to the neutrality of their political model, continues today, by adhering to a political theory that refuses to acknowledge its historical obsolescence — to deny its particularistic traditional foundations and therefore to avoid anything connected with desecularization.

It is now clear that the foundations of Western political institutions are not neutral, and that the modernist celebration of the break with traditions (seen as conformist residues projecting false ideals and possible reconciliations) presuppsoed a unilinear theory of progress dismissive of all traditions and customs. This modernist narrative is now give way to the refunctioning of traditions in that popular sovereignty is now seen to be deeply embedded in the country's very social fiber.

Charles Taylor has argued that an explanatory key to contemporary life is expresssivism: “Expressive individuation,” he writes in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, “has become one of the cornerstones of modern culture. So much that we barely notice it.” As Victoria Fareld observes in Charles Taylor’s Identity Holism: Romantic Expressivism as Epigenetic Self-Realization in Telos (Winter 2007) 'expressivism for Taylor refers to

the most crucial interpretative tool in Taylor’s understanding of German Idealism, notably Herder’s, Humboldt’s, and Hegel’s philosophies. But it is also used diagnostically to capture and evaluate trends in contemporary life, indeed tied to Taylor’s effort to normatively use the insights of the German philosophers to articulate “a contemporary expressivism which tries to go beyond subjectivism in discovering and articulating what is expressed. Expressivism is thus both a hermeneutical, historico-analytical concept aimed at orienting us in the terrain of history of philosophy, and a highly normative concept directed against what Taylor perceives as the dominant trends in contemporary thinking on personal identity, that is, against the Anglo-American liberal notion of identity, as well as against its poststructruralist and conservative critiques

Taylor’s expressivism embraces the twofold lexical meaning of expression as a medium or an outward form conveying or reflecting an inner content, something that precedes and exists independently of the expression itself, as well as something that is brought into being in and by the expression itself.

Bildung is both individual development and at the same time a process where the individual makes herself part of a larger social whole and makes it into a part of her own individuality.This, in pointing toward the
nonsubjective sources constitutive of who we are as subject, so avoids subjectivism, since a 'self' is to be realized through a 'we.'

Schmitt’s political and legal thought has returned to the forefront of current debates within political theory. The interest in Schmitt's understanding of the political has been triggered by a growing skepticism with regard to liberal political thought, such as John Rawls’s theory of justice and Kantian models of communicative action and discourse ethics, which both Jürgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck have sought to establish as models for a deliberative democracy with cosmopolitan reach.

This interest remains despite Schmitt’s vehement criticism of Weimar constitutionalism, which together with his attack on the legislative state, promotes concepts of sovereignty and political decision that have clear tendencies toward totalitarianism.

What is of interest is Schmitt's pointing to the imminent “collapse of the parliamentary legislative state” and the increasing transition of a highly complex administrative democracy to a total state. In Legality and Legitimacy he says:

[G]iven the absence of another authority, the individual parts of the German civil service could become a focal point of the strong need for a tendency toward an authoritarian state, and the civil service on its own could attempt to “produce order” in an administrative state. . . . In the peculiar, though practical, alliance of legality and technical functionalism, the bureaucracy in the long run . . . transforms the law of the parliamentary legislative state into the measures of the administrative state.(pp. 13–14.)

A fundamental defect of liberalism is that it is founded on a contradiction. Liberalism purports to be a rationally transparent, culturally and religiously neutral account of objective reality, accessible to all human beings in terms of their shared universal reason. However, in truth, liberalism is merely one particular, debatable account among others, stemming from a particular debatable tradition of rationality. Highlighting liberalism as a tradition diffuses its primary rhetorical strategy of preempting any debate as to the debatable character of its own premises.

So the basic incoherence of standard liberalism is that it is a particular political/economic tradition that pretends it is not a tradition. Enlightenment “reason” now seemed to be only empty rhetoric, being just one narrative of one particular culture’s self-understanding among many, and a deeply problematic narrative at that. If liberalism is to survive the collapse of Enlightenment culture, liberals must now attempt to de-universalize or contextualize their political language, to learn to explain and advocate liberal democratic moral ideals in a vocabulary that can express the particularism of liberal political norms without thereby invalidating them.

In order to defend itself in the present intellectual climate, liberalism must adopt a postmodernist, narrative approach to its own origins and history, accepting the a priori characterization of all philosophical systems as culturally and historically particularistic. If it does not reconfigure itself in this way, it remains vulnerable to the critiques of both the anti-modern traditionalist and the postmodern genealogist.

Is there such a liberalism?

In theory, the liberal democratic state operated under two basic principles. The first of these was separation of powers. Legislative and executive action would be held to a standard of legality by the action of unelected and therefore presumably independent judges. The second principle is that certain invasions of individual personal liberty are forbidden, and that the judges will provide a remedy against those who commit such invasions.

It is It has been obvious for some time that these principles are in jeopardy. The suspension of the rule of law, the emergence of a permanent state of exception, abuses of authority, and the generalized condition of restriction of freedom in Western societies since 9/11 have become part of what is normal. Our world of liberal democracy is becoming a world constituted by the new anti-terrorism laws in the United States, Great Britain, and the European Union; the placing of certain groups of individuals outside the law (terrorists, enemy combatants, suspect airline passengers); the creation of exceptional procedures of containment, detention, and interrogation by government agencies; an ongoing and intensified regime of police surveillance inside Western societies, and ongoing American state of a global war against terror.

Hence the critique (based on the work of Schmitt, Agamben, and Hardt and Negri) of the so-called democratic state—from the United States to Europe to Australia —and of the transformation of liberal systems of constitutional governance into police, military, and security orders. The various lines of critique inform us that the state of exception in the making is in fact a new norm, a state of permanence.The state of exception created by emergency laws and other extra-constitutional decisions and actions in Western societies is indeed a permanent condition.

Jean-Claude Paye, in his Global War on Liberty, argues that:

the rule of law becomes increasingly formal, not only because its content, the protection of private life and the defense of individual and publicliberties, turns out to be very limited, but also by the practical possibility offered to the executive power to free itself completely from the last safeguards of legal order.... The strengthening of the executive relative to the other powers makes possible the general and permanent suspension of the law. It is the instrument for setting up a state of exception.

It is interesting to look back on the writings about the significance of 9/11 written in 2001 about the significance of those events. Thus Paul Piccone in So, This is the Brave New World in Telos says that since the US sees itself engaged in a war, it has:

a right and a duty to mobilize; but since the enemy is only a criminal enterprise rooted nowhere in particular, but operating anywhere, the US need not bother, at least in the short run, with whatever happens to pass as international law concerning normal wars. President Bush has said as much in his various statements prefiguring intervention anywhere with whatever means necessary. What this means is: a) internationally, greater US world hegemony; b) domestically, a massive centralization of power; and c) operationally, considerably more space within which to pursue whatever course of action the US eventually chooses.

By reserving for itself the right of intervention into any country without having to respect national sovereignty, while at the same time remaining unaccountable to anyone but its own well-mediatized domestic constituency. This rejection of the terrorists’ definition of the new enmity lines in sharp civilizational
terms checkmates the American conservatives’ rush to condemn all Muslims — thus indirectly accepting the terrorists’ definition of the conflict. In isolating the perpetrators as pathological expressions of an anti-modern fundamentalism preventing the kind of economic rationalization (globalization) essential
for the development of the Third World (but also conducive to an ever greater US economic hegemony), it also isolates domestic isolationists calling for a US international disengagement, or at least for a substantially diminished presence abroad — the kind of presence necessary to pursue essential economic interestssuch as unhindered access to foreign energy sources.