The Telos Press Podcast

In today's episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Adrian Pabst talks with Michael Lind and John Milbank about postliberalism, the topic of the current issue of Telos, "Debating Postliberalism." Adrian Pabst's "The New Era: What Comes After the Self-Erosion of Liberalism," Michael Lind's "After Liberalism," and John Milbank's "The Politics of Virtue" all appear in the issue. We have made the articles by Pabst and Lind available as open access publications, and they can be read for free at our website. To purchase a copy of the issue or to subscribe to Telos, visit our online store.

In this episode of the TPPI Podcast, we present plenary session 2, entitled "Beyond Global Capitalism and the Ecological Crisis: Rebuilding National Economies and Societies," from day 1 of Political Economy and the Good Life: The 2024 Postliberalism Conference. This session was moderated by David Pan, Editor of Telos and Professor of German at the University of California, Irvine. The panel featured presentations from the following four speakers: Sohrab Ahmari, Co-Founder and Co-Editor, Compact Magazine; U.S. Editor of UnHerd; author of Tyranny, Inc. How Private Power Crushed American Liberty–And What To Do About It (2023); Juan Carlos Belausteguigoitia, Professor of Economics; Director of the Center of Energy and Natural Resources, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM); Mary Harrington, Contributing Editor, UnHerd and author of Feminism against Progress (2022); and Wolfgang Streeck, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, Germany; author of Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism (2024). The 2024 Postliberalism Conference took place on December 13–14, 2024, in the McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, UK. Co-sponsored by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute, the Centre for Social Renewal, Energeia, and Plough, the conference brought together leading academics, politicians, policymakers, and journalists to explore the errors and excesses of liberalism and to conceptualize constructive alternatives to its worldview and to the dominant theoretical models that underpin it.

In this episode of the TPPI Podcast, we present Michael Lind's keynote address "After Liberalism: Pluralism and the Social Constitution," from day 1 of Political Economy and the Good Life: The 2024 Postliberalism Conference. Lind is a leading academic, commentator, and bestselling author of The New Class War (2020). The panel discussion was moderated by Tom McTague, Political Editor of UnHerd, and it featured responses to Lind's lecture from the following three speakers: Claire Ainsley, Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal, Progressive Policy Institute; Director of Policy, Labour Party (2020–22); author of The New Working Class; Jon Cruddas, former Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham; author of The Dignity of Labour (2021), and A Century of Labour (2024); and Adrian Pabst, Professor of Politics, University of Kent, and author of The Politics of Virtue: Postliberalism and the Human Future (2016, with John Milbank) and Postliberal Politics (2021). The 2024 Postliberalism Conference took place on December 13–14, 2024, in the McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, UK. Co-sponsored by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute, the Centre for Social Renewal, Energeia, and Plough, the conference brought together leading academics, politicians, policymakers, and journalists to explore the errors and excesses of liberalism and to conceptualize constructive alternatives to its worldview and to the dominant theoretical models that underpin it.

Gabriel Noah Brahm talks with Orian Morris, a longtime close observer of Israeli politics and culture, a noted Israeli literary critic, a critically acclaimed novelist writing primarily in Hebrew, and a former IDF combat soldier. While serving as a paratrooper, he saw the death of his company commander in battle and participated in an ambush in which a number of Hezbollah terrorists were killed. He has authored numerous highly original and thought-provoking essays and stories for Haaretz, Makor Rishon, Tablet, and TelosScope. The release of his formally innovative 2016 book לרגל עבור מקום אחר (With My Little Eye) established him as the latest "enfant terrible of Hebrew literature."

Gabriel Noah Brahm talks with Michael S. Kochin, Professor Extraordinarius in the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. Kochin received his A.B. in mathematics at 19 from Harvard and his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He has held visiting appointments at Yale, Princeton, Toronto, and Claremont McKenna College. Through September 2025 Kochin is Visiting Scholar at the Hillsdale College Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship and at the Catholic University of America. He has written widely on the comparative analysis of institutions, political thought, politics and literature, and political rhetoric. Kochin is the author of three books: Gender and Rhetoric in Plato's Political Thought (2002), Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art (2009) and (with the historian Michael Taylor) An Independent Empire: Diplomacy & War in the Making of the United States (2020). With Alberto Spektorowski he edited Michel Houellebecq, the Cassandra of Freedom: Submission and Decline (2021).

Gabriel Noah Brahm, director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute's Israel Initiative, speaks with Gadi Taub, a Senior Lecturer at the Federmann School of Public Policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Taub previously joined us for the TPPI webinar on "Our Troubled Institutions: The End(s) of Higher Education, Post-Journalism, and Antisemitism after October 7," which also featured Russell A. Berman and Paulina Neuding, and which is available here. For more information about TPPI's Israel Initiative, visit our website.

In the latest podcast of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute, TPPI's Mark G. E. Kelly, organizer of the 2024 Telos conference on "Democracy Today?," speaks with Salvator Babones of the University of Sydney about democracy in India, asking him in particular about his sympathetic reading of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A video version of this interview is available here: https://youtu.be/epeq67sOccg

Gabriel Brahm, director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute's Israel initiative, speaks with Prof. Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors, about the role of critical theory in the response within higher education to the Hamas atrocities of October 7. This conversation follows TPPI's webinar on January 7 on the same subject with Nelson, Abe Silberstein, and Manuela Consonni, available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWNDnQtLvLQ

Chih-yu Shih discusses his article "Loving Hong Kong: Unity and Solidarity in the Politics of Belonging" from Telos 202 (Spring 2023).

David Pan talks with Matthew Dal Santo about his article "Russia, the Ukraine War, and the West's Empire of Secularization," from Telos 201 (Winter 2022).

Paul Grenier discusses his article "Konstantin Krylov's Ethical Theory and What It Reveals about the Propensity for Conflict between Russia and the West" from Telos 201 (Winter 2022).

Eric Hendriks-Kim discusses his article "The Polemics of China's Counter Cosmopolitanism" from Telos 201 (Winter 2022).

Michael Hüther discusses his article "Tired of Science?! Notes on the Relationship between University and Society" from Telos 200 (Fall 2022).