About the Institute Become a Member Donate Israel Initiative China Initiative Other Initiatives The TPPI Podcast The TPPI Newsletter Webinars and Conference Videos Past Telos Conferences Calls for Papers Online Publications Translation Grant Program Leadership Contact    The Telos Israel Initiative: Our Troubled Institutions (May 7, 2024) The 2024 Telos Conference in New York City: Democracy Today? The 2023 Telos Conference in New York City: Forms of War Marking Telos 200: The New Politics of Class The 2022 Telos Conference in New York City: Civilizational States and Liberal Empire—Bound to Collide? Telos Zoom Symposium: The Place of Truth at the University Telos Zoom Discussion: Causes and Consequences of the U.S. Failure in Afghanistan The 2020 Telos Conference in New York City: After the Welfare State: Reconceiving Mutual Aid The 2019 Telos Berlin Conference: Europe’s Constitutional Challenges as a Problem of Culture The 2019 Telos Conference: Political Theology Today as Critical Theory of the Contemporary: Reason, Religion, Humanism The 2018 Telos Israel Conference: Asymmetricality, the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, and Abrahamic Peace The 2018 Telos Europe Conference in Italy: The Endurance of Empire Fifty Years of Telos: 50th Anniversary Event in New York City Earlier Conferences

The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s China Initiative

The Telos circle falls outside many conventional intellectual categories. During the Cold War, this quality enabled us to form a bridge between Eastern Europe and the Anglosphere. We fostered work by Soviet-bloc intellectuals, helping Western readers understand the ideological dynamics at play behind the Iron Curtain; we supported a wide variety of dissidents in their opposition to bureaucratic centralization, as we have likewise for opponents of bureaucratic centralization and fascist tendencies in the West; and we brokered an encounter between Marxism and phenomenology that was central to opposing the Soviet state—while also influencing critical thinkers in the liberal democratic world. Much of that bridge was built through translation work, which laid the basis for our esteemed translation fund.

We believe that the future of TPPI now lies in a parallel engagement with China, to which we have given steadily increasing focus for the past ten years in our annual conferences. These meetings have laid the basis for seven special issues of the journal Telos entirely or significantly engaged with China, as well as numerous individual articles in the field. We now seek to become a key bridge for a mutually regarding, critical discussion of social and political theory between China and the West, well beyond the circles of East Asia specialists. The Telos China Initiative will include a wide variety of programs to be developed over a five-year period beginning in 2024.

Webinars

China Keywords: A TPPI Webinar Series

Each webinar in the “China Keywords” webinar series will introduce and explore a single concept essential for understanding contemporary Chinese social and political theory. The series will illuminate these concepts with an eye toward non-specialists in the West, while also addressing deep contestations of interest to experts in the field. The webinars will take place monthly, on the third Thursday of every month. Sign up for our newsletter to receive updates on upcoming webinars and other TPPI events.

Webinar 1: Tianxia
With Ban Wang and Ian Buruma
Moderated by Eric Hendriks
March 21, 2024

Webinar 2: Wangdao
With Yan Xuetong
Moderated by Eric Hendriks and Logan West
April 18, 2024