The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute (TPPI) is a 501(c) non-profit organization created in 2006 and incorporated in 2012 in memory of Italian-American philosopher and social theorist Paul Piccone, the founding editor of the scholarly journal Telos. The institute "develops new ideas for addressing the challenges of modernity worldwide through the resources of particular communities and traditions."[1] Its board president is Russell A. Berman.
The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute holds annual conferences in New York based around a single theme, and it has held additional conferences in Europe and Asia. A conference scheduled for December 2024 in Cambridge, England, is titled "Political Economy and the Good Life: The 2024 Postliberalism Conference." Its organizers describe the conference in the following terms:
"What will replace the liberal order that is unraveling? Neither populist revolutions nor technocratic restoration can offer a postliberal vision of the good life and human flourishing. This conference seeks to reclaim postliberalism by charting an alternative to both an empty centrism and an atavistic ethnonationalism. The postliberal vision we explore combines economic transformation with social reconciliation."[2]
Conference topics of the past years include: Forms of War (2023, NYC), The New Politics of Class (2022, NYC), Civilizational States and Liberal Empire—Bound to Collide? (2022, NYC), After the Welfare State: Reconceiving Mutual Aid (2021), Europe’s Constitutional Challenges as a Problem of Culture (2019, in Berlin, Germany), Political Theology Today as Critical Theory of the Contemporary: Reason, Religion, Humanism (2019, NYC), The Endurance of Empire (2018, in Ragusa, Sicily), Constitutional Theory as Cultural Problem: Global Perspectives (2018, NYC), After the End of Revolution: Constitutional Order amid the Crisis of Democracy (2017, in Moscow, Russia), Asymmetrical Warfare: The Centrality of the Political to the Strategic (2017, NYC), Democracy and Secular Sectarianism (2018, in New Delhi, India), Sacrifice: Biological and Theological Investigations for Economic and Military/Political Praxis—Conceptualizations, Categories, Applications, and Abuses (2016, in Berlin, Germany), Beyond Nostalgia: Ethics, Politics, and the Critique of Modernity (2016, NYC), The Concept of the People and Consumer Society (2015, in Chongqing, China), Universal History, Philosophical History, and the Fate of Humanity (2015, NYC), Europe and the World: World War I as Crisis of Universalism (2014, in Irvine, California), The Idea of Europe (2014, in L’Aquila, Italy), Cosmopolitanism and China: Toward a Literary (Re)Construction (2014, in Beiojing, China), Reconceiving Naturalism: The Speculative Challenge (2014, in Melbourne, Australia), The Difficulty of Democracy: Diagnoses and Prognoses (2014), Religion and Politics in a Post-Secular World (2013, NYC), The West: Its Legacy and Future (2012, in L’Aquila, Italy), Space: Virtuality, Territoriality, Relationality (2012), Rituals of Exchange and States of Exception: Continuity and Crisis in Politics and Economics (2011, NYC), From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama (2010, NYC), New Administration: War, Class and Critical Theory (2009, NYC), After the Revolution: 1968 and Today (2008, NYC).[3]
The 2006 Telos Conference hosted a panel discussion titled "Modernity and its Critics" featuring David Pan, Arthur Versluis, Timothy Luke, and Mika Okajangas. A second panel at the conference, "Post-Communism," included Frank Adler, Victor Zaslavsky, David Ost, and Avi Tucker.[4] Discussions at the 2007 conference featured Joe Bendersky, Jay Gupta, Jeffrey Herf, Gabor Rittersporn, Adrian Pabst, James Schall, and John Smith. Luke and Pan again appeared as moderators.[5] In 2008 speakers at the conference included Bendersky, Luke, Pan, and Pabst as well as Martin Saavedra, Zoltan Balazs, Catherine Lu, John Barry, and Paul Gottfried.[6] Pan, Luke, Bendersky, and Pabst spoke again at the 2009 Telos Conference. They were joined by Jim Kulk, John Milbank, Neil Turnbull, Michael Marder, and Ernie Sternberg.[7] A Telos Conference in 2010 was organized around the theme "From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama."[8]
TPPI has been structured to advance a series of rotating, long-term intellectual initiatives. Its current initiatives concern China, Israel, and modern political economy.
The institute describes its China initiative as follows:
"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."[9]
The institute describes its political economy initiative, "Beyond State and Market," directed by Adrian Pabst, as follows:
"From its inception, the Telos circle combined a critique of communism and capitalism with constructive alternatives drawn from a variety of intellectual traditions such federalism or populism, with their shared emphasis on subsidiarity and democracy. In breaking with both Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism and secular liberalism, its members rejected economic and technological determinism in favor of human agency and democratic self-rule.
"Today, as the contest has shifted to the apparent opposites of Western market capitalism and Eastern state capitalism, TPPI will continue to develop ideas for alternative political economies anchored in markets that are embedded in social relations and civic institutions—all the intermediary institutions that constitute society and uphold a more plural polity....
"The task is to overcome the convergence of state and market power in the direction of more mediated and participatory models of statecraft and moral markets capable of promoting the common good—reconciling the estranged interests of capital and labor so that together all people can participate in mutual flourishing."[10]
The institute's Israel initiative, "Reckoning with October 7," is "designed to explore the place of critical theory in the response within higher education to the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023."[11]
The institute describes the motivations behind the initiative as follows:
"Beginning in the immediate political aftermath of the Hamas atrocities, theory has been present—in ways that should give us pause. It was present in sublimated ways, as widespread presuppositions and “narratives,” infused with charismatic authority by a popularized “postcolonial” jargon. It was present in kinetic, emotionally charged, intellectually unsophisticated responses in “mass” demonstrations, public statements by groups and institutions, and individual social media campaigns. Yet above all, it was manifest in considered, open, intentional ways within our universities, as well as among educated elites taught and credentialed within them. The American college campus, the traditional home of critical theory—which emerged in the twentieth century most powerfully as a response to fascism and Nazism—has become a nodal point for the dramatic unfolding of a morally and politically deficient discourse about a present-day Kristallnacht.
"What can this state of affairs tell us about American higher education? What does it reveal about the fate of “theory” itself, in concrete, practical, and abstract theoretical terms? How does the ritual deployment of certain theoretical vocabularies in response to the attacks help obscure the interests and power of the New Class of managers, information workers, social engineers, and therapeutic organizers, against which Telos has launched a sustained critique since 1968? What does it signify that many members of this powerful strata have learned to conceive of justice and injustice in terms of reified castes in a hierarchy of victimhood, such that racial, ethnic, national, religious, sexual, or gender identity are largely equated with individual moral culpability or innocence? How have theories critical of symbolic violence turned into justifications for actual violence? And how is this justification of actual violence “by any means necessary” emancipated from any ethical constraints? How do macro-level geopolitical concerns provide a larger context for understanding the place of critical theory in the response to October 7?"
The institute supports the translation of works of critical theory and other writings of interest to its community through its translation grant program. Essays produced through the translation program are published to "TPPI Translations," on Telos Insights, the institute's Substack page.[12]
TPPI shares historical roots with the scholarly journal Telos, in the name of whose founding editor, Paul Piccone, the institute was created. Although they regularly cooperate to facilitate the publication of papers presented at TPPI conferences, the two organizations are independent from one another and pursue seperate missions.
The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute publishes essays and videocasts available exclusively on its Substack page, Telos Insights. It also makes other occasional publications available free of cost under a CC BY-ND 4.0 open access license.[13]