Following a brief review of historical ideas useful for considering actual issues, the Annals offer two texts from contemporary political theory that place the problems of order, community, and freedom within the chaotic modern kairos, demonstrating that a text can serve as both a sign of the times and an attempt to give it meaning, a symptom and a diagnosis. This is similar to "post-truth," which is a major theme here—both as a critique of discourse and its practice, in the academia and the political arena as well.
The article by Tonči Kursar, War, Peace, and Nomos: On the Impossibilities of Schmittian Transgression of Space, critiques an unusual and persistent effort by a group of theorists on the Left to appropriate Schmitt's work. In some interpretations, “Schmitt” is stripped of essential features of his discourse, which belongs to a bygone world of states and their legitimate conflicts, when defense ministries could still be called ministries of war. Vedran Jerbić's article, The Legacy of Postmodernism in the Post-truth Era: A New Version of the Crisis of Governability of Democracies, criticizes the discourse of post-truth as a reactionary political nostalgia for a lost hierarchy: "Its ideological structure is much closer to Socrates' fear of the excessive freedom of poets and myth-makers than to the liberal discourse on freedom," writes Jerbić, thus reviving ancient concerns of political thought.
On the one hand, there is the impossibility of a Schmittian post-nomos, and on the other, the impossibility of returning to a disciplinary industrial society. Social upheavals, internal and external instability on the borders of civilizations and geopolitical blocs suggest an era of interregnum. Readers of these texts are invited to consider the possibilities of order and freedom in a time of social change that is accompanied by simultaneous complaints of excesses of democracy and its complete lack. In the background, as indicated, lurks a question that has haunted political thought since Plato: the relationship between truth and politics, epistemology and political science. Is interpretation merely part of the struggle for voluntary meaning—a political, not an epistemological, endeavor? Can any alethurgy as a set of political procedures and contests between various points of awareness, knowledge, and power alter the truth? Or is its "epistemological monopoly," to borrow Jerbić’s words, precisely in the fact that it has no single master because it cannot have one, so that political lies, like any other, often return as the great wrath of facts?
If so, the Platonic fear for the republic is as justified as ever, and fiddling while Rome burns becomes a form of poetry, a poetics of decay, an integral part of the human comedy or tragedy that does not repeat itself as a farce but as a historical cycle with recognizable, stereotypical characters on both sides of the divide, who live the fate of political conflict equally in social and political reality and in new versions of Platonic dialogues between sophists and philosophers on the pages of social science and humanities journals.
In other words, these two texts are a modest contribution by the editorial board to the enjoyment of kairos after yet another failed end of history.
