Russell A Berman

Biographic Data

ID368795
NAMERussell A Berman
GIVEN NAMESRussell A
FAMILY NAMEBerman
SIGNATUREBERMAN R A
AFFILIATIONSStanford University
ORCID0000-0001-7507-087X
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS67
TOTAL CITATIONS7
AUTHOR COUNT66
EDITOR COUNT1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1976
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX2

  • From Ideology to Strategy: Rethinking the Chinese Challenge

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2026

  • The Editor, the Journal, the Project

    Russell A BermanARTICLEFast Capitalism2026

  • Rewriting Twelfth Night: Genre, Gender and Identity in Finn Job's Damenschach

    Open AccessRussell A BermanARTICLEThe German Quarterly2026

    Finn Job's Damenschach (2024) offers a reworking of Twelfth Night in a contemporary setting, thereby exploring the vitality of a work of traditional canonic culture in the current context of skepticism toward tradition. It transforms Shakespeare's comedy of cross‐dressing into an inquiry into identity politics and gender fluidity which takes shape via a formal shuttling among alternative theater‐historical genres: comedy, Kammerspiel , commedia d…

  • Immigration, poetry, and translation between Syria and Germany: Adel Karasholi

    Open AccessRussell A Berman, Russell BermanARTICLEThe German Quarterly2024

    The work of Syrian‐German poet Adel Karasholi exemplifies key vectors of literature in the context of migration, in particular the tension between nostalgia and assimilation. Karasholi's case is distinctive insofar as he lived between two dictatorships, Syria and the German Democratic Republic, and his poetry testifies to processes of ideological accommodation, integration into GDR literary networks, and identity‐political hybridization. A Brecht…

  • The Prospects for Higher Education after October 7

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2024

  • Democracy in America 2024: Election Notes

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2024

  • Learning from Defeat: Sadik al-Azm and the Arab Defeat in 1967

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2023

    The goal of war is victory, which means that one’s opponent should lose. Part of war is the victor’s imposition of his will on the opponent, compelled to face the experience of defeat and its consequences. Despite the platitude that history is written by the victors, the defeated party too has a role to play, since it cannot escape the cruel reality of loss. Defeat is part of war, but the defeated may respond to the loss in different ways, with i…

  • Empire, State, Nation: Glory to Ukraine

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2022

    The high-water mark of globalization has passed. New competitions continue to emerge in a decidedly multipolar international system. As the United States views China and Russia as strategic competitors or worse, an array of mid-level powers—Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India, the BRICS, and so forth—try to navigate this complex system and pursue their national interests. Meanwhile, no matter how much the United States and the European…

  • Toward a Post-Critical Public Sphere in Germany and the United States

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2022

    The modern understanding of the public sphere is inseparable from criticism: the public is the space in which criticism can be articulated most effectively. The critical public emerged historically as a platform for individuals to call into question the decisions of state authority, especially when those decisions were taken outside the public view, as was typical for the premodern state—although the penchant for secrecy in government certainly l…

  • The Consequences of Afghanistan: Comments on Girard

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2021

    Renaud Girard is an American-born French journalist, the author of several books on world affairs, especially the Middle East. In this trenchant commentary1 on the Afghan debacle, he recognizes the defeat for what it is, bluntly invoking the collapse of the imperial German army at the end of the First World War. Is that an overstatement or an unflinching naming of the collapse of an order? Girard brings a realist eye to the factors that have cont…

  • Constituting the Nation in Theodor Fontane’s Vor dem Sturm

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2021

    It is now 150 years since the founding of the modern German state, the so-called “unification” of 1871, which resulted from both long-standing national aspirations, often with a democratic character as in the Revolution of 1848, and Otto von Bismarck’s political designs for a more conservative political structure.1 The German victory in the Franco-Prussian War led to the crowning of the Prussian King Wilhelm as the first Kaiser of the new German …

  • Reflections on Rights

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2020

    In July 2020, the Commission on Unalienable Rights submitted its report1 at a historical moment that for two different reasons has made a serious consideration of rights, their foundation and their promotion, all the more urgent. Internationally, the response to the spread of the COVID pandemic has demonstrated the ease with which all countries, but most worrisomely liberal democracies that rightly pride themselves on their commitment to rights, …

  • The Virus from China and American Political Debate

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2020

    As of this writing, the precise origin of the Chinese virus, SARS CoV-2, remains unclear. It is however known that cases predated the eruption in the “wet market” in Wuhan—which in the meantime has been reopened, suggesting at least that Chinese authorities do not believe it was the source of the pandemic. The alternative theory that the virus escaped from experiments in one of Wuhan's virology laboratories therefore remains plausible. In any cas…

  • In Defense of Human Rights: Reply to Emden

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2020

    In his comments on the Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights and my own short addendum, “Reflection on Rights,” Christian Emden offers a spirited defense of his approach to the topic. Yet his adamant advocacy of his own view prevents him from succeeding in his ostensible task, responding to the report. Instead he significantly misrepresents the report and my own comments, at times through distortions of the major claims and at times thro…

  • Between Alienation and Identity: Toward a Critical Theory of Refugees

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2018

    The critical theory that animated Telos in its early years was centrally concerned with the concept of alienation as it had evolved from Hegel and Marx and was reformulated in the writings of the young Lukács. The description of a “transcendental homelessness” in Lukács's early work The Theory of the Novel informed an understanding of the generalized displacement in modern societies, implicit in the neo-Marxist accounts that proliferated at the e…

  • Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967–1989Jeffrey Herf

    Russell A BermanARTICLEHolocaust and Genocide Studies2017

    This meticulously researched volume deepens Jeffrey Herf's extended analysis of the complexities and contradictions within National Socialism, especially with regard to the Holocaust. Herf's initial monograph, Reactionary Modernism (1984) explored ideological components that fed into Nazi thought, in particular the combination of cultural anti-modernism and a fascination with modern technology. His subsequent volumes broadened the treatment of Na…

  • Beyond Engaged Literature: Samir El-Youssef's The Illusion of Return

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2017

    A feature of contemporary politics is the tendency to focus primarily on narratives, as if the story lines were more important than the events. One often finds, for example, that news reports themselves become the news, rather than the conflicts, interests, or power struggles that purportedly make up the content. This sort of self-referentiality of the narrative producers may serve the media well, even if it impoverishes the reporting provided to…

  • Nationalism, Populism, Islamism

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2017

    Not that long ago, debates over politics were anchored in a clear opposition between universalism and relativism. Proponents of an inclusive structure of, at least aspirationally, all states—the new world order—envisioned an unchallenged entrenchment of democratic capitalism everywhere. Where dictatorships endured, as in North Korea, they were treated as bizarre outliers, exceptions that proved the rule of the progress of mankind toward Kant's pe…

  • Brexit, Immigration, and Populism

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2016

    For nearly half a century, Telos has sustained a discussion of critical theory, broadly understood, encompassing various and diverse intellectual traditions and individual thinkers whose work points toward trenchant examinations of our contemporary society and culture. Articles published in the journal operate in various registers—philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, cultural criticism, or more generically "theory"—but despite this…

  • The Dialectic of Recognition and the Rediscovery of China: After Orientalism

    Open AccessC Tsui, Chiann Karen Tsui et al.ARTICLEEuropean Review2015

    The cultural relationship between China and the West, including the hypothesis of a rediscovery, does not fit neatly into the binary pattern implied by the model of Orientalism associated with post-colonial theory. Even in the era of high imperialism, the Sino-Western relationship involved complexities for which the paradigm of colonizer and colonized is too simplistic and therefore requires a theorization of a post-Orientalism. As evidence, the …

  • Thomas Sowell and the New Class

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2014

    Thomas Sowell is widely familiar for his many newspaper columns and opinion pieces, which have frequently won him vilifications (and, more rarely, praise) as a “Black conservative.” The appropriateness of the political designation is dubious, or it depends on the murkiness of political categories in the uncharted waters around libertarianism. This volume may not provide the ideologically obsessed readers with the definitive pigeonhole in which to…

  • Humanities and the Public Sphere: Scholarship, Language, Technology

    Russell A BermanARTICLETelos2012

    The concept of the public sphere is the touchstone of Peter Hohendahl's scholarship, which has been profoundly influential on both sides of the Atlantic. One is tempted to suggest that the public sphere is the central concept of Atlanticism. Historically, the urgency of publicness emerged, via Jürgen Habermas's foundational study, in the Federal Republic against the backdrop of the Nazi dictatorship.1 The pursuit of a public sphere represented an…

  • Freedom or terror: Europe faces Jihad

    Russell A BermanBOOKFreedom or terror2010

  • The German Colonial Imagination

    Lora Wildenthal, Juergen Zimmerer et al.ARTICLEGerman History2008

    German History continues its series of virtual round-table discussions with this forum on the German colonial imagination, a topic very much at the centre of current historical controversy.By European standards, the period of formal German colonialism was extremely brief.Yet work inspired by cultural and literary studies has suggested that a 'colonial imagination' was much more deeply rooted in German society than the brevity of the political exp…

  • Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty, and Western Culture

    Russell A BermanBOOKFiction Sets You Free2007