David Pan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3864339 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Pan |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Pan |
| SIGNATURE | PAN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | California State University System |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3558-4125 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 46 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
China, Sovereignty, and World Order
Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism in China
Depressive Symptoms May Improve More Outdoors Than Indoors or Control During Mindfulness-Based Behavioral Activation
Nature-based therapy (NBT) has been growing as a therapeutic option and has demonstrated effectiveness in addressing numerous mental health issues. However, many NBT study designs are limited in their external validity because the intervention is complicated and time intensive, appropriate comparison groups are not included, and the effect of nature cannot be isolated. Using Behavioral Activation with Mindfulness exercises, this study uses three …
Defending Liberalism against Its Postliberal Critics
Limiting Academic Freedom to Protect Freedom of Speech
Trump, Populism, and the New Class
Myth and the Sovereignty of the People in Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy
Reforming Higher Education
In Memoriam
Fred Siegel’s passing on May 7th of this year was a profound loss for us all. A frequent guest and participant at our events, he contributed to Telos from the 1980s to the 2020 publication of his last book, The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump. His ideas had a defining impact on Paul Piccone and the journal’s development, laying the foundations for what would become the Telos populist critique of liberalism. With a keen ear for the right tu…
Human Rights and Nation-State Sovereignty
Human rights organizations for the past few decades have generally attempted to promote international law against the principle of state sovereignty in order to establish human rights norms worldwide. This approach presumes the universality of human rights is in fundamental opposition to the principle of sovereignty because this principle can be used by governments to shield themselves from outside criticism. By contrast, the U.S. State Departmen…
How Media Exposure, Media Trust, and Media Bias Perception Influence Public Evaluation of Covid-19 Pandemic in International Metropolises
International metropolises are key sites of outbreaks of COVID-19 cases. Global public evaluation of the pandemic in international cities is affected by many factors. This study examines how media exposure affects this evaluation and how media trust and media bias perception moderate the relationship between them. Based on an online survey of the evaluation of 13 international cities' pandemic performances by 1171 citizens from 11 countries, this…
The Underlying Unity of the American People
Paul Kahn and Tim Luke base their claim that the United States is involved in a civil war on the implacability of the political differences between left and right that prevent any reconciliation. Arguing that the differences go beyond policy choices to questions of identity that are not subject to the compromises of party politics, they interpret recent examples of violence such as the January 6 Capitol riots as the rule rather than the exception…
The Russian Invasion of Ukraine and the Rise of the Nation-State
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has signaled the emergence of nationstate politics as the new basis of global order. Gone is the hope that globalization would establish a world of interlocking trade relationships to mediate between regions and cultures in order to establish a liberal order of peace and prosperity. On the one hand, the benefits of trade have created opportunities to use trade as a means of coercion that is being used on both sides…
The Invisible Hand of the Chinese Communist Party
Shaomin Li, The Rise of China, Inc.: How the Chinese Communist Party Transformed China into a Giant Corporation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. x + 336
The U.S. Failure in Afghanistan and the Future of World Order
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is the culmination of a shift in the strategic priorities of the United States in its relationship with the rest of the world that began with the Obama administration. In contrast to George W. Bush’s attempt to challenge the spread of Islamist violence by promoting the establishment of liberal values in the Middle East, the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have given up on that project in order to focus…
Economy and Ecology
Work and Nature Our economic life is ultimately a function of our interactions with nature. If Marx held that nature was our “inorganic body,” to be exploited without consequence, we must now accept that it is an active force that provides the overarching structure for our economic life. We are not in control of nature but merely, like ants on the volcano, struggling to make our lives within the space that nature allows to us. Consequently, the w…
Unalienable Rights, the 1619 Project, and Nation-State Sovereignty
Both the Commission on Unalienable Rights, chartered in July 2019, and the 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times one month later, have reflected upon how the ideal of equality has interacted with the practice of slavery in the U.S. tradition. But while the commission's report1 took July 4, 1776, to be the founding moment of the United States, the 1619 Project suggests that “the country's true birth date, the moment that its defining contra…
State, Movement, People
At the beginning of his Constitutional Theory, Carl Schmitt lays out an understanding of a constitution in which it does not consist of a set of laws that would form a unified system of norms that govern state procedures. Rather, he insists that a state does not simply have a constitution but is the constitution in the sense that the constitution consists not just of the laws but of “the concrete manner of existence that is a given with every pol…
The Cultural Basis of Twenty-First-Century World Order
Can world literature become the unifying basis of world order? If this dream, implicit in the project of a world literature, might seem to be impossibly utopian, it also outlines a long-term project of global transformation, whose attractiveness stems from the link to a larger process of globalization. For the idea of a unified global culture that “world literature” presages seems at first glance to coincide with the development of a world histor…
Myth and Rationality in Politics
Discussions of Carl Schmitt's 1938 Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes have focused on the question of whether Schmitt defends a mythic conception of politics based on the idea of political theology or a rationalist approach that focuses on state power to the exclusion of theological justifications for power.1 The difficulty in assessing this text is that Schmitt provides in it both types of explanation for the stability of the state. …
Nationalism, Liberalism, and World Order
At its foundations, politics is about representation, and this has never been more pertinent than since the rise of nationalism, which developed historically not so much as a political goal in itself but as a by-product of democracy. By undermining the power of the monarch, the American and French Revolutions initiated a move toward popular sovereignty that created the prospect of majority rule, which in turn immediately raised the question of th…
Populist Politics and the New Campus Culture Wars
The campus culture wars are back. If the debates of the 1980s ended with the demise of Western Civilization courses and the establishment of multiculturalist curricula, the Europeanists are again making their case, but no longer as tenured classics professors. Rather, the new defenders of Western culture are right-wing agitators from off campus who, feeling marginalized in their whiteness, are seeking to reaffirm the centrality of European cultur…
Populism and the Humanities
In spite of his administration's threat to completely defund the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities, the election of Donald Trump has enhanced the significance and impact of the humanities as fields of study and teaching. If Obama's technocratic style of government matched the culture of the natural sciences with a rhetoric whose goal was to establish the legitimacy and objectivity of expert opinion, this agenda in fact sidel…
Cosmopolitanism, Tianxia, and Walter Benjamin's “The Task of the Translator”
As a term, cosmopolitanism defies simple understanding. Already in its earliest formulation, attributed to the ancient Greek Cynic Diogenes, the merging of cosmos and polite to mean “citizen of the world” had a paradoxical meaning, imagining both local belonging as a citizen and lack of a specific place in the world.1 If the Cynics' notion of cosmopolitanism arises out of a rejection of conventions in general rather than the embracing of a world …
The Joker Takes the White House, Crashes the End of History
Liberalism is in retreat across the globe. The Chinese government has openly opposed the introduction of liberal freedoms. The Arab Spring has for the most part failed to establish liberal democratic structures in North Africa and the Middle East, and the prospects for the success of U.S. attempts at maintaining such structures in Afghanistan and Iraq are precarious at best. Moreover, the oldest and most committed liberal democracies in the world…
The Underlying Unity of the American People
Paul Kahn and Tim Luke base their claim that the United States is involved in a civil war on the implacability of the political differences between left and right that prevent any reconciliation. Arguing that the differences go beyond policy choices to questions of identity that are not subject to the compromises of party politics, they interpret recent examples of violence such as the January 6 Capitol riots as the rule rather than the exception…
Culturally adapted versus standard exposure treatment for phobic Asian Americans
This study is a 6-month follow-up of a randomized pilot evaluation of standard one-session treatment (OST-S) versus culturally adapted OST (OST-CA) with phobic Asian Americans. OST-CA included seven cultural adaptations drawn from prior research with East Asians and Asian Americans. Results from 1-week and 6-month follow-up show that both OST-S and OST-CA were effective at reducing phobic symptoms compared with self-help control. Moreover, OST-CA…
Sacrifice as Political Representation in Bertolt Brecht's Lehrstücke
In pursuing the goal of a political theater, Bertolt Brecht's Lehrstücke such as Der Jasager and Der Neinsager neither efface nor exalt the individual, but provide insight into how the representational aspect of political power in the modern world is linked to the individual's aesthetic experience of sacrifice. In a move that distinguishes his idea of Einverständnis from Ernst Jünger's notion of individual sacrifice on the one hand and links it t…
J.G. Herder, the Origin of Language, and the Possibility of Transcultural Narratives
Herder's ideas on cultural plurality in language offer an explanation for how narrative might bridge cultural boundaries. In his Essay on the Origin of Language, Herder focuses on language as the specifically human trait that distinguishes humanity from all other species on the one hand and the creator of human differences and diversity of cultures on the other hand. The crucial issue for Herder's aesthetics of language is the reception process w…
Botho Strau
Botho Strauss's (1993) attempts to resurrect a premodern approach to German culture centered on themes such as the sacred & myth is defended against those who see it as a resurgence of Nazi themes. This attempt to reintroduce the power of a traditional religion-based culture is based on three claims about culture: (1) A crisis of values is inevitable for a society organized around economic prosperity. (2) Tradition-based authority is essential fo…
The Society of the Spectacle 20 Years Later
Berman: Before beginning this discussion of Guy Debord's Comments on The Society of the Spectacle, it is important to rethink, the original spectacle thesis which could be described as a convergent reading of Lukács' neo-Hegelianism and Horkheimer/Adorno's account of the culture industry. It was about the proliferation of the commodity form in mid-century capitalism and how it transformed society by systematically substituting exchange-value and …
Political Aesthetics
In “The Source of the Tragic,” Carl Schmitt articulates a detailed critique of autonomy aesthetics in which he rearticulates principles of his political theory — the critique of liberalism, normativism and subjectivity: decisionism. His essay can thus be read as a sort of right-wing inversion of the critique of bourgeois aesthetics expressed in Adorno's “Lyric Poetry and Society.” Schmitt belabors both the divisions characteristic of 19th century…
Wishing For More
The first question which comes to mind in reading Ellis' bestseller, Less Than Zero, is “Is Los Angeles really like that?” This astonishment betrays not only the vague feeling that one has somehow missed out on all the action in Los Angeles, but also the compulsion to continue reading in order to experience, at least vicariously, all the sordid details of life in the American “elite.” This voyeuristic query fits perfectly into the framework of a …
The Society of the Spectacle 20 Years Later
Berman: Before beginning this discussion of Guy Debord's Comments on The Society of the Spectacle, it is important to rethink, the original spectacle thesis which could be described as a convergent reading of Lukács' neo-Hegelianism and Horkheimer/Adorno's account of the culture industry. It was about the proliferation of the commodity form in mid-century capitalism and how it transformed society by systematically substituting exchange-value and …
Ivory Tower and Red Tape
Adler's discussion of university affirmative action is driven by two contradictory imperatives: a commitment to the objectivity of truth and a desire to preserve communal structures which have been threatened by the process of rationalization associated with the notion of universal truth. He focuses on the extent to which the rationalization described by Weber has destroyed traditional and communal structures and asks whether the university or af…
The Deconstruction of Tragedy
John Sallis Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 158 pp
Enemies, Scapegoats and Sacrifice
The relation between politics and individual experience has never been convincingly articulated. Palaver tackles this question by connecting Carl Schmitt's political reconstructions with René Girard's cultural theory. While Schmitt traces political concepts such as sovereignty and the state back to their theological origins, he only deals with these issues on the institutional level. He does not discuss the dynamics of individual experience assoc…
Kafka as a Populist
Peculiarity\nFranz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony " has almost always been read as\nthe description of a barbaric machine of torture. Yet the first sentence of\nthe story, "It's a peculiar kind of apparatus,"1 uttered by the officer, does\nnot direct attention to the apparatus itself but to its peculiarity. For the voyager\nwho listens to the officer describing the apparatus, the latter is certainly\npeculiar as an instrument of torture and executi…
Botho Strau
Botho Strauss's (1993) attempts to resurrect a premodern approach to German culture centered on themes such as the sacred & myth is defended against those who see it as a resurgence of Nazi themes. This attempt to reintroduce the power of a traditional religion-based culture is based on three claims about culture: (1) A crisis of values is inevitable for a society organized around economic prosperity. (2) Tradition-based authority is essential fo…
Primary and Secondary Control Over Age‐Related Changes in Physical Appearance
Beliefs about appearance‐related changes due to aging were used to test the effects of perceived control and secondary control (acceptance) in a sample of 412 young, early‐middle‐age, and late‐middle‐age college‐educated adults. Mean difference in aging‐related appearance control and hypotheses regarding the adaptiveness of primary and secondary control were examined. Primary control over aging‐related appearance was lower in older adults and sec…
The Struggle for Myth in the Nazi Period
Revising the Dialectic of Enlightenment
Scholars since World War II have distinguished National Socialism from Enlightenment by pointing to Nazi recourse to mythic structures in construction of its ideology,l and liberal opposition to Nazism has long been based on consequent rejection of myth. The attempt to separate Enlightenment from Nazism based on myth dates back to 1926, when Thomas Mann attacked theory of myth developed by budding philosopher, Alfred Baeumler, and accused him of …
Primitive Renaissance
J.G. Herder, the Origin of Language, and the Possibility of Transcultural Narratives
Herder's ideas on cultural plurality in language offer an explanation for how narrative might bridge cultural boundaries. In his Essay on the Origin of Language, Herder focuses on language as the specifically human trait that distinguishes humanity from all other species on the one hand and the creator of human differences and diversity of cultures on the other hand. The crucial issue for Herder's aesthetics of language is the reception process w…
Against Biopolitics
While Walter Benjamin's equation of law with violence leads to his affirmation of a kind of un‐mediated divine violence and Giorgio Agamben's notion of sovereignty links politics directly with the body, Carl Schmitt's idea of sovereignty does not concern itself primarily with bare life but with an acculturated subject that links law and politics to a particular tradition. Because he is always concerned about this relationship between culture and …
Sacrifice as Political Representation in Bertolt Brecht's Lehrstücke
In pursuing the goal of a political theater, Bertolt Brecht's Lehrstücke such as Der Jasager and Der Neinsager neither efface nor exalt the individual, but provide insight into how the representational aspect of political power in the modern world is linked to the individual's aesthetic experience of sacrifice. In a move that distinguishes his idea of Einverständnis from Ernst Jünger's notion of individual sacrifice on the one hand and links it t…
Culturally adapted versus standard exposure treatment for phobic Asian Americans
This study is a 6-month follow-up of a randomized pilot evaluation of standard one-session treatment (OST-S) versus culturally adapted OST (OST-CA) with phobic Asian Americans. OST-CA included seven cultural adaptations drawn from prior research with East Asians and Asian Americans. Results from 1-week and 6-month follow-up show that both OST-S and OST-CA were effective at reducing phobic symptoms compared with self-help control. Moreover, OST-CA…
Political Theology for Democracy
The Metaphysics
Tragedy as Exception in Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba
Because Carl Schmitt’s work on political theology and representation in politics presuppose a mythic basis for political order, Hamlet or Hecuba is important for providing a theory of the relationship between tragic myth and politics. If much of his work involves an attempt to understand the representational aspect of politics, Schmitt’s foray into Shakespeare criticism rejects a kind of art that is divorced from political concerns. Politics unde…
The West as Rationality and Representation
First published in 1962, Jürgen Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere has had a seminal impact on the way that we conceive of the public sphere as a political space defined by rational discourse and the exclusion of violence from political decision-making. His analysis is founded upon the argument that economic developments engendered the movement from a feudal form of representation connected with hierarchy and violence to a …
The Transformation of the National Security Agency
The NSA is undergoing a transformation. The days when it could be No Such Agency are a distant memory, and it must now develop and maintain an extensive publicity campaign. Though this change was forced upon it by the documents stolen and divulged by former contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013, these revelations were merely the catalyst for publicizing a fundamental change in the relationship between the NSA and the broader public that has been…
The Joker Takes the White House, Crashes the End of History
Liberalism is in retreat across the globe. The Chinese government has openly opposed the introduction of liberal freedoms. The Arab Spring has for the most part failed to establish liberal democratic structures in North Africa and the Middle East, and the prospects for the success of U.S. attempts at maintaining such structures in Afghanistan and Iraq are precarious at best. Moreover, the oldest and most committed liberal democracies in the world…
European Union and Holy Roman Empire
Walk around Berlin these days and you will find that you hear almost as much English being spoken on the streets as German. While some describe this situation as a sign that Berlin has now become a cosmopolitan city, this very interpretation reveals precisely the attitude that has led to the rise of English in Germany. To speak English is to be cosmopolitan, and to speak German is to be provincial, and so it becomes a mark of pride to converse in…
Nationalism, Liberalism, and World Order
At its foundations, politics is about representation, and this has never been more pertinent than since the rise of nationalism, which developed historically not so much as a political goal in itself but as a by-product of democracy. By undermining the power of the monarch, the American and French Revolutions initiated a move toward popular sovereignty that created the prospect of majority rule, which in turn immediately raised the question of th…
Populist Politics and the New Campus Culture Wars
The campus culture wars are back. If the debates of the 1980s ended with the demise of Western Civilization courses and the establishment of multiculturalist curricula, the Europeanists are again making their case, but no longer as tenured classics professors. Rather, the new defenders of Western culture are right-wing agitators from off campus who, feeling marginalized in their whiteness, are seeking to reaffirm the centrality of European cultur…
Populism and the Humanities
In spite of his administration's threat to completely defund the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities, the election of Donald Trump has enhanced the significance and impact of the humanities as fields of study and teaching. If Obama's technocratic style of government matched the culture of the natural sciences with a rhetoric whose goal was to establish the legitimacy and objectivity of expert opinion, this agenda in fact sidel…
Political science (35 works) · Law (32 works) · Law (30 works) · Politics (27 works) · Philosophy (25 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Art (12 works) · Aesthetics (11 works)