NEW TITLE:
FANATICISM
On the Uses of an Idea
By ALBERTO TOSCANO
Published 7h June 2010
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EVENTS:
Thursday 3 June, 1pm at
the RSA,
Friday 2 July, 2-3.30pm at the Marxism 2010 Festival
in
Thursday 8 July, 6.45pm: Launch talk at the ICA.
Further details to be announced here: http://www.ica.
Monday 11 October, 6.30 -8.00pm at the LSE, Wolfson theatre as
part of the Forum for European Philosophy talks. Further
details to be announced here:http://www.lse.
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“A tour de
force in every sense – Toscano wipes the smug smiles off the self-righteous
faces of the New Philosophers.” Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums
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Fanaticism is usually seen as a deviant or extreme variant
of an already irrational set of religious beliefs. Drawing a straight line from
the Peasant Wars to Bolshevism, this view of fanaticism is today invoked by the
West in order to demonize and psychologize any non-liberal politics. Alberto
Toscano’s compelling counter-history explores the critical role fanaticism
played in forming modern politics and the liberal state, and undermines the
idea that liberalism and fanaticism are irrevocably opposed.
Tracing its development from the traumatic Peasants’ War of early
sixteenth-century
The ‘fanatic’ is the figure that we are all scared of –
whether it’s the Islamic fundamentalist primed for a suicide bombing or the
Christian anti-abortionist planning to murder a doctor. The fanatic is a whirl
of contradictions: at once cold-blooded and insanely passionate, opportunistic
but principled, backward and yet technologically sophisticated, murderous and
prepared to risk everything to human rights. He or she is driven by abstract
principles, whether religious or secular, that threaten the very basis of a
pragmatic liberal democracy. But are these oppositions really the way to
understand the conflict between religion and state, terror and democracy?
In this tour de force examination of political and
philosophical rhetoric through the ages, Alberto Toscano examines the use of
the term ‘fanatic’. Following its use by Martin Luther in the Reformation, the
rationalists in the Enlightenment, and liberals in the Cold War and the present
day, he finds our understanding of it dictated by the prejudices of the day.
Toscano argues that there is an unsettling intimacy between
political behaviour regarded as fanatical, and rational, emancipatory politics:
supposedly liberal political projects are also marked by fanaticism. Moreover,
while a liberal would claim that passion and abstract principles (such as
universal rights) are the jurisdiction of the fanatic and have no place in
rational politics, we should seek to reclaim a place for these supposedly
negative terms at the heart of contemporary politics. For example, finding that
nineteenth century slavers called abolitionists fanatics for their ‘mad’
adherence to the Rights of Man, he asks us to reconsider who we regard as a
fanatic.
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ALBERTO TOSCANO is a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths,
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ISBN: 978 1 84467 424 4 / $26.95 /
£16.99 / CAN$33.50 / 304 pages
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