Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea

by Alberto Toscano

The idea of fanaticism as a deviant or extreme variant of an already irrational set of religious beliefs is today invoked by the West in order to demonize and psychologize any non-liberal politics. Alberto Toscano’s compelling and erudite counter-history explodes this accepted interpretation in exploring the critical role fanaticism played in forming modern politics and the liberal state. Tracing its development from the traumatic Peasants’ War of early sixteenth-century Germany to contemporary Islamism, Toscano tears apart the sterile opposition of ‘reasonableness’ and fanaticism. Instead, in a radical new interpretation, he places the fanatic at the very heart of politics, arguing that historical and revolutionary transformations require a new understanding of his role. Showing how fanaticism results from the failure to formulate an adequate emancipatory politics, this illuminating history sheds new light on an idea that continues to dominate debates about faith and secularism.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, History, Political Science, Nonfiction, Religion, Theory

352 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2009

About the author

Giornalista e analista politico, laureato in Scienze politiche a Milano, ha lavorato per importanti testate italiane e francesi, tra cui L’Unità, ItaliaOggi, Il Giornale, France 5, LCI e La Croix. Vive a Parigi dal 1986, dove è anche docente universitario a Bordeaux e alla Sorbona.

Ha ricoperto ruoli di rilievo in associazioni della stampa europea e ha ricevuto numerosi riconoscimenti, tra cui onorificenze da Jacques Chirac e Giorgio Napolitano. È stato protagonista di iniziative culturali e teatrali, e collabora attivamente con media italiani e francesi.

Reviews

[Ramzey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Albert Toscano examines the word fanaticism, who is a fanatic? and who get's to decide what a fanatic is? The fanatic is viewed as the opposite of reasonable, in his abstract idealistic creed and intolerant to liberal Enlightened thought and behaviour

Alberto Toscano examines the political and philisophical roots of the concept.
In this history of the uses of the idea of fanaticism we see the concept fall apart when critically examined.

Kant, for example, was a fanatic himself according to his critical conservative contemporaries due to his sympathy for the French Revolution.

The book contains theoretical discussions of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Badiou, Sloterdijk, Arendt, Schmitt, and others. I found the section on Marx and the 'good old' concept of 'political religion' and of Marx's analyses of religion particularly rewarding.

Toscano investigates who has been called a fanatic, by whom and why.

The answer is: anyone engaged in challenging current property and power relations who has an emancipatory agenda. Those advocating abolition of slavery were fanatics, people fighting for their indepdence of their country anti-colonial resistence fighters..

I found it particularly interesting how the concept of fanaticism has, throughout history, posited Islam as a template of the eternal fanaticism and of Mohammed as the eternal fanatic. An interweaving of Orientalist and counter-revolutionary discourse. For Hegel, Robespierre was Mohammed and for Bertrand Russel, Lenin was Mohammed.

There are moments of humour as well as Toscano portrays Francis Fukuyama as a fanatic according to his own philosophical tradition when he claims that history has ended. Toscano is also very witty and fun to read and poking fun at concepts like Judeo-Christian secularism or atheism.

Toscano finishes with a defence of emancipatory politics.

This is a very stimulating book which I'd recommend anyone on the Left to read.
As a criticism, I think the language used is often too difficult and could do with being more accessible.

[Anthony Galluzzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although as of this writing I am about half-way through Alberto Toscano's book, I'm impressed with what I've read. Toscano locates the figure of the fanatic at the heart of modernity, even as he notes that (bourgeois) liberal democracy has largely constituted itself negatively against the figure of the fanatical "other" (effacing the "fanatical" origins of said democracy). This other, according to Toscano, occupies two, ostensibly antithetical, positions within the liberal imaginary: the atavistic and decidedly irrational religious millenarian, of which we've, uh, heard so much lately, and the bloodthirsty ultra-rationalist, who willingly sacrifices all customary and affective relationships to abstract principles. The first form of fanaticism finds its template in Thomas Muntzer and his Anabaptists, while the second neatly corresponds to Edmund Burke's account of the French revolutionaries and, more recently, the Bolsheviks, at least according to the decidedly Burkean "antitotalitarians" who dominated twentieth-century liberal discourse. And yet, as Toscano shows, these two seemingly opposed modes of fanaticism are often made one in liberal representations; the rationalist radical, for example,whether Jacobin or Marxist, reconstitutes religion in secular terms, as if this is an indictment in itself. Toscano suggests that we view the fanatic, in both his religious and secular iterations, as the product of a blockage vis-a-via utopian energies--hopefully he'll more fully elaborate on this notion in the second half of the monograph. The writer takes aim at all the right targets: antitotalitarianism, the new atheism, and the ideology that dare not speak its name, namely bourgeois liberalism. Toscano builds on the theoretical rejuvenation of radical thought effected by Zizek and Badiou, which he combines with meticulous intellectual history.

[Taylor Gregory · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alberto is not beating the authoritarian sympathizer allegations 😔

[Stas · Rating 3 out of 5]

For political science heavy on philosophy nerds. Not terribly novel, but a good resume and update of the tired old chestnut: is fanaticism an excess or an insufficiency of reason? Chapter on Kant had me faltering - I simply lack a frame of reference. But his engagement with Hannah Arendt and Cohn's Pursuit of Millenium is interesting. ( His defense of Muntzer contra Cohn is particularly convincing). Chapter on Marx and religion manages to add something to the old insight that opium is medicine, salvific, not necessarily a pure befuddlement and distraction. Appropriately for a psychoanalytically inflected critique of a peculiarly European (?) dilemma about the place of passion in politics, and in spite of the nods to the Subaltern studies work on Indain peasant uprisings and cargo cults, it ends with (a spoiler alert) a plea for moderation. All in all, a fine critique of liberal illusions. A great bibliography. Manifests a certain Negritude of Antonio variety. Partial to, though at times suspicious of Badiou. Clear political demarcation away from Agamben.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a time where you, the smart reader who would actually be able to make heads or tails of Toscano's dense academic prose, are not supposed to believe in anything too much, and more than disdain those who do, Fanaticism is a shockingly brave. It's not an easy read, but it is worth the effort.

[Alyssa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Useful ideas; very difficult to read.

[Илья Дескулин · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author is probably a good teacher of philosophy: he explains ideas of others very well. However, writing a book is not just a rehash of others' thoughts. You have to synthesize them and make a point. And here we have a problem: at the end of the book we are left with weakly related interpretations of fanaticism and the author's hope for communism to come someday and somehow...

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lovely book. If one remembers what a matrix is, this is the perfect column product, in my judgment.