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Liberals also imply that the policies and actions of the Western powers in the Middle East and Central Asia are carried out to defend moral and political values, instead of these values being used as an ideological cover to justify imperialist policies and tactics. In his Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea , the scholar Alberto Toscano traces the history of the idea of fanaticism, a politics of passionate and unconditional conviction, and presents a rigorous treatment of the roots of the liberal and conservative attacks on fanaticism.
His book is primarily cast as a treatise in political theory and the history of ideas. Although unquestionably an erudite work, it is often difficult to follow and seems to have been addressed to doctoral students and professors of political theory familiar with the literature and controversies in the field rather than to a lay, politically interested audience.
Having said that, it is a valuable and stimulating study and throws considerable light on a number of issues bearing on political militancy and provides much historical information. The study also shows the various meanings of fanaticism in widely different and contrasting circumstances.
The historical use of the notion of fanaticism to describe widely different behaviors in many differing contexts could render the notion pretty useless: it applies to too many historical circumstances and therefore it does not clarify historical analysis very much. We could borrow Justice William O. In trying to defend the constitutionality of a right to privacy that is not explicitly spelled out in the U.
Constitution, Douglas argued that the specific guarantees spelled out in the Bill of Rights have penumbras. These are formed by emanations from those explicit constitutional guarantees that help give them life and substance, and from which the right of privacy can be inferred.
We could similarly say that the notion of fanaticism exists within a penumbra emanating from other important and far more precise concepts. One such concept, which turns out to be historically and logically related to the notion of fanaticism, and central to it, is abstraction. Toscano shows the close association between the conservative attack on abstraction and its indictment of radical political thought.
Conservative thinkers since Edmund Burke have stressed the need to base political practice on common sense, custom, and tradition against what they regarded as the misty abstractions of fanatics. As a response to Burke and conservative thought, Toscano brings up the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his defense of abstraction and revolutionary enthusiasm in the same terms that Kant supported the French Revolution. Moreover, for Kant, fanaticism was immanent in human rationality itself.
Thus, Kant made an effort to distinguish between enthusiasm, which he favored, and fanaticism, which he did not. There are other important issues that have, in my view, a somewhat weaker connection to the notion of fanaticism that are nevertheless discussed by Toscano in an interesting and provocative fashion.
The second half of the course questions the conceptual costs of this redefinition. Who are political fanatics? What are the political and psychological consequences to us in labeling others as fanatics?
How might we distinguish between fundamentalism and fanaticism? Is fanaticism necessary to define the extant parameters of toleration or civil society? Ultimately these inquiries are designed to test our assumptions about what fanaticism is as a political idea and how it operates in contemporary political thought. This course fulfills the requirement of an advanced seminar in Political Science.
Requisite: One course in political or social theory. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. For Kant, fanaticism is always a transgression of the limits of human reason, a metaphysical delirium.
This is almost a kind of metaphysical idolatry in fact, Kant praises Jewish iconoclasm here. What is the political core of the Kantian discourse on fanaticism? Firstly, for Kant fanaticism is linked to an obsession which, although it believes itself to be universal, reveals itself to be particularist.
This is the case in nationalistic fanaticism, which Kant sets against cosmopolitanism. In Kant, the defence of authority that we encountered in Luther reemerges: denial of any right to rebellion and the requirement in politics for a respect of authority, laws, and representative institutions.
While the rebel sans-culotte is implicitly seen as a fanatical and pathological figure, the revolutionary movement is saved and universalized through its effect on the spectator , who judges it in terms of human history and the sign of universality that it conveys. While in Kant we are dealing with a cognitive and affective disposition, a spurious result of our inevitable metaphysical impulse, in Hegel fanaticism is depicted as a necessary passage in the progressive universalization of Spirit.
As rightly noted by Domenico Losurdo, 8 German thought from Kant to Hegel can be characterized as a philosophical response to the historical trauma and prospect of emancipation represented by the French Revolution.
In the conceptual transcription of the revolution, fanaticism appears as a short circuit between the abstract universal and its concrete realization, a manifestation of subjective freedom in its pure negativity, in its active refusal of any determination. As is well-known, in the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel recognizes in this negating movement of abstract, subjective freedom the spiritual force behind the Reign of Terror and its ruthless logic of suspicion — an idea that Alain Badiou has recently brought back in The Century 9 in order to summarize the essence of the twentieth century.
This could give the impression of a simple refutation, liberal or conservative, of a radical politics of principle. Or better, in the Hegelian discourse on fanaticism there is a strange short circuit between an exquisitely immanent moment of the European spirit and the appearance of its non-European and ahistorical Other.
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