Modern Intellectual History, 11, 3 (2014), pp.

719–733 
C Cambridge University Press 2014
doi:10.1017/S1479244314000262

in nostris extremis (terror and

fanaticism in the western mind)
julian bourg
Department of History, Boston College
E-mail: bourgj@bc.edu

Mikkel Thorup, An Intellectual History of Terror: War, Violence, and the State (London:
Routledge, 2010)

Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010)

The abolitionist John Brown. Freedom fighter? Terrorist? The choice is

unsatisfying for any number of reasons, least of all for the anachronistic
nomenclature and the moral obviousness of his cause. Of course Brown was
right, we can easily say, to take up the fight against that “peculiar institution” of
barbarous slavery. Insofar as the federal government stood in the way of historical
progress, perhaps he also was justified in striking the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry
in 1859 as the first salvo of the American Civil War, demonstrating by his pitiful
action that the Union would have to choose sides and fight. Yet no less clear
today is the sheer difficulty of justifying such antistate violence. Since the 1970s
and especially since September 11, 2001, with comparable moral obviousness,
insurgent and terroristic violence have generally been condemned as threats to
social stability and political coherence. The very liberal-democratic traditions
that might otherwise superficially heroize someone like John Brown recoil at
the disorder he personified. The truth of Brown’s adventurism is clearly more
complicated than the postcard version, and his crazed biblical prophetism, nasty
1856 murder spree in Kansas, and patronizing wish to play Moses to southern
blacks must be read alongside successful efforts by the government and pro-
slavery camp to brand him an incorrigible fanatic—a label that Brown himself
and other abolitionists embraced as their own.1 What Brown represents, however,
is an access point to the deep history of ideas about fanaticism and terrorism in
the modern West, a history filled with paradoxes and ambiguities that nonetheless
revolve around the basic fact—avoided with ease by contemporary pundits and

1
Michael Fellman, In the Name of God and Country: Reconsidering Terrorism in American
History (New Haven, 2010), 14–56.

719
720 julian bourg

prognosticators—that for the past several centuries we have met the enemy, and
he is us.
Under review here are two exemplary books of a new historiography of
extremism and terrorism. Appropriately, it has taken time to digest the events
of September 11 and its aftermath and to begin to reexamine the long-term
history of modern political violence. In contrast to other recent histories that
often examine local case studies, Mikkel Thorup and Alberto Toscano aspire to
the big picture. In spite of their different emphases, they both read the past as a
means through which to critically engage with the present. Above all, they pursue
an elusive objective in the study of the history of violence, namely grasping
the ideas that have animated and justified modern extremism, fanaticism, and
terrorism. Both authors overcome an obvious counterintuitive impediment to
such an intellectual history: the fact that violence forecloses the life of the
mind. Thorup escapes this bind by centering his history on the modern state’s
project of discursive legitimation, terror developing as a term of opprobrium for
the menacing violence of non-state actors. Toscano’s narrative traces the long-
standing Western tradition of denouncing abstract and universalizing political
visions as fanatical. In both cases, lines between system and excess, moderation
and extreme, are drawn within the Western intellectual frame. Here, the story
of extremism is in large measure a story of those who denounce it. By the same
token, hidden within this history are passions and enthusiasms that may evade
the condemnatory categories to which they are assigned. For John Brown was
wrong, and he was right.

∗∗∗
Mikkel Thorup divides his account into four parts: an exposition of his main
claim that ideas of terroristic violence revolve around the modern state, the
historical “archive” of terror and anti-terror since the French Revolution, anti-
pirate discourse from the early modern period to the present, and contemporary
debates on security and an emerging “humanitarian sovereign.” Thorup manages
to cover an impressive amount of ground, from the Bible to the present. The fact
that the text is weighed down with scrupulously researched citations, and that
the analyses are at times repetitive and choppily written, need not distract from
the book’s overall effect, which is altogether impressive. Thorup’s intention is
“trying to learn how violence is being described in order to be used” (189). He
argues that discourses of terroristic violence emerged largely after 1789 as part
of the modern state’s efforts to monopolize violence (Max Weber), in part by
defining its own violence as legitimate and discrediting non-state violence as
illegitimate. Non-state actors themselves eventually mirrored the state in playing
at such legitimation games. To be sure, precedents such as tyrannicide had long
 in nostris extremis 721

enabled the argumentative justification of political violence, and Thorup never

skimps on giving early modern sources and debates their due. However, the
main story involves the ways in which modernization processes since the French
Revolution instigated the shift from a world of ubiquitous violence to one in
which violence has, paradoxically, become increasingly both monopolized and
contested. Notionally, if violence could be controlled, it could be reduced, leading
to what Hans Joas calls “the dream of a modernity without violence” (quoted at
6). Arguments over the justification of violence and ideas about its legitimacy have
played a crucial role in this history, especially in the emergence of discourses of
terror. Needless to say, a greater paradox still, the era of the dream of nonviolence
has witnessed the embrace of violence to bring about historical and political
change and thus also, especially in the twentieth century, nightmarish expansions
of its range and intensity.
Somewhat schematically, Thorup charts the legitimation game through which
the ideal-typical modern state distinguishes its own “good” violence from the
unacceptable violence of its enemies. Although oversimplified, his analysis yields
elements worth considering. State actors tend to declare that their violence is
based on good intentions: it is preventative, reluctant, occasional, limited, self-
defensive, and restorative. Our enemy has caused this violence. He started the
fight, and we will finish it. The precise and immediate goal is ending the conflict
and achieving, or rather restoring, peace. Because the enemy has instigated the
conflict, action is better than inaction, and History is on our side. In contrast, the
enemy is “violence incarnate” (17). His violence is unprovoked, limitless in scope,
endless in duration, excessive, cruel, and monstrous. Blame and responsibility
for conflict rests with this essentially brutal and savage enemy, and violence is the
only language he speaks and understands. Now, given the crudeness of this type of
demonization, its consistency and longevity is surprising. Yet Thorup delivers the
evidence, from the French Revolution to the American Civil War to imperialism
to Russian nihilism to the twentieth century’s seemingly inexhaustible calamities.
The fresh move he makes here is to show how non-state actors, too, “observe
and subvert” this legitimizing strategy: fin de siècle anarchists claimed that the
status quo was already violent towards workers; South American guerillas in
the 1960s mimicked the states they fought by developing uniformed armies
(25, 36). On their side, state actors develop a kind of historical amnesia about
the state’s own violent history, which is naturalized. The state’s monopoly over
violence, only ever an “approximate reality,” is reinforced through struggle. The
preferred form of conflict is interstate war because the state recognizes itself in
other states (57). On the other hand, it cannot tolerate the violence of non-state
antagonists—criminals, pirates, insurgents, terrorists, and so forth—because,
unlike the antagonists of interstate war, they question the very legitimacy of the
state. The porousness of this state/non-state line is demonstrated not only by
722 julian bourg

the state’s use of non-state actors for its own ends (from privateers to Blackwater
employees), but especially in what Thorup calls the “frontierlands” of state power,
such as urban ghettos, colonies, and the “nomadic, disordered, rapacious non-
West” (57). In the latter, modern states inflict violence that mirrors that which they
ascribe to illegitimate, savage Others. The less regular one’s adversary, the more
irregular the response must be, and, again, harsh violence is the only language
“savages” can understand. It is on this basis that modern states perpetrate “guilt-
free massacres” (71).
In the second, historical, section of the book, Thorup follows the changing
fortunes of the concept of terror before, during, and after the French
Revolution. Forgoing facile transhistorical claims, he reasonably notes the vague,
unpoliticized sense of the term before 1789 as a synonym for fear and horror. For
example, the Hebrew Bible used various terms, translated in English as terror,
to designate dread of or trembling before the divine. In early modern political
thought, thinkers from Jean Bodin through Baruch de Spinoza unself-consciously
used “terror” to refer to fear of violence and war. In the Enlightenment, the term
denoted fear of war and death, but also of uncertainty and criminality. In his
discussion of despotism, “more than anyone,” the Baron de Montesquieu laid “the
groundwork for the subsequent politicization of the concept” as a description of
unpredictable and vicious governance (85).2 Thorup is right that Montesquieu
generally recycled the traditional political vocabulary of antiquity while pushing
it in new directions.
It was the French Revolution, however, that added a “creative dimension” to
the concept of terror, pushing it from a notion of “something done to you, to
[the idea of] something done by you, something active” (87). Henceforth, terror
became associated with forward-looking efforts to stimulate and hasten historical
and political change. According to Thorup, the 1790s saw two successive stages
in the conceptual development of terror: a “Robespierrean moment” that linked
it to virtue and the future, and an “anti-Robespierrean moment” beginning in
Thermidor when it came to mean illegitimate violence (89). The Terror of 1793–4
combined the older notion of generalized fear, especially related to extraordinary
or exceptional circumstances, with the Revolutionary vision of the new. “Terror
as justice was unknown until this period,” Thorup comments (92). A new order
had to be made quickly and defended at all costs. Crucially, Republican virtue was
supposed to prevent temporarily extreme, emergency violence from descending
into execrable despotism. Indeed, terror was now the very means by which
to overcome definitively those earlier meanings of the word: fear, uncertainty,

2
Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford, 2004).
 in nostris extremis 723

insecurity, and criminality. By destroying the causes of general instability and

vulnerability—for instance, the arbitrary, unnatural power of aristocrats and
clergy—terror was a means to build and defend a new world, as Franklin Roosevelt
would have it, free from fear.3 Of course, in “accelerating” the Revolution, the
Terror also generated its own enemies (94).
With the fall of Maximilien Robespierre in 1794, terror became an accusation of
illegitimate and horrific violence. Robespierre’s enemies invented the new word
terrorisme to describe the perversely despotic system he had put in place. “Terror
comes to be mean violence not from the state against individuals but violence
from despots or terrorists against state and society”; “terror as state practice” became
“terror as terrorism” (95, 101, original emphasis). In converting terror as justice
into terror as the antipode of justice, the terrorist-as-pariah was born. It had
taken only a few years in the 1790s for the decisive semantic shift to occur: from
“neutrality” (nonpolitical fear and insecurity) to legitimacy to illegitimacy (95).
Under Thermidor (1794–5), terror quickly came to refer to violence perpetrated
by usurpers, rebels, traitors, and despots whom the state had to repel. The old
category of “brigand,” too, underwent a rapid transformation. Making terror an
“epochal concept”—that is, associating it with a now-passed, regrettable phase
of the Revolution—enabled the Thermidorians to justify and excuse their own
extreme violence, which actually resembled that of the Committee for Public
Safety under Robespierre. Thermidor modeled the template that would eventually
take hold: basing legitimacy in part on the denunciation of one’s adversaries as
illegitimately terroristic.
It took time for the concept of terror to become fully politicized. Against
the assumption that counterrevolutionaries cemented the connection between
terror and revolution, Thorup insists that critics such as Edmund Burke and
Joseph de Maistre used the word only sporadically and vaguely. Burke, for
instance, more often referred to despotism, and his use of “terror” resembled
the prerevolutionary meaning of circumstantial fear rather than a new kind
of political regime or antiregime. Throughout the nineteenth century, “terror”
retained its older sense of generalized fear and only gradually became accepted
as signifying “something done to us and by them” (102, original emphasis).
Anarchism was the accepted term for “counter-social” violence (103), and
perpetrators and advocates of antistate violence did not use “terror” to describe
their own acts. Karl Marx, too, never used the term in any methodical way.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the word had come to designate
general social disorder. Only with the Russian nihilists of the late nineteenth

3
Daniel Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the
French Revolution (Chicago, 2010).
724 julian bourg

century did another major conceptual shift take place. Nikolai Morozov and
G. Tarnovski used the word positively, associating it with individual acts of
violence. Between the 1870s and 1917, the revolutionary left debated the tactical
usefulness of lonely spontaneous acts of violence, usually assassinations. Thorup
might have dwelt more on the emergence of anti-terror rhetorics and practices
among fin de siècle states coordinating new security regimes.4 It was the
Bolsheviks, however, explicitly aligning themselves with the example of the French
Revolution, who embraced terror as a strategy of governance. Insisting on the
public and pedagogical value of terroristic violence, and emphasizing immediacy
and collective identity, the Soviets advocated “not just defensive violence but a
terror meant to both eliminate and terrify” real and imagined enemies (109).
Throughout the twentieth century, the words “terror” and “terrorism”
were applied to an expanding variety of phenomena. Suggesting excessive
and extreme violence, they could refer to a “regime type,” “indiscriminate
warfare,” “pacification,” “instrumental violence,” and “political crime and moral
outrage” (111). Such discursive looseness, pertaining to circumstances as diverse as
totalitarianism, the horrors of combat, and the suppression of colonial rebellions,
continued through the Second World War. Only after 1945 were the concepts
of terror and terrorism “consolidated”; that is, they replaced a range of other
synonymic expressions (sabotage, insurgents, bandits) and became associated
with non-state actors who struggled with states over the “definitional landscape”
of conflict (118). Of the postwar era, Thorup writes, “what is new and interesting
is the ‘agreement’ to let the definitional struggle on legal and illegal violence center
on the concept of terror” (122, original emphasis). The process of consolidation
happened step-by-step. In the 1960s and 1970s, Nelson Mandela and Yasser Arafat
used the term “terror” to refer not to their actions, but to those of their adversaries.
Revolutionaries such as Carlos Marighella and João Quartim evaluated terrorism
according to its expediency and tactical efficacy, sometimes embracing the term
and sometimes rejecting it. Rarer have been those who positively embrace the
label of terrorism, from the Provisional IRA to neo-Nazis to some contemporary
Islamists. “The appropriation of the language of one’s enemy,” Thorup observes,
“is one way to confirm the mutual enmity” (128). These voices have mirrored
states’ own ongoing efforts to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate
violence.
According to Thorup, anti-terror debates in international law and diplomacy
took shape in three waves: the 1930s, the 1970s, and since 2001. Building on the
aforementioned anti-anarchist measures at the turn of the century, between the
1930s and the 1970s, existing states “secure in their statehood and position in

4
Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History,
1878–1934 (Cambridge, 2014).
 in nostris extremis 725

the international system” were quick to delegitimize non-state violence. On

the other hand, newly born or unstable states were eager to distinguish their
foundational struggles from terrorism (127). A full-blown anti-terror posture
emerged in the West with the Nixon administration (1969–74), a position that
initially dovetailed with antiguerilla rhetoric before being fully elaborated under
Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Thorup sees in our post-September 11 period the
return of the pre–1789 notion of terror as generalized fear and horror divorced
from politics. In a stimulating culturalist reading, he pinpoints the “abstract,
pervasive, and universal fear of unknown and invisible dangers” that courses
through Western “risk” societies (129). Such fears are not limited to terrorism
and appear in a variety of forms. Citizens are viewed as victims, and “threats are
epidemic” in a “general culture of fear” (131–2). The omnipresent and totalizing
sense of unease associated with terrorism since September 11, disconnected from
local, tactical, and ideological politics, has returned us to a framework that
strongly evokes the pre- or non-modern view of divine or mortal terror in the
face of unpredictable and uncontrollable anonymous forces. This terror, it is
alleged, has no words and does not speak the language of legitimacy.
Thorup provides another detailed example of this analysis in the third part
of the book, where he compares anti-pirate discourse from the seventeenth
to the nineteenth centuries with post-September 11 anti-terror talk. Here, too,
state prerogative was privileged in the distinction between reviled pirates and
sanctioned privateers. Although their actions on the early modern seas were
often indistinguishable, privateers were lawful and served a role in the formation
of modern navies, until they were no longer needed. The current American
war on terror has led some to draw explicit parallels between jihadists and the
Barbary pirates of the early 1800s. Both are enemies of humanity and deserve
no quarter. Blackwater employees are the latest privateers. In his concluding
chapters, Thorup takes aim at the heart of the present, excoriating what he calls
an emergent “humanitarian sovereign” that reinforces the sovereign power of
Western states while hiding behind an apparently post-statist rhetoric of human
rights and humanitarian intervention. Within Western countries, especially the
United States, such “cosmopolitan warfare in the new global frontierland” leans
on a “securitist” posture that promotes a “non-democratic defense of democracy.”
According to this view, the qualities of liberal democracy render society weak
and vulnerable; therefore democracy can only be saved through its suspension.
The dangers of this line of thinking are obvious to all students of history.
For all the consistent pursuit of the argument that discourses of terror have
emerged as a by-product of the legitimation of state violence, it is curious
that Thorup deliberately avoids the issue of state terror (111, 261 n. 56). The
line between state anti-terror campaigns and full-blown state terror remains
indistinct.
726 julian bourg

∗∗∗
Before turning to fanaticism’s deeper history and philosophical pedigree,
Alberto Toscano details modern liberalism’s attack on it. Nineteenth-century
Western liberals were often elitist, racist, and imperialist, and they branded
fanatics those who contested their power in the name of more robust ideals
of equality and self-determination. Indeed, imagining an end to slavery or
imperialism during the 1800s did require renouncing contemporaneous realities
from a position of idealized solidarity and emancipation. Over and against
manifestly immoral circumstances, some people such as John Brown willingly
embraced the label of fanatic. On the other hand, the diatribes of a John C.
Calhoun against abolitionists, or British journalists condemning the Mahdist
revolt in the Sudan, delegitimized those causes by accusing them of abstraction,
extremism, excessive emotion, and religious fervor—qualities that led to the
charge of fanaticism. Calls for calm gradualism and a defense of civilization
were reinforced by “a profound mimetic impulse” (15): fanaticism had to be met
with equally fanatic responses. In other words, crazed and starry-eyed critics of
slavery did not deserve the rights afforded more mature and moderate defenders
of the status quo, and indigenous rebellions merited extreme violence—the only
language they understood. By the late nineteenth century, the discrediting of
fanaticism culminated in medical–pathological models of degeneracy (Cesare
Lombroso) and social-scientific diagnoses of frenzied crowds (Gabriel Tarde).
Emotion, fantasy, utopianism, and universalist longings had to be removed from
a body politic that was reasonable, responsible, and “realistic.”
Toscano insists that we are still beholden to this template of anti-fanatical
liberalism. One influential historical narrative of the twentieth century maintains
that its horrors and tragedies resulted precisely from fanaticisms based in impas-
sioned political abstraction: from Communist fantasies of radical equality to Nazi
delusions about racial purity. Whatever the similarities and differences between
Nazism and Communism, the real issue becomes the rejection of all politics that
critique the imperfections of a given present from the point of view of alternative
futures—the vision of which requires some degree of abstraction. The last century
taught us that intensity is dangerous. Even someone like Michael Walzer, commit-
ted to reintroducing a tempered notion of impassioned political participation, has
felt the need to distinguish, as Toscano writes, between “virtuous enthusiasm and
pernicious fanaticism” (25). Yet, against the narrow positions of thinkers such as
Francis Fukuyama and Peter Sloterdijk (who have essentially recycled Burke and
Tarde), Toscano turns to Alain Badiou in order to conceptualize a “passion for the
real” that opposes the limitations of the actual world in the name of emancipatory
politics. While agonistic and antagonistic, such a passionate politics nevertheless
refuses wanton destruction. It presumably differs from Walzer’s, however, in its
rejection of mundane compromise and accommodation.
 in nostris extremis 727

A historically rooted reconsideration of the politics of fanaticism is required.

On one hand, the ability to imagine better futures needs to be salvaged; on the
other hand, the dominant powers’ use of the charge of fanaticism to discredit
social movements merits critical reflection. For Toscano, the story points back
to Thomas Müntzer and the peasant revolts of the 1520s, dismissed by Martin
Luther and Phillipp Melanchthon as a diabolically and chaotically fanatical threat
to the Augustinian distinction between the City of God and the City of Man.
Ever since, attempts to “build Heaven on Earth” have been charged as pitifully
unrealistic and injurious. Luther also pioneered the pursuit of extremist means
to deal with fanaticism: Müntzer and the peasants were to be wiped off the
face of the earth. While the image of Müntzer as fanatic has proved durable,
others as varied as Friedrich Engels, Ernst Bloch, and Fredric Jameson have
cheered the emancipatory political potential he represented. To this alternative
reading, the millenarian or chiliastic vision of an emancipated world, although
superficially anachronistic, has served as a productive subterranean resource for
conceptualizing modern temporality and politics. For instance, to his friend
Georg Lukàcs’s objection that otherworldly theological concepts amounted
to useless symptoms of historical-material frustration, Bloch responded that
such abstract images could motivate and spur action. For him, utopianism
was a necessary moment in social critique and radical politics; it marked
the irruption of the “non-synchronic” into the conventional and everyday.
To buttress the argument, Toscano again evokes Badiou, whose notions of
the “communist hypothesis” and “communist invariants” (possibility, equality,
popular immediacy and rebellion, non-representational and extra-statist politics)
express a “less romantic” version of Bloch’s suggestion (90–91). However, perhaps
surprisingly, Toscano also leans on Karl Mannheim in order to explain “the
birth of modern politics out of the spirit of millenarianism.” In Ideology and
Utopia (1929), Mannheim had noted that both chiliasm and liberalism were
utopian visions that embraced contingency. Chiliasm, the purer version of utopia,
was characterized by kairos—the irruption of eternity into ordinary time. For
Mannheim, too, this explosive outburst bore a direct link to modern revolution
and politics in general because it was linked to emotional expressiveness and
social conflict. Moreover, the revolutionary inheritance of chiliasm—the “utopia
of uncompromising antagonism and transcendent conviction, borne of the
dispossessed”—was locked in a ceaseless struggle with liberalism’s attempts to
calculate and manage modern time (97).5

5
Cf. Antonio Negri, “Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo,” in Negri, Time for Revolution (New
York, 2003), 139–261, 147–80. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism
(Stanford, 2003).
728 julian bourg

In the second half of his book, Toscano recounts a grippingly complicated

tale about theories of fanaticism from the Enlightenment and Immanuel Kant to
G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx. Surpassing earlier intra-theological debates, the
eighteenth century generated a variety of polemics over the theme. Voltaire
condemned “enthusiasms” whose ultimate root was religious. David Hume
rejected “superstition” for the same reason while reserving a positive role for
tempered “enthusiasm” in the expression of civic liberty. On the other hand,
positive uses of the term fanatique could be found, for instance, in Alexandre
Deleyre’s Encyclopédie article on the word, which praised “the fanaticism of the
patriot,” and with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, pace Voltaire, lauded “passion in
politics” (105, 111). Such variety revealed the ambivalences of the eighteenth
century, and to Toscano’s mind, no thinker better expressed Enlightenment
equivocations on the topic than Kant, who, amplifying earlier criticisms of
fanatical madness and spiritualism, shone a light on the possible fanaticism
of reason itself. In his efforts to delimit the legitimate scope of reason, and thus
circumscribe its misuse, Kant considered the danger that the notions of reason
and freedom, although inspiring energized commitments, might themselves
become objects of fanatical devotion. The violence of the French Revolution
lurked in the background of this effort to distinguish an intelligible enthusiasm
(Enthusiasmus) from an unsalvageable fanaticism (Schwärmerei) (121).6 Although
perhaps understandable temptations, to mistake subjective abstractions for
concretizable objects, or to expect universal approbation for particular demands,
amounted to perilous category mistakes. In other words, the effort to locate in a
straightforward way the noumenal in the phenomenal world—building Heaven
on Earth—was a chimerical project that led to bloody excess. To a later critic
such as Friedrich Nietzsche, of course, Kant’s dry and moralistic rationalism
was itself fanatical. With help from Hannah Arendt, however, Toscano draws a
different conclusion. The “passionate yet disinterested partisanship” evidenced
by the enthusiasm for the French Revolution of Kant—who, true to the Third
Critique, observed it from a distance as a “spectator” allied to the ideal of human
equality—models a passional universalism that has played (and might again play)
a crucial role in progressive history (143). One can be enthusiastic about human
emancipation without having to work the guillotine.
Not surprisingly, Hegel gave a comprehensive philosophical account of
fanaticism. Echoing Voltaire’s secularist assertion that Islam was distinctively
fanatical, Hegel the orientalist accused Muslims of rejecting rational, post-
Christian mediation in favor of precipitous submission to “the One.” For him,
Islam was characterized by excessive abstraction, bellicosity, and a rejection of

6
Anthony J. La Vopa, “The Philosopher and the Schwärmer: On the Career of a German
Epithet from Luther to Kant,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 60, 1–2 (1997), 85–115.
 in nostris extremis 729

individual freedom. Here, Toscano opens up a provocative line of analysis: for

Hegel compared the pernicious empty “formalism” of Islam with the Terror of
the French Revolution (154–5). Both have been accused by the liberal tradition—
then as now—of sharing a basic fanatical devotion to abstraction and unseemly
universalism. Indeed, according to this judgment, the unique destructiveness
of the Terror was that it introduced a form of “religious” vision into politics,
subjecting individuals, relationships, institutions, and the state to notional visions
of unanimity and harmony. By the same token, religious fanaticism itself has been
held up as a form of political fanaticism. Like Kant, Hegel worried that moving
too quickly from subjective dreams of universality to objective embodiment was
destructive. Of course, he escaped this predicament by treating such apparent
dead ends as historical stages en route to the Rechtsstaat. In his conclusion to this
section, Toscano turns to psychoanalysis in order to trace the legacy of Hegel’s
“expressive-civilizational” version of the fanatical Others of reason all the way
to Slavoj Žižek. In contrast, he postulates a “relational-political” approach to
fantasy supposedly truer to Sigmund Freud himself (169). In short, the enemy is
us.
After fairly noting that “the portrait of Marx the fanatic does not stand up to
scrutiny,” Toscano works his way toward the book’s culminating theme, namely
political religion (172). Dissatisfied that left Hegelian demystifications of theology
did not go far enough, Marx treated religion as a form of “objective illusion” and
“real abstraction”; that is, as an intelligible expression of material alienation
(184, 186). Because religion truly corresponded to specific material relationships,
critiques of religious fanaticism that remained at the level of ideology, such
as that of the liberal Enlightenment tradition, fell forever short of their mark.
Only a really emancipated world, in which universalist, egalitarian principles were
fulfilled, would see the retreat of religious world views. In other words, to really be
secular would mean surpassing both the modern state, whose transcendent form
perpetuated earlier political-religious structures, and “the private spirituality
of atomized individuals in civil society,” which was both a symptom of and
a misdirected protest against immiseration (197–8). Toscano then argues that
Marx himself viewed capitalism as an everyday religion propelled by fanatical
production and accumulation, a judgment echoed by thinkers from Paul Lafargue
and Walter Benjamin to Jacques Derrida and Žižek.
The last scene in Toscano’s drama presents the discourse of political religion
in the hands of twentieth-century antitotalitarian thinkers. From religiously
committed minds accusing fascism and communism of idolatry to secular
thinkers denouncing their anti-Enlightenment illiberalism, a broad interwar
and postwar consensus emerged that political fanaticism was inspired by quasi-
religious “passions” “organization,” and “aims” (212). The problem with political
religions was that they worshiped absolutes and abstractions. According to
730 julian bourg

Toscano, many have drawn a Burkean lesson: do not expect too much from
politics. Critics of political religion such as Jacob Talmon, Norman Cohn, and
John Gray, however, have based their views on unjustified anthropological
and historical premises: that religious impulses are permanent features of
human life, that secularization has gone too far or not far enough, or some
combination of the two. For example, Arendt, in her debates with Eric Voegelin
and Jules Monnerot, combined “an anthropological understanding of sacred
functions” with “the metahistorical narrative of Christianity’s displacement by
the secular religion of communism” (223). To Toscano’s mind, the very idea of
political religion leads to a double bind: we can neither escape nor embody the
sacred.
In this final chapter, Toscano also unearths fascinating evidence of
antitotalitarian thinkers’ anti-Islamic jibes, thus highlighting an unbroken
orientalist lineage that stretches from Voltaire to the present. Intellectuals as
varied as Karl Barth, Carl Jung, and Bertrand Russell all restated Monnerot’s
1949 claim that communism was the “Islam of the twentieth century.” Toscano
also retraces how Cold War-era critiques of political religion were extended into
the post-1989 and post-2001 moments. There is not much original about the
fact that political Islam is now the reigning fanaticism of choice. In 2009, the
neoconservative journalist Christopher Caldwell could, reversing Monnerot, call
Islam “the communism of the twenty-first century” (quoted at 206–7). At the
same time, Toscano readily upbraids some contemporary theorists’ penchant
for political theology, a field of thought he regards with critical ambivalence.
He first takes aim at Giorgio Agamben’s commitment to what Claude Lefort
once questioned as “the permanence of the theological–political.” After usefully
referring to earlier debates over secularization involving Karl Löwith, Hans
Blumenberg, and Carl Schmitt, he then turns to Jameson and, surprisingly,
Alexis de Tocqueville for the welcome suggestion that religion and revolution
both hinge on universality and abstraction. Finally, the sympathy of Agamben,
Badiou, Derrida, Antonio Negri, and Žižek for messianism and eschatology is
held to account. While Toscano is sympathetic to these thinkers’ embrace of
“enthusiasm” against anti-fanaticism, he rejects how their headlong plunges into
emancipatory–universalist abstraction tend to lose sight of concrete knowledge,
historical specificity, and political programmatics. When they do not engage
the material world, abstractions drift away into reveries. In sum, we still need
Marx. On balance, Toscano maintains a dual position: on one hand, he rejects
facile anti-fanaticism, whose modern history he has traced with subtlety and
attentiveness; on the other hand, he urges that certain, seemingly untimely and
unrealistic “fanatic” ideas, still have a role to play in the world. He therefore
aims to steer between the Scylla of ahistorical immateriality and the Charybdis
of worldly manifestation by any means necessary.
 in nostris extremis 731

∗∗∗
Both Thorup and Toscano familiarize extremism, exploring the borders and
exteriors of certain normatively acceptable political arrangements, and showing
how, to take up an older language, the discursive center defines the margin.
Outsider terrorists and fanatics have long been associated with death, from the
colonial “primitive” authors of savage violence (subjected in turn to reciprocal
savagery) to utopian radicals who threaten to destroy existing society in the
name of a vaguely sketched future. Thorup’s emphasis on the legitimation
game of state power overlaps with Toscano’s attention to the conservation of
existing states of affairs. Still, we are left with John Brown’s body. Toscano falls
short of the embodiment to which he aspires. He masterfully exposes fanatical
conservative and liberal repudiations of radical fanaticism. This mirroring is one
of Thorup’s main points, too. In contrast to Thorup’s more muted structural
analysis, Toscano lays his normative cards on the table—a “passion for the real”
tempered with Kantian disinterestedness is set over and against political religion
and Islamophobia. The pushback against contemporary fascination with political
theology is refreshing. Yet Toscano is nevertheless misguided in his insistence that
“abstract” fanaticisms automatically point toward universalism and progressive
history. Racial purity and the free-market world order, too, are future-oriented
abstractions. Most seriously, like Badiou, Toscano does not grapple with violence
as a problem. He himself seems to flinch at the bloody implications of some of
the ideas he recovers but is faster to denounce reactionaries, conservatives, and
liberals than to confront the consequences of some of his protagonists’ visions.
In spite of otherwise lucid normative positioning, we are left with little idea of
how to differentiate “good” from “bad” extremism and violence. Be that as it
may, Toscano’s recuperative history of fanaticism since Müntzer is preferable to
another recent, much weaker work that traces the same ground with narrow
“liberal” and political-religious blinders.7
Thorup does deal with violence, and some of his descriptions of state anti-
terror repression, such as the US Army’s campaign against Native Americans,
are truly chilling. And yet, because the modern state is the principal agent of
his systematic account, antistate, insurgent, or terroristic violence is not fully
explained. Indeed, such force emerges primarily as the distorted mirror of the
statist model, either because non-state actors aspire to take over state power
or because they are obliged to grapple with state-assigned categories. Thorup
underplays the differences and discontinuities among the outsiders he treats—
Robespierre, Morozov, Lenin, Che, and so forth. Furthermore, where Toscano

7
Alessandro Orsini, Anatomy of the Red Brigades: The Religious Mind-Set of Modern
Terrorists (Ithaca, 2011).
732 julian bourg

shows his leftist cards, in contrast, Thorup seems unable to give us a way out of a
situation in which state power formulates the rules of the game and then runs the
tables. To Toscano’s Marx, in other words, he offers a young Hegelian’s frustrated
anguish over right Hegelian statism. He is understandably horrified at anti-
terror violence, and his distress gathers momentum in his concluding discussion
of antidemocratic securitist rhetoric and the humanitarian sovereign. His own
position, however, is restrained by the closed economy of his statist structure. In
other words, non-state violence in itself is overlooked, and anti-terror campaigns,
even when taken to an extreme, relate to the modern state’s normal project of
monopolizing violence. But when is state violence itself terroristic? There is thus
a related story to tell about terror as a form of rule that both connects to and
varies from the French Revolutionary experience of “terror as state practice.” In
states whose “essence” was terror, anti-terrorist rhetoric played a justificatory
role.8 Furthermore, the similarities and differences, say, between the United
States’ annihilation of indigenous peoples and the murderous regimes of interwar
Europe need to be parsed further.
For both authors, the rhetoric of terror and fanaticism amounts to
consequential name-calling. Thorup is more attentive to the bloody effects of
such strategies of delegitimation, even if his account ends in a certain paralyzed
ambiguity. Toscano is clearer in his ambition to defend extremism, although he
is unable to justify the distinction between progressive and destructive future-
oriented politics. On the whole, we find ourselves still and again in the modern
game of legitimation and of history as a meaningful process. How easy it is to
forget that fifteen to twenty years ago such a game seemed played out. Indeed, in
some quarters the era of Islamist terrorism has intersected smoothly with already
existing senses of post-political, post-national, and nomadic globalization. Yet
who even pronounces the word “postmodern” anymore? Perhaps these two
books’ unsurprising announcement relates to the fact that, for all the claims
to globalized novelty and uncharted territory since 1989 and then 2001, states
still kill and radicals are invariably discredited. For Thorup, what seems like the
overture to post-statist humanitarian sovereignty amounts to merely the string
tugs of Western nation state puppeteers. For Toscano, there is nothing much new
in either Western Islamophobia or the dismissal of emancipatory idealism by
conservative realism. It is nonetheless telling that neither author confronts the
issue of Islamist violence directly, either on its own terms or in terms of how it
compares and contrasts with earlier Western violent radical traditions. Because

8
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1973), 344. On state terror’s anti-
terrorism see Report of Court Proceedings: The Case of the Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist
Centre: Heard before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., Moscow,
August 19–24, 1936 (Moscow, 1936).
 in nostris extremis 733

they describe long-term continuities without offering visions of how to exit from
cyclical repetition—the state and status quo always win—there is a sense in
which the lesson we are still involved in the modern story doubles over into plus
ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Repetition has always been the minor key of
narratives of the end of modernity, and diagnosis without prognosis constitutes
a neutered form of critical thought. What are the prospects for Joas’s “dream of a
modernity without violence”? How then to embody Münster’s fanciful sense of
possibility? In lieu of answers, Thorup and Toscano leave us with the clear sense
that modernity continues to be haunted by “radical trembling” that comes “from
the outside” and that “is played out in the violent relationship of the whole of
the West to its other[s].”9 Derrida was thinking of Vietnam when he wrote this
line in 1968. Today, however, such an outside is no longer simply “over there,”
but rather everywhere; it includes polymorphous frontierlands and nomadic
subjects from western Pakistan to southern Norway to Nairobi to Boston. Insofar
as this decades-old language continues to structure these accounts of terror and
fanaticism, conceptually at least, we remain on familiar, shaky ground.

9
Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago, 1985),
109–36, 134, original emphasis.
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