Zachary R. Goldsmith - Fanaticism: A Political Philosophical History

For the errours of Definitions multiply themselves, according as the reckoning proceeds; and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see, but cannot avoyd, without reckoning anew from the beginning; in which lyes the foundation of their errours.

Thomas Hobbes (1985 [1651]: 105)

Passion, Michael Walzer (2004) claims, is a hidden issue at the heart of many of todays most pressing political problems (110). Excessive passion in the political arena can impel a turn to irrationalism and engender an unbending conviction in the exclusive truth of ones own belief. Often, this can further mean a refusal to compromise or admit any doubt and, all too often, the pursuit of violent means to realize ones political aspirations. To put it too bluntlyfanaticism. But, as Walzer is quick to point out, a politics totally devoid of passion is also undesirable. Like Max Weber before him, Walzer argues that politics, in its best expression, comprises conviction energized by passion and passion restrained by conviction (120), an unstable combination redolent of what Weber (2004) famously called an ethics of conviction and an ethics of responsibility (83).

Historians of political thought have long wrestled with this central problem of passion in politics, engaging with changing concepts and attendant terminology to understand and grapple with this central problem of social existence. John Passmore (2003) notes that, during the Enlightenment, when the forces of reason were arrayed in battle against those of passion, two words entered the English language at almost the same time to describe this struggle: enthusiasm and fanaticism (211). As we will see in this work, these two different termsand the closely related concepts they are meant to denotehave undergone a long process of evolution as they have been used to understand certain types of social engagement, beginning with their earliest invocation in the ancient world, followed by their transformation into religious concepts, and, by the time of the Enlightenment, their ultimate refashioning as primarily political concepts.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines fanaticism as the condition of being, or supposing oneself to be, possessed, or, the tendency to indulge in wild and extravagant notions, esp. in religious matters; excessive enthusiasm, frenzy; an instance, a particular form of this, as well as, in a weaker sense: Eagerness or enthusiasm in any pursuit. While the dictionary notes the first instance of the word (or a variant) in English as dating from 1652, Dominique Colas (1997) notes a usage more than a full century earlier in a 1525 version of the celebrated story of Robin Hood (14). Emerging in vernacular languages around the turn of the seventeenth century, enthusiasm is defined similarly by the Oxford English Dictionary, which offers a few related definitions, all variations on possession by a god, supernatural inspiration, prophetic or poetic frenzy; an occasion or manifestation of these.

More recent attempts to define fanaticism focus on particular attributes of this concept. For example, H. J. Perkinson (2002) claims that the key attribute of fanaticism is a flight from fallibility. Such a rejection of fallibility, Perkinson argues, leads one to become fanatical, as well as dogmatic, obscurantist, and authoritarian (172). The psychologist Stanley Milgram (1977) reduced fanaticism to mere extremism, writing, A fanatic is someone who goes to extremes in beliefs, feelings, and actions (58). The philosopher A. P. Martinich (2000) identifies an obsession with transcendence as the crux of fanaticism, writing, A fanatic is a person who purports to place all (or virtually all) value in things of some transcendent realm. This entails that either no or only derivative value is attached to this world (419). Passmore (2003) extends these analyses, arguing that hard-core fanaticism has three major attributes: some objective of such consequences that all other ends must be subordinated to it even when this entails acting in ways which would normally be regarded as immoral, as well as a belief that it is possible to know by having access to some peculiarly authoritative source of knowledge what this objective is and why such means are possible, and the further belief that those who have this knowledge are entitled to suppress those who raise any questions about it, who oppose in a way its realization or, more generally, who do not show in their behaviour that they wholeheartedly accept it (221).

While these attempts at definition are no doubt helpful, they only tell us so much. Indeed, as many political philosophers and intellectual historians have pointed out, the central concepts of political life are difficult, if not impossible, to neatly define. As Nietzsche (1996) argues, such concepts exist completely beyond definition; they no longer possess[] a single meaning, but a whole synthesis of meanings (60). The influential German intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck (2016) arrives at a similar view regarding such foundational concepts (Grundbegriffe), writing, Concepts are thus concentrations of many semantic contents (46). Accordingly, while the meaning of the words we use to denote certain concepts may be more or less clear, the concepts themselves can only ever be interpreted. This is no less the case with a concept like fanaticism.

Combining insights from the field of concept history (Begriffsgeschichte), as well as related approaches including the Cambridge School of intellectual history, and the more recent methodological innovations of the philosopher Berys Gaut (2000, 2005), this work demonstrates the complexity and myriad transformations of the concept of fanaticism. Therefore, instead of proffering one simple and neat definition of fanaticism, I will provide a cluster account of the concept of fanaticism. Accordingly, after studying the history of the concept of fanaticism, especially its more modern political manifestation through analyses of the thought of Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, I will posit ten primary attributes of the concept of fanaticism that, in various permutations, hang together and create what we can recognize as fanaticism in its fullest sense. These core attributes are messianism, an inappropriate relationship to reason, an embrace of abstraction, a desire for novelty, the pursuit of perfection, an opposition to limits, an embrace of violence, absolute certitude, excessive passion, and an attractiveness to intellectuals.

While throughout its history fanaticism has almost always held a normatively negative connotation, it has long existed alongside its more normatively ambiguous (or even normatively positive) twin, enthusiasm. Accordingly, to hope to understand the concept of fanaticism, its twin concept, enthusiasm, must also be explored. The history of these two concepts can be likened to two concurrent lines, sometimes intersecting and converging, where the terms