Some clues to the character of this brilliant book are provided in the epigraphs reminding us that the histories of the Anabaptists were written by their adversaries and that not everything irrational is stupid. Toscano points out that those whom we label fanatics are thereby rendered beyond our empathy and beyond negotiation, and he adds that it is enthusiasm for an abstraction such as equality or universality that distinguishes the fanatic from the madman. Fanaticism may exemplify an excess of rationality rather than irrationality and as such can be a cover for a kind of universal humanism, but one that is anything but humanitarian. He therefore focuses his critical and historical interrogation of fanaticism with a broader reflection on the contemporary relationship between universal emancipation and abstract universalism, notably the way in whcih the idea of fanaticism has been used in Cold War polemics and the current war against terror. Toscano has various targets in mind, but the hyper-cynicism of the political philosopher John Gray may stand in for the rest, particularly because his views rest on the fusion of revolutionary religion with revolutionary politics in the work of Norman Cohn. In Cohn's discussion of the eschatological and millenarian impulse, both radical religion and radical politics are labelled fanatical, totalitarian and psycho-analytically pathological. For Toscano this way of dealing with serious commitment is the contemporary version of Burke's revulsion from the excesses of the French Revolution and other reactions to it, and it has affinities with the rejection of religious enthusiasm. He contrasts this with the sympathetic treatment of radical religion by Marx, Engels and Hobsbawm. After quite a lot of virtuoso dialectics in the Marxist manner and an insightful analysis of some two centuries of intellectual and social history Toscano is concerned with the resurrection of commitment, belief and hope in a world grown tired and comprehensively cynical. This then is a moral critique and it indicates one of the reasons why Marxist thinkers, while doubting whether religion has any power independent of its function as a reflection of real forces, turn to St Paul on faith and hope. Rather nicely he sees the ‘new atheists’ as mere ‘rentiers’ of the Enlightenment, and he condemns the fusion of the religious and the political in a common category as blasphemous. Of course passionate convictions, religious, charismatic and secular, are bound to proliferate in a rather alarming way in times of crisis, but we should be wary of pathologising them. The passionate embrace of principle is a moment in any emancipatory project, even though fanaticism is not capable of shaping that project coherently and effectively. ‘Urgency and intransigence must be coupled with patience and strategy.’