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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 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 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).Footnote 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, 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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 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.

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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 impassioned 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, committed 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.

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).Footnote ⁵

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).Footnote 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 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 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.

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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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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 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].”Footnote 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.