Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea was one of Steven Poole‘s Non-Fiction Choices in last Saturday’s Guardian Review:
The text is often highly abstract, with theoretical discussions of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Badiou, Sloterdijk, Arendt, Schmitt, and others, but then Toscano is after all explicitly engaged in a defence of abstraction in “emancipatory politics”. By the end he has at least irrefutably demolished our lazy opposition between rational-moderate liberalism and “fanatical” religion; while his sorrowful comparison of modern blowhards with “the great reactionaries of yesterday” is a slyly humorous touch.
Meanwhile, Johnathan Wright of Catholic Herald wrote a thought-provoking review of the book, published last Friday:
Gets the synapses firing… The book has brio, it is bolstered by wide-ranging scholarship and it will make you re-examine one of the most dangerous words in the political lexicon.
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