Luther and Calvin applied the term "fanatic" to those who sought to
destroy civil society in order to establish the Kingdom of God, the
"false prophets" and their followers who, early on in the
Reformation, began smashing images in churches and rebelling
against princes. "Civil Society and Fanaticism" is organized around
this seminal moment of religious and political iconoclasm, an
outburst of hatred against mediations and representation.
The author shows that civil society and fanaticism have been
consistently present as conjoined notions in Western political
thought since the sixteenth century, underlining the link between
two principles that are constitutive of that thought:
dualism--between the City of God and the earthly city, between
civil society and the state--and the validity of representation.
In what is both a study of the evolution of the two interrelated
concepts and a critique of critiques of representation, the author
draws upon an impressive range of works, including texts by
Aristotle and Baudelaire, the medieval theology of Giles of Rome
and the humanist thought of the Reformer Philipp Melanchthon, the
political philosophies of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Rousseau, Kant's
reflections on the sublime, and Marx's critique of Hegel. At the
same time, he discusses a varied group of fanatics or people
stigmatized as such: the first Anabaptists, the Shiite sect of the
Assassins, the French Protestant Camisards, the Bolsheviks. An
original analysis of Lenin's political theory and practice sheds
new light on the antagonism between totalitarianism and the
law-governed state identified with civil society.
The author's approach is multidisciplinary, proceeding at different
moments from lexicographical, sociological, psychoanalytic, and
philosophical methods and analysis. The book also makes vivid use
of iconology by reproducing and interpreting a series of works by
Albrecht Durer, whose art and theory of representation, it is
argued, were opposed to the destruction not only of images but of
civil society.
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