Manus I. Midlarsky. Origins of Political Extremism: Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Abstract

Manus I. Midlarsky tackles a most difficult issue: how to understand political extremism across widely varying forms, geographies, and chronologies. He is on the hunt for an overarching thesis that enables us to understand communism, fascism, Islamic radicalism, and extreme nationalism. Midlarsky is a political scientist with a difference (these days): he takes history seriously and quickly dispenses with the idea that cross-national studies will tell us much of significance. Instead, he proposes to explore the interface between individuals and their historically formed social conditions. If one wants to understand political extremism, he contends, one needs first to get a handle on the political extremists. For Midlarsky, the four forms of extremism share a common, totalizing view of the individual and society. The regimes and movements that embody extremism have a singular view of the world. They are anti-pluralist to the core; all individuals have to follow in lockstep the prevailing ideology, and enemies—current, imagined, or potential—have to be purged in one fashion or another.