To even consider writing a monograph on fanaticism, in general, and on political fanaticism, in particular, requires a certain amount of scholarly courage, because it implies the ability to avoid not only the Scylla of commonsense platitudes but also the Charybdis of abstract analytical claims with little or no relevance to real life. Fortunately, Zachary Goldsmith has both the courage and the navigation skills to bring this ship to shore in one piece. All maritime metaphors aside, this book presents a necessary reminder of the many forms that fanaticism has taken throughout history and of its versatility today.

It is precisely its resilience and adaptability that signal a feature of fanaticism worth preserving, in the right amount, for the sake of a healthy political life: passion. To his merit, Goldsmith agrees from the very beginning with authors like Max Weber or Michael Walzer that “a politics totally devoid of passion is also undesirable” (p. 1). According to him, this notion emerged by the eighteenth century, when “enthusiasm presented itself as a third way between fanaticism, on the one hand, and a bloodless rationalistic politics, on the other” (p. 5). The ways in which the Greek word enthousiasmos came to double for the Latin fanaticus (from fanum, meaning “temple” or “holy place”) are detailed in chapter 2. Initially, both words came to designate the possession by a deity as part of a cultic practice, yet even for the ancients, enthusiasm appeared “a gentler form of divine inspiration” than fanaticism, as documented, for example, in the Platonic dialogues Ion and Phaedrus (pp. 21–23).

As a matter of fact, chapter 2 is the only one that justifies the inclusion of the word “history” in the subtitle of the book. Goldsmith identifies three stages in the development of the concept. According to this history, the Roman cultic understanding of fanaticism was followed by the premodern and then the modern, theological one that crystallized during the Reformation and solidified around the time of the French Revolution into the political and social sense that we tend to associate with fanaticism today. These shifts were accompanied by the transformation of an ontological concept (“in the ancient world a fanatic was thought to be truly possessed by a deity”) into an analogical one (“it is as if this person is truly possessed by a deity”). Yet the main characteristics of the fanatic remained the same: excessive passion and a non-negotiable belief in the possession of the Truth, “often implying a highly intellectualized plan to remake the world according to some a priori plans” (pp. 51–52).

Each of the next three chapters, representing the bulk of the monograph, focuses on one author—Kant, Burke, and Dostoevsky, respectively: despite their national, temporal, and philosophical differences, they were chosen for their various takes on political fanaticism during the French Revolution and after. This kind of selection always involves a fair amount of subjectivity that needs to be respected as such; yet, in this case, one may wonder why, the French Revolution being first and foremost a national event, Goldsmith did not include a French author as well. Tocqueville, for example, comes to mind as an excellent candidate: he is someone with a deep understanding of religious and political fanaticism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Considering the centrality Goldsmith assigns to the French Revolution for understanding the “transition” from religious to political fanaticism, the reader is left wondering what might have been peculiar to France during the eighteenth century that allowed or even encouraged such a metamorphosis. After all, at that time, France was not the most modernized country in the Western world. Furthermore, the possibility that religious and political fanaticisms do not succeed one another but, on the contrary, coexist is never seriously considered, despite being alluded to. Isn’t it possible that religious convictions become fanatical only when they embrace political overtones, whereas political fanaticism requires, of necessity, a pseudo-religious faith in one’s Truth? If so, then it is not only the Reformation that ought to draw the attention of the historian of ideas but also American Puritanism and its subsequent manifestations during the Great Awakenings.

The concluding chapter serves a dual purpose. First, it provides “a cluster account of fanaticism.” As Goldsmith argues persuasively, “Understanding fanaticism in this way attempts, on the one hand, to display the diversity of the many faces of fanaticism, while also pointing to an underlying unity, to the ‘family resemblances’ among various examples of this phenomenon” (p. 132). The result is a surprisingly neat decalogue of criteria: messianism, against reason, embrace of abstraction, desire for novelty, pursuit of perfection, against limits, embrace of violence, certitude, passion, and, last but not least, “an opium for intellectuals” (p. 140). The description of each addresses many possible questions, yet the relationship between fanaticism and intellectuals remains somewhat muddy. Is fanaticism associated with some “attractiveness to intellectuals” (p. 3) or with some “intellectual pretension” (p. 5)? Although the opium metaphor suggests the former, many of the examples offered throughout the book endorse the latter. One may suspect that the explanation for this ambiguity is related to yet another one: How does individual fanaticism become a mass movement? A possible clarification comes through the analysis dedicated to Dostoevsky’s Demons: “The history of all fanatical movement are populated by a few Pyotrs [“great fanatics”] at the front and hordes of Erkels [“weak fanatics”] following behind, eager to do what needs to be done” (p. 125).

Showing why extremism “is a necessary but not sufficient condition of fanaticism” and how the latter “is fundamentally antidemocratic, antipolitical, antiliberal, and never necessary” (p. 155) serves the second aim of the last chapter, which is to criticize the few but vocal supporters of political fanaticism. Scholars such as Joel Olson or Alberto Toscano consider political fanaticism a political virtue and attempt to develop a “critical theory of fanaticism” for the “radical transformation of the status quo” (pp. 142–53). Here, Goldsmith does a great job taking apart their arguments, or lack thereof, revealing not only internal inconsistencies but also their potentially devastating consequences if taken off library shelves and implemented in the real world. Nevertheless, one feels like this “up-to-date section” could have been expanded to include forms of fanaticism that are not self-identified as such but otherwise fulfill many, if not all, of the 10 criteria Goldsmith proposes. From the opposite perspective, the demanding reader could also wonder whether John Locke’s old advice that “the opprobrious name of fanatics … might with more prudence be laid aside and forgotten than made use of” (quoted at p. 38) would not deserve a more serious consideration in today’s already polarized and names-throwing political life.

All in all, such shortcomings and some distracting repetitions of ideas and quotes aside (e.g., Pocock on pp. 92 and 97 or Dostoevsky’s Kirillov on pp. 115 and 122), Goldsmith’s Fanaticism represents a significant and timely contribution to a much sought-after balance between “the fanatic and the zombie,” as Alain Finkielkraut aptly put it (The Defeat of the Mind, 1995). It also serves as a reminder that, as one of Dostoevsky’s characters quoted in Goldsmith’s book phrases it, “The first [fire] is in people’s minds, not on the rooftops” (p. 121).