Includes bibliographical refeerences and index.

"[This book] does an admirable job of making our understanding of civil society both more elaborated and more complex. Bringing together theoretical and histori

We may think we know what defines religious fanaticism: violent action undertaken with dogmatic certainty. But the term fanatic, from the European Reformation t

Voltaire called fanaticism the "monster that pretends to be the child of religion". Philosophers, politicians, and cultural critics have decried fanaticism and

The idea of fanaticism as a deviant or extreme variant of an already irrational set of religious beliefs is today invoked by the West in order to demonize and p