A Critical Theory of Political Extremism

The last volume of historian Eric Hobsbawm’s history of the modern world was entitled The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. Published in 1994, Hobsbawm’s end date for the ‘age of extremes’ was not intended to carry deep significance, but it reflected a wider post-Cold War optimism in which deep national and global divisions between radically opposed ideological positions seemed a thing of the past. That optimism has collapsed. Since the 1990s, far-right and religious political violence has increased, democratic institutions have been aggressively eroded across the globe, and ultranationalist, racist and sectarian movements have moved into the mainstream. Simultaneously, some accuse apparently progressive political movements – for democratic reforms, environmental activism, or indigenous rights – of sliding towards extremism. Extremism is now central part of the vocabulary of 21st Century politics. But what is extremism? A deluge of answers to this question have been proposed by governments, scholars and other specialists, yet most have suffered from two principal and interrelated flaws. First, they have overwhelmingly assumed that extremism is primarily a phenomenon of ‘non-state actors’ – such as terrorist organisations, armed groups, or radical political parties. Limited analysis has been given to the way states themselves could be extremist in whole or in part. Second, much work on extremism has started from the assumption that extremists must be driven by a radical rejection of ‘mainstream’ values. “Extremism is the vocal or active opposition to our fundamental values,” states the UK government, while French President François Hollande, speaking after the 13th November 2015 Paris attacks, declared that: “France came under attack for what it represents, for what it stands for, for its culture, our way of living, as well as our values, our principles.” Both these assumptions, I suggest, should seem both empirically and theoretically dubious from a critical orientation. In this paper, I therefore outline a political theory of extremism that explains what the concept should mean in a political context, what the empirical basis for this conception is, and what its normative implications are. I draw on both ‘analytical’ and ‘critical’ political theory and integrate ‘conceptual’ and ‘empirical’ inquiry. In a certain respect this approach is not new. Capital letter Critical Theory in many ways begins with an empirically-orientated critique of extremism, in the form of interwar Fascism, as conducted by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer during and after World War II. Yet much has changed in the landscape of extremism and the state of social scientific research on extremism since this time. I will engage with post-World War II figures like Adorno and Horkheimer (and also Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper), but seek to demonstrate the difference between their conception and diagnosis of extremist politics and my own.