Radical Voices, Radical Ways

I confess to being something of a radicalism sceptic. As I see it, the main question confronting the historical study of radicalism is not, as the editors of the present volume suggest, whether or not it is wrong to apply the nineteenth-century term ‘radicalism’ to earlier phenomena. The notion that our own analytic vocabulary must be restricted to words and concepts used by the historical actors we study appears evidently ridiculous as soon as it is stated clearly. Instead, the main question about the artificial analytic category ‘radicalism’ is the perennial question for all such categories: is it useful? What do we gain, what can we learn, by treating the phenomena we count as ‘radicalism’ together? The editors, Laurent Curelly and Nigel Smith, make a strong effort to construct ‘radicalism’ as an analytic category. Their proposal, building on important work by Burgess and especially Ariel Hessayon, will interest those working on the subject. Radicalism, they claim, can be known by four features: first, it mounts an oppositional challenge to the status quo; second, radicalism tends to be short-lived and temporary; third, it was polymorphous, having various concerns and commitments—religious radicalism, republican radicalism, and so on; and fourth, it provides a space for ‘idiosyncratic voices’, women and men who represent themselves, not any larger grouping

Epistemology · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Skepticism · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions