Description

This book is about the role of belief in political action.  Such belief, often unfounded by empirical evidence, can animate extreme action such as violence and the overthrow of political systems.

How does such belief have the power to engage people to risk their lives and others, and to kill others?  

To explore this concern, we use the French Revolution as a case study, and look at several persons who played a role in this moment in history.  Indeed, all the case studies are studies of fanaticism in some form, leading to dire consequences for the agent with ample collateral damage.

We then discuss matters of belief, science, and myth and their role in the lives of our cast of characters.

We suggest we are amid an Enlightenment counter-revolution, which, we will discuss, was inevitable.

We conclude with a discussion of the challenges of statecraft, the various resorts given conflict between and among groups, and the enduring tension between empirical science and non-empirical belief.

We promote the notion of “ironism” within a pragmatic framework as the panacea to all of this, with the attending problem of how to deal with fanatics.