By Ronald Wintrobe
Extremists are humans whose principles or strategies are seen as outdoors the mainstream. checked out this fashion, extremists aren't unavoidably twisted or evil. yet they are often, particularly once they are illiberal and violent. What makes extremists flip violent? This 2006 ebook assumes that extremists are rational: given their ends, they decide on the simplest ability to accomplish them. The research explains why extremist leaders use the strategies they do, and why they can be insensitive to punishment and to dying. It additionally explains how rational humans should be encouraged to die for the reason. The e-book covers diverse features of extremism corresponding to revolution, suicide terrorism, and worldwide jihad. The arguments are illustrated with vital episodes of extremism, together with the French Revolution, the increase of nationalism in Yugoslavia lower than Milosevic, and the emergence of suicide terror and Al Qaeda this day.
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Extra info for Rational extremism : the political economy of radicalism
Sample text
Because of the strong positive-feedback elements, systems markets are especially prone to “tipping,” which is the tendency of one system to pull away from its rivals in popularity once it has gained an initial edge. One implication is that in markets with network effects, there is a natural tendency toward de facto standardization, which means everyone is using the same system. Tipping has been observed in many situations, including typewriter keyboards, AM stereo radios, FM versus AM radio, color versus blackand-white television, and VHS versus Beta in videocassette recorders (Katz and Shapiro 1985).
For a crowd is the antithesis of an army, a human assembly animated not by discipline but by mood, by the play of inconstant and potentially infectious emotion which, if it spreads, is fatal to an army’s subordination. Hence it is that the bitterest of military insults contain the accusation of crowdlike conduct – rabble, riff-raff, scum, canaille, Pobel – and the deepest contempt soldiers can harbour is reserved for leaders whose armies dissolved between their fingers – Cadorna, Kerensky, Gough, Gamelin, Perceval.
The study of battle is therefore always a study of fear and usually of courage; always of leadership, usually of obedience; always of compulsion, sometimes of insubordination; always of anxiety, sometimes of elation or catharsis; always of uncertainty and doubt, misinformation and misapprehension, usually also of faith and sometimes of vision; always of violence, sometimes also of cruelty, self-sacrifice, compassion; above all, it is always a study of solidarity and usually also of disintegration – for it is towards the disintegration of human groups that battle is directed.