The Extremism Industry: A Political Logic of Post-Hegemonic Liberalism

Abstract

The rising fortunes of the academic ‘extremism industry’ call for robust social scientific scrutiny. We contend this industry is a significant expression of our current moment of post-hegemonic liberalism. We set out the typical definitional devices found in the literature, which assemble ‘extremism’ as a syndrome consisting of six major elements: non-normative values, anti-democracy, anti-liberalism, utopianism and a war on the present, totalisation and abstraction, justifications of unlawfulness. The extremism industry can be approached by way of three investigative spaces: modernisation approaches, psychological and culturalist explanations, and security and policing approaches. Within these spaces, we outline five ideal-typical modes of explaining extremism: consensual anti-fascism, civilisational provincialism, folk secularism, psychologistic pathologisation and moral educationism. We maintain that the extremism industry is analytically weak and politically pernicious and suggest that what passes for ‘extremism’ is better situated and understood at the crossroad of three important vectors: intellectual, geo-political and world-economic.

Retracted: Modern problems of youth extremism: Social and psychological components

“…The authors of this study identified the psychological elements of extremism: cognitive, emotional and behavioural. The method of content analysis of the questionnaire of ideas about the phenomenon of extremism was also used in the work, the same approach is used in foreign studies (El‐Ojeili & Taylor, 2020). Youth is the most sensitive group for the development of extremism (Zheng et al, 2020).…”

Political Extremism in Modern Democratic Transformations

“…This last period was marked by the crisis of intellectual and moral leadership and the fragmentation of the liberal project into three tendencies: punitive neoliberalism, fear liberalism, and neo-Keynesianism. Acceleration of extremist action is a symptom of this period of posthegemonic liberalism (El-Ojeili and Taylor, 2020).…”

“…Since the late 1990's, the extremism industry has begun to increase its presence caused by the anti-systemic dynamics of the alternative globalisation movement and the rise of right-wing nationalism, accelerating even more after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "Extremism" stands next to a number of other phenomena: protectionism, populism, utopianism, ideology, irrationality, bigotry (El-Ojeili and Taylor, 2020).…”

Racial and Religious Determinants of Terrorism in Western Europe

“…Conceptually, extremism gets its essence through association with other ideas -totalitarianism and terrorism, referring to the opposition of such concepts as democracy, openness, liberalism, tolerance and moderation Vol. 39 Nº 71 (2021): 44-61 (El-Ojeili and Taylor, 2020). Based on the features most often mentioned in the existing definitions of extremism, it can be noted that authoritarianism, anti-democracy and nationalism determine the properties of extremism.…”