![\"toscano\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/toscano.jpg\")
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Tomorrow night, Thursday 8th July, at 6.45pm, cultural critic and lecturer at Goldsmiths, Alberto Toscano<\/a> will talk at the ICA<\/a> in London about his new book, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Toscano’s book explores the critical role fanaticism played in forming modern politics and the liberal state. Tracing its development from the traumatic Peasants’ War of early sixteenth-century Germany, to contemporary Islamism, Toscano questions the sterile opposition of \u2018reasonableness’ and fanaticism.<\/p>\n Toscano also recently wrote the preface to a new edition of Thomas M\u00c3\u00bc<\/span>ntzer’s Sermon to the Princes<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n The idea of the Schw\u00c3\u00a4<\/span><\/em>rmer<\/em>, or fanatic, as the utmost threat to the orderly reproduction of society, the one who collapses the City of God into the City of Man in an apocalyptic conflagration – an idea that has since exercised a powerful hold on Western political thought – can indeed be traced back to the early responses to M\u00c3\u00bcntzer by the Wittenberg reformers, and in particular by his erstwhile interlocutors Luther and Melanchthon. (viii)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n