Summary of Propositions in the Book

In this book I have tried to understand political extremism on the assumption that the participants in extremist movements – both leaders and followers – are rational. But I added a twist to the standard rational choice approach: people are completely rational and selfish, but they are social and desire social interaction. They want solidarity, usually with a group. As these concepts are sometimes used loosely, I provided precise mathematical definitions of solidarity and related concepts like social capital in the appendix to Chapter 2 of the book.

In the first part of the book I sketched how this idea could be applied to problems such as crime, poverty, and international finance. The second part focused on using the model to explain varieties of extremist behavior in politics, such as the proclivity of leaders with extremist ideas to use violence to achieve their goals, how seemingly rational people can be led to commit suicide for a cause, and specific phenomena like nationalism, jihad, and revolution. Chapters on the great French Revolution, the explosion of nationalism under Yugoslavia under Milosevic, the phenomenon of suicide terrorism, and the rise of Islamic radicalism along with globalization illustrated these ideas.

For easy reference, I present a summary list of the main propositions in the book. Sometimes I add a brief comment as well as providing the chapter source.