ABSTRACT
Read any newspaper. Surf the current affairs channels on television or the internet. What do you find? Along with the daily diet of sport and gossip, you will find reports of the activities of people who belong to what we might call “totalist” groups-since September 11, 2001, this has particularly been the case. These are people who appear to identify uncompromisingly with an all-embracing ideology that narrowly prescribes their attitudes, feelings, and practices. These ideologies are normative systems that define membership in groups that, to outsiders, appear relatively extremist-groups that are ethnocentric and xenophobic, homogeneous and intolerant of dissent and diversity, attitudinally and behaviorally narrowly focused and consensual, hierarchically structured internally, sharply delineated from other groups, and so forth.
