How Fanatics Are Made [1952]

This laudatory appraisal of contrasting “Cold War” treatments of political zealotry first appeared in The Observer, 23 March 1952, p. 4 (B&R C52.06). It was reprinted almost two months later, as “Self-Respect, an Antidote to Fanaticism”, by the same Melbourne daily as had run at least four other articles by Russell since his Australian lecture tour of 1950 (Age, 17 May 1952, p. 2). The British Sunday newspaper’s literary editor, Terence Kilmartin, had asked Russell to write only about The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Jacob Leib Talmon (1916–1980) was a Polish-born Israeli historian of ideas who earned his ph.d, from the London School of Economics in 1943. In 1938 Russell spoke of fanaticism as the “greatest defect of the present age” (1938a = Papers 21: 544), and the fourteen years since then had hardly given him cause for a change of mind.