Five Best
A history scholar selects essential works about fanaticism
By ALAN CHARLES KORS
January 19, 2008; Page W8

Malleus Maleficarum
By Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger
1487

The great Enlightenment "Encyclopedia," edited by Denis Diderot (1713-84), defined "fanaticism" as "a blind and impassioned zeal, born of superstitious opinions, which makes men commit absurd, unjust, and cruel acts, not only without shame and without remorse, but, indeed, with a kind of joy and consolation." For Enlightenment minds, the European witchcraft crazes and prosecutions of the 15th through the 17th centuries stood as the most striking symbol of such fanaticism. We use the term "witch hunt" still. No work expressed beliefs about witchcraft more deeply or influenced more zealous behavior than the "Malleus Maleficarum," or "The Hammer of Witches." (A superb critical edition and translation by Christopher S. Mackay was published in 2006 by Cambridge University Press.) Written by two Dominican inquisitors, the "Malleus" never enjoyed the high, official church approval it claimed, but it was used for centuries by both Catholic and Protestant witch-hunters and judges. They relied on its explanations of the unspeakable supernatural horrors that witches performed and on its advice for identifying witches, for torturing or tricking them into confessions, and, finally, for convicting and killing them. The "Malleus" reflected -- and, above all, spread -- a terror of witches, mostly women, who slept with the devil and set about to produce evils that ranged from afflicting men with impotence to causing catastrophic harm and destruction.

The Education of a True Believer
By Lev Kopelev
Harper & Row, 1980

By the 20th century, in Europe at least, it was political, not religious, superstition that led to new terrors. What sort of political fanaticism would lead a bright, idealistic, sensitive young man to join in the immeasurable cruelties of the Bolsheviks' murderous grain requisitions and their deliberate mass starvation of millions of peasants unsympathetic to the future that the Communists desired? Lev Kopelev's autobiographical work puts us inside the fanatical thought and callousness that led to and was indifferent to the suffering of whole peoples. In his chapter titled "The Last Grain Collections (1933)," we see this lover of literature and philosophy taunting a terrified and weeping peasant woman on the verge of death: "Your children will be left hungry, without a mother." He was aware of the human cost but "persuaded" himself not to "give in to debilitating pity." Kopelev and his comrades, after all, were "realizing historical necessity . . . our revolutionary duty." That "duty" slew more in a decade than any witch-hunter ever could have imagined possible.

Kaputt
By Curzio Malaparte
Dutton, 1946

When the German Nazi armies invaded Russia in Operation Barbarossa, an Italian fascist intellectual (who later covered his fascist tracks as well as any secret agent could have done) went off, in the uniform of an Italian officer, as war correspondent for Milan's Corriere della Sera newspaper. Curzio Malaparte, for the first time, saw the cruelty and remorselessness of Nazi fanaticism in the full barbarity of the eastern front and Polish occupation. His novel about the experience, "Kaputt," is a transcendent work about the admixture of high culture, bestial depravity and human sadism. Part autobiography and part fiction, it captures seemingly unfathomable history. No work has ever revealed more about the murderous blend of zeal and indifference that is fanaticism. Simultaneously mythic and wholly human, "Kaputt" haunts the reader forever.

Son of the Revolution
By Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro
Knopf, 1983

There are many remarkable works, both scholarly and autobiographical, on the fanaticism of Mao's Cultural Revolution in China, a moment that casts its shadow to this day over the campaign's agents, its victims and those who were both. None of these books, however, has the simplicity, nuance, eye for detail, and focus on essentials of Liang Heng's "Son of the Revolution," written by Liang and Judith Shapiro (an American who taught him in China and whom he married). Liang and Shapiro describe with painful honesty, insight and wisdom his transition from "Chairman Mao's good little boy" to a young Red Guard locally acting out his hostilities; from a zealous participant in the nationwide horror of the Cultural Revolution to a victim and compassionate observer of what had befallen both his country and the individuals he loved. In particular, the authors show the shattering effect on the individual and on the human social fabric of a movement that declared no aspect of life to be outside of politics. They take you there, and you understand.

Moral Panic
By John Fekete
Robert Davies, 1994

In 1993, the "Final Report of the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women" set off what John Fekete, a man of the left and a major figure in academic cultural studies, compellingly termed a "moral panic," a fanaticism that led to willful bad science, to callous indifference to truth and criticism, to zealous bad law and policy, and to efforts to transform coercively the freedoms and dignities of an entire people. How else to save Canadian women from the violence of the warlocks except by creating a yet larger political state to infantilize both sexes and to effect a moral regeneration of men across the barbarism that is Canada? Fekete, a professor at Trent University in Ontario, offers a deeply disturbing account of the treacherous union of modern political superstitions with the totalizing exercise of power that sanctimonious passion invariably demands. His trenchant analysis of statistical fraud in the service of political aims is itself worth the reading. "Moral Panic" is an indispensable guide to the fanaticism of our times.

Mr. Kors is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and editor in chief of the recent "Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment" (Oxford).
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