Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Timothy Stacey looks at Luciano Pellicani's article "Was Fascism Revolutionary?" from Telos 122 (Winter 2002).
With wave after wave of Islamic extremist attacks across the globe in the last decade, two schools of thought have begun to emerge: the idealist and the realist. The idealist school says that Islam is dangerous; the realist school claims that economic deprivation is the chief cause of terrorism. Both schools are based on the presupposition that liberalism itself has nothing inherently provocative about it. Crucially, both sides ignore that liberalism can of itself be offensive—not because, as some media pundits suggest, its values are hard to swallow, but because it strictly has no values. There is something distinctly inhuman to this aspect of liberalism that is alienating to those that are new to the liberal rationale.