The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West

by Lee Harris

Overview

Whether by choice or not, the West finds itself in a low-grade yet bitter war with Islamic fanaticism. It is a war the West is singularly ill-equipped to fight. The foe is resistant to any of the normal methods of conflict resolution such as negotiation, economic sanctions, or conventional armed confrontation. Since the Enlightenment, the West has forgotten how to oppose fanaticism, and it is Lee Harris's goal to remind us what we are up against.

In The Suicide of Reason, he explains the logic of fanatical movements from the Crusades through Nazism to radical Islam; describes how the Enlightenment overcame fanatical thinking in the West; shows why most Western attempts to address the problem are doomed to fail; and offers strategies by which liberal internationalism can defend itself without becoming a mirror of the tribal forces it is trying to defeat.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465008698
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	08/02/2007
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	351 KB

About the Author

Lee Harris is the author of Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History and a frequent contributor to Policy Review, the Wall Street Journal's "Opinion Journal," and other publications, both print and online. He lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

Table of Contents

Preface     ix
Part 1
Fanaticism and the Myth of Modernity     3
The Denial of Fanaticism     15
Fanaticism and Resentment     29
The End of History?     39
Clash or Crash?     55
The Fanaticism of Reason     61
Reason, Fanaticism, and the Struggle for Existence
Demystifying Reason     79
Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Reason     105
The Origins of Popular Cultures of Reason
Condorcet's Tenth Stage     137
Reason and Autonomy     157
Liberal Exceptionalism     165
The Challenge of Islamic Fanaticism
The Logic of Fanaticism     205
The Legacy and Future of Jihad     215
Part 5
Can Carpe Diem Societies Survive?     241
Our New World Disorder     253
Conclusion     265
Index     281

Editorial Reviews

Several authors have published books on radical Islam's threat to the West since that shocking morning in September six years ago. With The Suicide of Reason, Lee Harris joins their ranks. But he distinguishes himself by going further than most of his counterparts: he considers the very worst possibility—the destruction of the West by radical Islam. There is a sense of urgency in his writing, a desire to shake awake the leaders of the West, to confront them with their failure to understand that they are engaged in a war with an adversary who fights by the law of the jungle…Harris's book is so engaging that it is difficult to put down, and its haunting assessments make it difficult for a reader to sleep at night.
—The New York Times

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Extremist Islam today, says Harris, represents the revival of earlier fanatical movements-the Crusades, Hitler's Nazis, Stalinist Russia. Harris (Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History) defines a fanatic as "someone who is willing to make a sacrifice in his own self-interest for something outside himself." All such zealous movements, fueled by righteous belief in a cause or an idea, directly threaten the integrity of Western rationalism and reason, he says. He intends here to challenge as ill-conceived Western culture's efforts to grapple with fanatical Islam. Accessible in thought and language, his work presents compelling historical, intellectual, and political arguments. The author contends, for example, that the West is experiencing a leadership crisis because political parties, rather than popular acclaim, supply potential candidates. Harris's thesis is that "an exaggerated and hopelessly unrealistic overestimation of the power of reason alone to settle differences and prevent conflict" amounts to a "suicide of reason," exemplified by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and America's desire to export liberal democracy to the Islamic world. Though his defense of Iran's President Ahmadinejad is more than a bit troubling, this is a thought-provoking and insightful book sure to challenge debate. Recommended.
—Sandra Collins

Library Journal