The concepts of “radicalism” and “extremism” have been the focus of increasing scholarly attention in recent years, but, surprisingly, there has not been the same kind of effort to specify their opposites, such as the concept of “moderation.” In this article I argue that because “radicalism” and “extremism” have been defined in generally negative terms, we may deepen and refine our understanding of moderation once we are equipped with a more neutral conception of radicalism. Accordingly, I propose a new approach (...) to the study of radical ideologies by comparing them to literary genres. Just as literary genres use tropes that constrain our reading of a text, radical ideologies use tropes—as, for example, the Marxists’ use of “reactionary” or “bourgeois”—that refer to a much wider background dichotomy, on which they base their arguments to discredit those of their opponents or to reinforce those of their supporters. Using this approach, I show how the Marxist theorist and leading German politician Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932)—one of the founders of modern Social Democracy—made a step-by-step critique of the Social Democratic Party’s orthodox Marxist tropes and core narrative that thoroughly undermined their arguments. Bernstein, I further suggest, was a particularly good example of a political moderate because he did not altogether reject the claims of his radical Marxist opponents but rather accepted those parts of their reasoning that he considered valid. By thus opening the way for constructing an anti-radical Marxist narrative, Bernstein’s example shows how moderates can “steal a page” from the radicals’ playbook to create alternative narratives whose central opponents are the radicals themselves. I conclude by briefly discussing two contemporary thinkers—Norberto Bobbio and Karl Popper—who went further than Bernstein in the development of a fully fleshed anti-radical narrative. (shrink)

The past two decades have seen an explosion in the methods and directions of neuroscience research. Along with many others, complexity research has rapidly gained traction as both an independent research field and a valuable subdiscipline in computational neuroscience. In the past decade alone, several studies have suggested that psychiatric disorders affect the spatiotemporal complexity of both global and region-specific brain activity (Liu et al., 2013; Adhikari et al., 2017; Li et al., 2018). However, many of these studies have not (...) accounted for the distributed nature of cognition in either the global or regional complexity estimates, which may lead to erroneous interpretations of both global and region-specific entropy estimates. To alleviate this concern, we propose a novel method for estimating complexity. This method relies upon projecting dynamic functional connectivity into a low-dimensional space which captures the distributed nature of brain activity. Dimension-specific entropy may be estimated within this space, which in turn allows for a rapid estimate of global signal complexity. Testing this method on a recently acquired obsessive-compulsive disorder dataset reveals substantial increases in the complexity of both global and dimension-specific activity versus healthy controls, suggesting that obsessive-compulsive patients may experience increased disorder in cognition. To probe the potential causes of this alteration, we estimate subject-level effective connectivity via a Hopf oscillator-based model dynamic model, the results of which suggest that obsessive-compulsive patients may experience abnormally high connectivity across a broad network in the cortex. These findings are broadly in line with results from previous studies, suggesting that this method is both robust and sensitive to group-level complexity alterations. (shrink)

A timeless critique holds that the radical is animated by a deep sense of certainty that leads to the worst excesses. By distinguishing essentialist and non-essentialist forms of radicalism, Ernesto Laclau offers a “coalitional” form of radicalism that, in effect, responds to this critique. Laclau deconstructs classical forms of radicalism, such as Marxism, to show how one can use some of their formal components, such as dichotomic rhetoric and a notion of utopia, without assuming that their particular content (e.g., the (...) figure of the proletarian or the socialist utopia) entails the permanent abolition of oppression. Laclau’s radicalism enables political actors to build their own radical front by politicizing and creating linkages between issues. Laclau thus avoids the epistemic certainty of classical radicalisms. However, in the interest of politically effective radicalism, he deploys a localized form of certainty that has an ambivalent potential for intolerance and violence. (shrink)