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Founding Fanatics

Noah Eber-Schmid

Published 2025 in Unknown venue

ABSTRACT

Founding Fanatics: Extremism and the Formation of American Democracy is a work of historical and contemporary political theory that offers new insights into the divisive and violent nature of popular democratic politics in the early United States. Through engagements with the memorialization of the Boston Massacre, popular debates over Shays’s Rebellion, the thought and practices of the Democratic Societies, and the use of the French Revolution in American political discourse, Founding Fanatics challenges conventional interpretive approaches to the history of the American democratic tradition and draws out new implications for theoretical approaches to contemporary American democracy. While many scholars have acknowledged the crooked path taken by the development of American democracy, few have recognized that moments of tension, violence, and extremism have sometimes served the pursuit of political equality. Founding Fanatics addresses the important but underexamined question of how extremism, fanaticism, and zealotry shaped popular democratic politics in the American Revolution and early Republic. By examining the ways that democratic actors used tactics of extremism, Founding Fanatics demonstrates that extremism on behalf of democratic claims has supported and may continue to support popular efforts to expand and deepen political equality and participation. This work argues that the development of American popular democracy during the Founding era, and the continual struggle to deepen and expand political equality and participation today, relies in part on the efforts of democratic extremists.

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