Making Terrorism Thinkable: The Philosophy of the Act and Its Reception in German Thought, 1794–1845

Abstract

This article challenges the widespread assumption that terrorist ideology was invented in the mid-nineteenth century by figures such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. Instead, the article argues, the foundations of terrorism were laid at the end of the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his disciples, who in turn exerted a strong influence on later radical thinkers. In showing how the intellectual reverberations of the French Revolution gave rise to anarchist ideology as well as actual acts of terrorism in Germany, the article traces the link between the state terror of the French Revolution and the emergence of insurgent terrorism.