IU Professor Noah Eber-Schmid’s first book, Founding Fanatics: Extremism and the Formation of American Democracy (Oxford UP, 2025) was awarded the “Best Book Award” by the American Political Thought section of APSA. The award was presented during the APSA annual meeting in Boston on September 3rd. The following is the committee's statement on the book:
In this learned and often startling book, Noah Eber-Schmid takes a courageous and unsparing look at the role of fanatics, zealots, and rebellious revolutionaries in the early years of the American Republic. He shows us the perils presented by these lawless and often violent rebels, but he is not blind to their role in the shaping of a more democratic, more egalitarian, and more just America. The Americans who rejected the laws and orders of their time included not only the venerated Founders of the Declaration and the Revolution, but those who rose for democracy in later years.
Eber-Schmid is alive to what he calls the tragic nature of democratic politics. Americans have eaten of that tree of knowledge that tells us any government can be overthrown. A politics committed to democracy cannot always submit to demands for law and obedience. Yet even the most honorable of insurrections often depends on violence. This is tragic, for the nature of violence is compulsion and tyranny. Yet too often, violence offers the only means of escape. Eber-Schmid’s book is a stellar contribution to the history of American political thought, to democratic theory, and to political ethics. Eber-Schmid closes this superb book with a recognition of the ethical demands on democrats. They -we- must judge: events, institutions, the occasions and the means of resistance.
The College of Arts