Verski fundamentalizam kao savremeni oblik totalitarizma
Religious Fundamentalism as a Modern Form of Totalitarianism

Summary/Abstract: In this essay the author first examines the notion of religious fundamentalism and its demarcations with similar concepts, such as traditionalism and fundamentalism. Special attention is dedicated to a typology of religious fundamentalism, as well as to the tendency of fundamentalists to shape the public and political spheres by their religious usage of the political space or by a sort of religization of politics. Fundamentalist movements are, in fact, the moderrn movements of the 20th century, despite their anti-modern and anti-enlightenment ideologies. Fundamentalism is simultaneously an anti-modern utopia, as well as the set of movements with emphasized Jacobin, and even totalitarian, tendencies. In line with the Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt, the author explores the connection between the totalitarian ideologies and movements of the 1920s and 1930s, on the one hand, and the contemporary forms of fundamentalism, on the other. Fundamentalist communities and regimes share some important features with the most extreme, secular and leftist, Jacobin, militant and communist regimes. Concerning the structural similarities between the communist, nationalist and fundamentalist ideologies, including the utopian character of those ideologies in the 20th century, the author refers to the congruencies between the two quasireligious systems – communism and nationalist ideology, contrasting them with the contemporary forms of religious fundamentalism.

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