Uwe Backes is a deputy director of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism and teaches political science at the Technical University of Dresden, Saxony.

Tracing the history of the concept of political extremism from Ancient Greece to the present day, this is an invaluable resource for scholars of democracy, extremism and political sociology.

1. Introduction 2. Extremes, Mean, Moderation and Constitutional Mixture in Antiquity and the Middle Ages 3. Extremes and the Tradition of the Mixed Constitution from Early Humanism to the Age of Democratic Revolutions 4. Extreme Ideologies in the Political Laboratory of the Nineteenth Century 5. Extremism in the beginning of the "Age of Extremes" 6. Extreme Terms in the Political Language of German Ideocracies 7. Extremism as an Element of the Official/Semi-Official Language of the Federal Republic of Germany 8. Lines of Development of the Extremism Concept in the Twentieth Century 9. Political Extremism: Final Results, Classification of Terms and Outlook 10. Appendix