What does ‘radical’ mean?

The word ‘radical’ has a bad name. Young people who commit terrorist actions are said to have been ‘radicalised’. Some men in Germany were recently arrested for posting ‘radical’ videos online. The US fugitive George Wright, who was just arrested in Portugal, has been described as a seventies ‘radical.’ Malaysia just blocked 300 ‘radical’ websites.

We see things differently. Our name is a play on the chemistry term, but the word ‘radical’ originally comes from the Latin ‘radicalis’ which means coming from or belonging to the roots of something: still today, we might say ‘radically  different’ to mean fundamentally or completely different.

In politics, the word is used to describe a position that is fundamentally different – and usually unacceptable or extreme. Terrorists are often described as radicals.

But the word takes on a positive sense by those who set themselves against the established politics of a particular time and place, because they see it as corrupt, unrepresentative or immoral. Anti-Nazi resistance, anti-imperial  boycotts in India, civil rights struggles in the US, fighting for women’s right to vote – all of these were seen as highly radical actions in their day. In many ways, today’s world is radical compared to the world of one hundred years  ago. And, of course, many concepts which were once taken for granted — slavery and racism, for example — are now seen as radical and extreme.

There is no one fixed definition of what a ‘radical’ idea or person is. In the 1960s, those who fought for equality for African-Americans were called radicals. But now we see their struggle as mainstream, and call the white supremacists who opposed them radicals. While the word ‘radical’ today is often associated with violence, many of the organisations which use violence (like powerful states, armies and the police) are not considered radical.

Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the British suffragette movement which fought for women’s right to vote, once reflected on the word ‘militant’, which is used in a similar way to the word ‘radical.’ She said: “It is about eight years  since the word militant was first used to describe what we were doing. It was not militant at all, except that it provoked militancy on the part of those who were opposed to it.”

For more thoughts on what ‘radical’ means: http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/blogs/ideas/radicalism-for-beginners/

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