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The British singer Morrissey, whose work returns obsessively to the theme of loneliness, once described its destructive potential in strikingly existential terms: „Nothing fortified me, and simple loneliness all but destroyed me, yet I felt swamped by the belief that life must mean something – otherwise why was it there? Why was anything anything??” (Morrissey 2013: 201) This tension – between loneliness and the hunger for meaning – lies at the heart of one of the most pressing questions in radicalization research: Why do some people who feel abandoned by society turn towards radical ideas and movements, as the singer himself did?
The connection between loneliness and radicalization has been widely documented. Its most dramatic manifestation is the figure of the „lone wolf” – the solitary actor who, out of isolation, turns to violence in what appears to be an existential attempt to overcome his disconnection from the world. Yet research has complicated this picture considerably. As O’Connor et al. (2024) have shown, lone actors are in fact rarely as „lone“. Empirical and theoretical work, they argue, demonstrate that radicalization is fundamentally a relational process, driven by interactions with individuals, movements, and institutions, and consolidated by emotional bonds.
This raises an important conceptual question: what do we actually mean by loneliness? If lone actors are embedded in networks, are they truly lonely? The answer depends on how we conceptualize loneliness itself. Tirkkonen & Tietjen (2025) offer a compelling reframing, drawing on the political theory of Hannah Arendt. Rather than understanding loneliness as mere social isolation – a simple lack of contacts – they conceptualize it as a lack of a shared world. One can have many interactions and still be profoundly lonely if those interactions do not constitute genuine participation in a common reality.
For Arendt, loneliness destroys both the public sphere and private life. It deprives individuals of agency, the capacity to act meaningfully in and upon the world together with others. Crucially, it also distorts deliberative processes: “lonely individuals not only cling to promises of fellowship and recognition but also tend to develop negative future scenarios and become suspicious of others“ (Tirkkonen & Tietjen 2025: 14; Arendt 1973: 326).
In this perspective, radicalization can be understood as an attempt to recover a sense of agency, that is to act meaningfully, to matter, and to belong. But it is, as Tirkkonen & Tietjen argue, a distorted form of agency, one that substitutes genuine political action for violence or destructive solidarity. Empirical psychology supports this theoretical picture: Ernst et al. (2024) have shown that loneliness amplifies authoritarian attitudes, susceptibility to conspiracy narratives, and right-wing extremism.
The Loss of Public Things
If loneliness understood as the absence of a shared world is a driver of radicalization, the question becomes: what creates and sustains such a shared world? And, equally pressing: what destroys it?
Political theorist Bonnie Honig offers a suggestive answer through her concept of „public things“ (Honig 2017). For Honig, political communities are not primarily constituted by formal attributes – citizenship status, voting rights, legal personhood – but by the things we share: public infrastructure and common spaces. As she writes, public things are part of the „‚holding environment‘ of democratic citizenship; they furnish the world of democratic life. They do not take care of our needs only. They also constitute us, complement us, limit us, thwart us, and interpellate us into democratic citizenship“ (Honig 2017: 5). „When infrastructure crumbles, it is not only infrastructure that crumbles but also its constitutive gifts of (de)stabilization, integration, and adhesion“ (Honig 2017: 6). This insight connects directly to Ray Oldenburg’s classic account of „third places“, those informal public gathering spaces that are neither home nor work: pubs, cafés, barbershops, libraries, community centres. Oldenburg (1999) argued that third places are essential to democracy, civic engagement, and a sense of place. They foster political debate, generate unexpected solidarities across social differences, unify neighbourhoods, and bring together people of different ages, backgrounds, and beliefs. Crucially, they do all of this informally, without institutional compulsion. Their sociality is spontaneous, pleasurable, and low-threshold. What we need, Oldenburg observed, are places where people can gather easily, inexpensively, regularly, and pleasurably – real-life alternatives to the retreat into private consumption.
Eric Klinenberg’s more recent work „Palaces for the People“ (Klinenberg 2018) provides empirical weight to these claims. Through the concept of „social infrastructure“, Klinenberg demonstrates that the physical places and organizations that enable social relationships have measurable effects on social cohesion, resilience, and wellbeing. Where that infrastructure had decayed, social bonds had decayed with it.
There is a further dimension worth noting. Loneliness is frequently accompanied by boredom. Boredom, as van Tilburg & Igout (2016) have argued, is itself a radicalization risk. Boredom increases the coherence of beliefs and the polarization of attitudes. In the context of political beliefs, it may contribute to the endorsement of extreme views. People who are lonely and bored are not merely unhappy – they are cognitively and emotionally primed to find meaning in simple, totalizing narratives that offer clear enemies, strong communities, and a sense of purpose.
None of this is entirely new. Robert Putnam (2000) warned twenty years ago, in „Bowling Alone“, of the collapse of civic community and social capital. Since then, the condition of our public things has continued to deteriorate. Infrastructure decays; university buildings close due to disrepair; pubs – tellingly called „public houses” in English – shut at an accelerating rate; pharmacies, those informal spaces of neighbourhood sociality, disappear; online interactions replace the chance encounters of embodied public life.
Morrissey’s evocation of an English seaside town where „everyday is like Sunday” – „silent and grey“, drained of life and purpose – captures this condition with uncomfortable precision. His narrator, in a moment of dark absurdism, wishes for an apocalyptic event simply to break the deadening monotony. It is a poetic exaggeration, of course. But it points to something real: when shared public life atrophies, the hunger for something – anything – that matters becomes harder to satisfy through ordinary democratic participation.
There are many approaches to countering radicalization. An important and underappreciated one is the restoration of informal, non-institutionalized spaces of encounter. Third places and public things do not only reduce loneliness in a social-psychological sense, though they do that too. Social psychology’s contact hypothesis gives us strong reasons to believe that intergroup encounters in such settings reduce prejudice and hostility (Pettigrew & Tropp 2011). They do something more fundamental: they create and sustain the shared world without which democratic citizenship becomes an abstraction that is unable to prevent the emergence of radicalisation.
References
Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Originally published 1951. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Ernst, Mareike, Manfred E. Beutel, Oliver Decker, and Elmar Brähler. 2024. “Einsam und Radikal? Eine psychologische Perspektive auf Einsamkeit und demokratiefeindliche Einstellungen.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 74, no. 52: 37–41.
Honig, Bonnie. 2017. Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair. New York: Fordham University Press.
Klinenberg, Eric. 2018. Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. New York: Crown.
Morrissey. 2013. Autobiography. London: Penguin.
O’Connor, Francis, Lasse Lindekilde, and Stefan Malthaner. 2024. “Radicalisation of ‘Lone Actors’.” In The Routledge Handbook on Radicalisation and Countering Radicalisation, edited by Joel Busher, Leena Malkki, and Sarah Marsden, 213–229. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge.
Oldenburg, Ray. 1999. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. 2nd ed. New York: Marlowe & Company.
Pettigrew, Thomas F., and Linda R. Tropp. 2011. When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact. New York: Psychology Press.
Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Tirkkonen, Sanna, and Ruth Rebecca Tietjen. 2025. “Loneliness and Radicalization.” Philosophy & Social Criticism. https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537251334550.