Fear: The History of a Political Idea

by Corey Robin

Book Overview

For many commentators, September 11 inaugurated a new era of fear. But as Corey Robin shows in his unsettling tour of the Western imagination--the first intellectual history of its kind--fear has shaped our politics and culture since time immemorial.
From the Garden of Eden to the Gulag Archipelago to today's headlines, Robin traces our growing fascination with political danger and disaster. As our faith in positive political principles recedes, he argues, we turn to fear as the justifying language of public life. We may not know the good, but we do know the bad. So we cling to fear, abandoning the quest for justice, equality, and freedom. But as fear becomes our intimate, we understand it less. In a startling reexamination of fear's greatest modern interpreters--Hobbes, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Arendt--Robin finds that writers since the eighteenth century have systematically obscured fear's political dimensions, diverting attention from the public and private authorities who sponsor and benefit from it. For fear, Robin insists, is an exemplary instrument of repression--in the public and private sector. Nowhere is this politically repressive fear--and its evasion--more evident than in contemporary America. In his final chapters, Robin accuses our leading scholars and critics of ignoring "Fear, American Style," which, as he shows, is the fruit of our most prized inheritances--the Constitution and the free market.
With danger playing an increasing role in our daily lives and justifying a growing number of government policies, Robin's Fear offers a bracing, and necessary, antidote to our contemporary culture of fear.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195157028
• ISBN13: 9780195157024
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Don't let this one escape you

Corey Robin began this book prior to the events of 9/11 and the politics of fear that have gripped this nation, culminating in the recent presidential election. Unfortunately, this scholarly work on the history of fear as both a political idea and a reprehensible social instrument was rather late to arrive in the recent avalanche of mostly mindless books. It has yet to be recognized for its thoughtful and lucid analysis. Well-researched and documented by nearly 50 pages of references, it's a watershed book on this subject like no other. Seldom will you find a more thought provoking book so in tune with the times.

Fear: History of a Political Idea

Thought provoking and most applicable to todays times--Weapons of Mass Destruction, Terrorism,etc. Historically many political motivations are based on fear as Robin explains. A good voyage through history on Fear and how it has been used by Political figures, leaders and statesman to move the public to accept their strategies, plans and actions. Perhaps we see Robin's theory most clearly in action in this November election race.