Fear: The History of a Political Idea by Corey Robin

From the Publisher

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.

Publishers Weekly

Given daily terror alerts and news reports of violence, Robin, professor of political science and contributor to the New York Times Magazine, offers a sober analysis of fear's Janus-faced potential as catalyst for economic progress and the raison d' tre of repressive regimes. A brilliant synthesis of historical perspective and the critically revealing story of "Fear, American Style," the account explores the classics of political thought by Hobbes, Montesquieu and Tocqueville and the portrayal of evil by Arendt in order to locate fear as the decisive underpinning of contemporary liberal theory. In doing so, Robin argues for the groundlessness of, on one hand, a "liberalism of anxiety" that perceives society as a debate over communities of identity and difference with low emphasis on social cohesion, while on the other hand a "liberalism of terror" that turns to abject evil as the summum malum grounding for morality. For Robin, both of these descriptions of political realities ignore the subtle threats fear wages in our everyday lives, most notably in the workplace. The closing chapters document how the Constitution and federalism's factionalist orientation aid that everyday fear. Conceived of before 9/11, but inclusive of its results, Robin's analysis predicts that when the war on terror does end, "we will find ourselves still living in fear." (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

This talented young political scientist examines fear as a "political tool, an instrument of elite rule or insurgent advance, created and sustained by political leaders or activists who stand to gain something from it, either because fear helps them pursue a specific political goal, or because it reflects or lends support to their moral and political beliefs-or both." He examines the role of fear in the work of thinkers from Hobbes and Montesquieu to Tocqueville and Arendt, warning us throughout against the limitations of liberalism in combating it. The last part of the book turns to "fear, American style"-how "a little bit of coercion" can "produce a great deal of fear." Both during the Cold War and after September 11, 2001, elites organized coalitions of fear with the help of collaborators.

In all, this book is a thoughtful, often brilliant, radical polemic against the insufficiencies and pitfalls of liberalism. And yet, in his very brief conclusion, it is to "the egalitarian and libertarian principles of Rawls and Dworkin and to the emancipatory strains of American liberalism more generally" that Robin appeals, despite doubts about their viability. Let us hope that in his next work he will try to construct a defense against political fear as spirited as this provocative and discouraging dissection of its multiple forms.

Library Journal

In this original and fascinating work, Robin (Brooklyn Coll., CUNY) examines how fear represses, rather than unites, a nation. The first half of the book dissects fear as discussed by philosophers Hobbes, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Arendt over the last few centuries. As the fear of death and loss of self-preservation in Hobbes's view gives way to the total terror of Arendt's careerist elites, Robin shows that fear is also at the forefront of life as we know it today. The second half discusses what Robin calls "Fear, American Style," which includes the actions of collaborators, bystanders, victims, and fear in the workplace. In his view, elites control by fear by selecting what we see or don't see and influencing how we are perceived by our neighbors and co-workers. Robin ends his account stressing the need to change our current view and replace fear with freedom and equality as a basis of politics. As this work is quite complex and heavily noted, it is recommended for academic and large public libraries only.-Maria C. Bagshaw, Lake Erie Coll., Painesville, OH Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself-and the uses to which the powers that be are putting that fear. States and rulers have traded on fear since time immemorial; it has proven useful to them to have a body of subjects that is afraid of external enemies, the elements, and the rulers and states themselves. But there's fear and then there's fear, and Robin (Political Science/Brooklyn College) usefully distinguishes the collective fear of faraway danger from the fears "arising from the vertical conflicts and cleavages endemic to a society," the "inequities of wealth, status, and power." In other words, one can be afraid of the international communist conspiracy, say, while also being afraid of unemployment and poverty. Such fears, Robin writes, are very real, and he traces the views of classical political philosophers on such issues. He finds the work of Thomas Hobbes particularly germane to the discussion, for Hobbes's Leviathan evokes a world of disorder, revolution, turmoil, and constant fear, succeeded by "quiet complacence and sober regard for family, business, locality, and self" once order is restored. As for the history of fear in our own country, Robin notes that what distinguished the 1950s from other times was not necessarily the fear of nuclear annihilation, though that was certainly a novelty, but the fear that resulted from an unprecedented level of political repression. "Fear," he writes, didn't destroy Cold War America: it tamed it," only to dissolve into Hobbesean chaos with the '60s. Provocatively, Robin examines the events surrounding 9/11 in light of the fear of both the terrorists and their targets: the Islamicists, he writes, were made anxious by "the loss ofpremodernity, the ruined solidarity of dead or dying traditions, the unscripted free-for-all of individualism." And, of course, their actions raised new levels of fear. Robin foresees that more fear will follow: "not of radical Islam, but of the domestic rulers that fear has left behind."A worthy, if gloomy, contribution to the political-philosophical literature.

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