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Fear: The History of a Political Idea, by Corey Robin
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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.
- Sales Rank: #652943 in Books
- Published on: 2006-01-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.90" h x .90" w x 8.90" l, 1.02 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
From 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."
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"Robin's account of the place of fear in American life is refreshingly clear--and timely."--Tony Judt, New York Review of Books
About the Author
Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. His writings have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Raritan, Dissent , The Times Literary Supplement and American Political Science Review.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Three Stars
By Matthew Kirby
Gave it as a gift; hadn't heard either way. Sounds interesting in today's political climate.
45 of 53 people found the following review helpful.
Be Very Afraid
By doomsdayer520
Throughout history, leaders have made use of fear to consolidate their power. Repressive dictators of the Stalin variety inflict fear directly on their populations, while those of the Hitler variety enforce obedience by claiming threats from "others" either inside or outside the territory. In fact, this is taking place in America right this minute, though not in such a dictatorial fashion. Here Corey Robin constructs an initially fascinating intellectual history of the use of fear by heads of state, through the works of philosophers who have explored the concept. This includes informative and occasionally revisionist analyses of the long misinterpreted or forgotten writings of Thomas Hobbes, Baron de Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Hannah Arendt. The first two-thirds of the book take us on an educational journey through the political fear, terror, anxiety, and totalitarianism observed upon by these philosophers.
Unfortunately this book derails in the final third, in which Robin attempts to tie these concepts into current events, but misses the boat badly. The supposedly authoritative closing chapter is an anemic summary of the lack of privacy in the workplace and corporate actions against unions. Robin postulates that this phenomenon indicates political fear amongst the workforce, but fails to adequately explain how this is so, missing the structural phenomena engendered by the ideological and economic connections between many corporate leaders and politicians. More fundamentally, Robin leans primarily toward blaming political "liberalism" for modern political fear of any stripe. I realize that Robin uses the intellectual political science definition of "liberalism" in terms of active government, which is far less accusatory than the version of that term used by politicians and media pundits. But any criticism of the equally inclusive practice of conservatism (once again, not just the pundit's definition of the term) is strangely missing from the book, even in Robin's long discussions of the (mostly) rightist-fueled McCarthyism. This indicates a creeping personal outlook into a book that started strongly and objectively.
And finally, there is a catastrophic omission here, especially since Robin claims that the book was partially inspired by 9/11 and subsequent events - the current conservative administration's use of fear, especially of terrorist attacks, to drum up support not just for war but their own policies and political plans. Regardless of whether Robin (or the reader) would be for or against current political trends, at the most basic of levels this would be an immensely illustrative example of the use of political fear that is supposed to be the reason for this book's existence. [~doomsdayer520~]
23 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
Don't let this one escape you
By Dennis R. Jugan
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.
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