:Fear: The History of a Political Idea.

Abstract

Corey Robin's historical meditation on political fear offers a sweeping spatial and temporal coverage that ranges from Thomas Hobbes's civil war‐plagued England in the seventeenth century to the United States in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. He envisions his study as “an intellectual history of fear” (p. 27), challenging thinkers who might prefer to see fear as irrational and as beyond the bounds of history and politics. As a political scientist, Robin demonstrates an admirable attention to the historical development of ideas about political fear, but he dedicates himself most thoroughly to delineating the intimate links between fear and liberal political systems. Robin divides his analysis into two distinct and—on the surface—disparate parts. Part one focuses on the titular “History of an Idea,” while part two switches to “Fear, American Style.” Part one presents a literate and incisive treatment of select European political theorists from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries who contributed to embedding fear, terror, and anxiety into politics. Part two leaps to the contemporary American scene and assesses the meanings and manifestations of political fear from the era of Joseph McCarthy through September 11, paying close attention to the workplace as a site for the exercising of political fear. What connects these two segments is, of course, political fear, and more important, the questionable philosophical and political embrace of fear for enlivening, unifying, and controlling otherwise divided and demoralized peoples and political systems. In other words, there is a method to Robin's historical madness in stretching from the seventeenth to the twenty‐first century and in moving between such dissimilar historical figures as Hobbes and McCarthy.

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