Fear : the history of a political idea / Corey Robin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Robin, Corey, 1967-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political science.

Fear--Political aspects.

Fear.

Physical Description:

x, 316 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 2004.

Summary:

For many commentators, September 11 inaugurated a new era of fear. Out as Corey Robin shows in his unsettling tour of the Western imagination, fear has shaped our politics and culture since time immemorial. From the Garden of Eden to the Gulag Archipelago to today's headlines, Robin analyzes our growing fascination with political danger and disaster. As our faith in progress 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 and equality, freedom, and even happiness. But as fear becomes our intimate, we understand it less. In a stunning reexamination of fear's greatest modern interpreters, Robin finds that intellectuals 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 devastating final chapters, Robin accuses our leading cultural critics of ignoring "Fear, American Style," which, as he shows, is the fruit of our prized inheritances--the Constitution and the free market. As fear plays an increasing role in our daily lives and justifies a growing number of government policies, Robin's "Fear offers a bracing, and necessary, antidote to our contemporary culture of anxiety.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [253]-302) and index.

ISBN:

0195157028

OCLC:

54817520