TITLE / AUTHOR

B I B L I O G R A P H I C A L E S S AY O N F E A R

Wilson N. Brissett

Wilson N. Brissett is a Graduate Fellow at the Institute for Advanced

Studies in Culture and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at
the University of Virginia. His dissertation focuses on changing views of
aesthetics, ethics, and religion in the late colonial, revolutionary, and early
republican periods.

RECENT WORK ON FEAR IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE IS AT

once remarkably wide-ranging and surprisingly interconnected. Despite
the myriad of topics scrutinized under the academic study of fear, schol-
ars are unified in their assessment that fear is deeply engrained in con-
temporary culture. If we ever thought that a total eclipse of fear was
part of the natural maturation process of an enlightened society, it
seems impossible to take that position today. And while much of the
scholarship seeks to locate and interpret fear in its particular manifesta-
tions, there is also a consistent and urgent drive to push behind the
specific examples in order to understand how fear itself may be, for
good or ill, a foundational cultural element of liberal society.

While fear has been an occasional topic of scholarly interest for quite
some time, the problem of fear in contemporary culture was first stud-
ied systematically in the late 1990s, when a host of books were pub-
lished on what was called “the culture of fear.” These sociological studies
criticized the media, politicians, and even some intellectuals for sensa-
tionalizing crime, disease, drugs, and other social problems in order to
benefit from the fascinated paranoia of uninformed readers. Since this
initial flurry of publications, the study of fear has widened its purview

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to consider terrorism, conspiracy theories, postmodernism, the arts, and

political and ethical philosophy—to name the major topics of this essay.

Perhaps the most consistent conclusion of these recent studies has been
that fear is a plague within our society because it is regularly and inten-
tionally misused to further suspect economic, political, or ethnic
motives. Fear is the instrument of choice in the hands of those agents,
the powerful and the disenfranchised alike, who seek to achieve short-
sighted goals at the expense of ignoring the deeper, more complex prob-
lems of liberal society. Furthermore, the perseverance of irrational fear
within supposedly rationalistic societies is often explained as a result of
a general sense of insecurity due to the failure of various religious, polit-
ical, artistic, and scientific metanarratives in the twentieth century.

Others understand fear as a useful epistemological tool closely allied

with suspicion. On this view, an unacknowledged foundation of the lib-
eral tradition is its ability to employ fear as suspicion as a means to over-
come the harmful effects of fear as prejudice. This conception of fear as
constitutive, in part, of the liberal tradition has its supporters in politi-
cal as well as ethical philosophy, and it has been spun out into new the-
ories of multiculturalism, justice, and ethical judgment claiming that
human flourishing will increase more by intentionally avoiding cruelty
than by chasing elusive utopian figurations of “the good society.”

It seems clear that unless we come to a more nuanced view of the role
fear plays in contemporary culture, we will have learned little from the
amazing energy that has recently been put into the study of this emo-
tion that looms so large in our social and cultural lives.

Fear in History

While fear is a universal human experience, an understanding of its

various historical instantiations is crucial to an understanding of its
operation in the social and cultural spheres. The books listed in this
section attempt such a contextualization of fear in a number of eras
and places. The books by Naphy and Roberts, Schultz, and Scott and
Kosso each contain a general introductory essay that helps to locate fear

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within the time and place covered by the book. The other essays in
these collections are quite specific readings of texts or events, from The
Canterbury Tales to the American Revolution, that are related to fear.

■ Delumeau, Jean. Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt

Culture, 13th–18th Centuries. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.
■ Naphy, William G., and Penny Roberts, eds. Fear in Early Modern
Society. New York: Manchester University Press, 1997.
■ Schultz, Nancy Lusignan, ed. Fear Itself: Enemies Real & Imagined in
American Culture. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2001.
■ Scott, Anne, and Cynthia Kosso, eds. Fear and Its Representations in
the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Turnhout: Brepolis, 2002.
■ Tuan, Yi-fu. Landscapes of Fear. New York: Pantheon, 1979.

Diagnosing “the Culture of Fear”

The culture of fear was diagnosed first by sociologists in the late 1990s.
The books below analyze a wide range of perceived social “problems”
that have contributed to a culture of fear, and then show that many of
these social problems are actually on the decline, for example, crime,
drug use, and disease. Attempts to understand the underlying cultural
trends that have led to the rise of the fear culture are various. They
range from a reliance on an often unelaborated psychology of group
behavior (Glassner and Giroux), to an explication of how mass media
representations collaborate with institutional elites to create cultural
frames, or narratives, that develop a public expectation of fearful
national events (Altheide and Best). Berry is notable in forwarding a
comprehensive, grassroots vision of societal change as an alternative to
the public response of fearfulness after the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001.

■ Altheide, David L. Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis.

New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 2002.
■ Berry, Wendell. In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed
World. Barrington, MA: The Orion Society, 2001.
■ Best, Joel. Random Violence: How We Talk about New Crimes and
New Victims. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

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■ Cohl, H. Aaron. Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death? How Pessimism,

Paranoia, and a Misguided Media are Leading us Toward Disaster.
New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.
■ Furedi, Frank. The Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of
Low Expectation. New York: Continuum, 2002.
■ Giroux, Henry A. The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the
Culture of Fear. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
■ Glassner, Barry. The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the
Wrong Things. New York: Basic, 1999.
■ Showalter, Elaine. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern
Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Fear and Liberal Society

As strong as the sociological current has been in denouncing “the cul-

ture of fear,” there has been no shortage of work done on the benefits of
fear to humans in society. Several books have appeared recently that
emphasize the usefulness of fear in human survival and flourishing.
These works describe the biological (Dozier), social (De Becker), and
emotional (Scruton) roots of fear within an evolutionary paradigm that
lionizes fear as the prime source of humanity’s continued survival.
Another group of scholars, following on the work of political philoso-
pher Judith Shklar, especially her influential article “The Liberalism of
Fear,”1 has begun to give substantial attention to fear’s foundational role
in the Western tradition of political liberalism. These thinkers outline a
negative politics that emphasizes the necessity of coupling a liberal atti-
tude of suspicion with the well-established tradition of positive liberal
rights. They elaborate how a solid fear of both the weakness of the indi-
vidual and the tendency of the state to oppression can produce more
effective policies than can a political philosophy based solely upon a
utopian imagining of the potential good society (Levy). Robin provides
a nice counter to these attitudes. His work, while obviously indebted to

1 Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L.
Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

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that of Shklar, finally sees fear as an efficacious political tool that must
nonetheless be overcome if liberal society is to live up to its promise by
envisioning and achieving “the good society.”

■ De Becker, Gavin. The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us

from Violence. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997.
■ Dozier, Jr., Ralph W. Fear Itself: The Origin and Nature of the
Powerful Emotion that Shapes Our Lives and Our World. New York:
St. Martin’s, 1998.
■ Levy, Jacob T. The Multiculturalism of Fear. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000.
■ Robin, Corey. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004.
■ Scruton, David L., ed. Sociophobics: The Anthropology of Fear.
Boulder: Westview, 1986.

Terrorism

Traditional Studies of Terrorism

Most of the books listed in this first group take terrorism to be a

method of unconventional warfare employed by illegitimate, marginal
groups to fight against established governmental powers by attacking
non-combatants and spreading fear within the populace. The rise of
globalization has considerably complicated this picture, though, and
during the terrorist era culminating in the September 11, 2001 attacks
on American targets, much more attention has been given to the cul-
tural roots of terrorism and its cultural implications. Townshend pro-
vides a good general introduction that considers the complexity of the
issue since September 11, and Jurgensmeyer gives due attention to the
role of religion in terrorism. Walter includes a rare early account of
how the acts of legitimate states can be recast as terrorist activities.

■ Hoffman, Bruce. Inside Terrorism. New York: Columbia University

Press, 1998.
■ Jurgensmeyer, Mark. Terror in the Mind of God. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2000.

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■ Laquer, Walter. A History of Terrorism. New Brunswick: Transaction,

2001.
■ Townshend, Charles. Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
■ Walter, Eugene V. Terror and Resistance. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1969.
■ Whittaker, David, ed. The Terrorism Reader. New York: Routledge,
2003.

Terrorism and the State

Especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there has
been a move in studies of terrorism to complicate the definition and
location of terrorism. This critique has developed from curious parent-
age—the seemingly polarized camps of postmodern cultural theory
(Zizek and Baudrillard) and Christian theology (Berquist, Hauerwas,
and Williams). If terrorism is defined in a more general way as the sys-
tematic use of tactics of fear and violence, rather than law, to achieve
political goals, then even established democratic states are not immune
to charges of terrorist activity. This line of argument, which grows out of
an anti-globalization stance of distrust toward capitalist democratic
states, focuses more on the use of fear than earlier studies of terrorism do
and implicates the modern state for using methods that they consider no
better than those of extremist groups clamoring for power and influence.
The more expansive accounts (Baudrillard and Zizek) psychologize the
September 11 attacks as examples of globalization turning against itself—
the successful employment of the technological instruments of modern-
ization and industrialization (i.e., airplanes and sky scrapers) as weapons
against those progressive processes of Western civilization.

■ Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism. New York: Verso, 2002.

■ Berquist, Jon L., ed. Strike Terror No More: Theology, Ethics, and the
New War. St. Louis: Chalice, 2002.
■ George, Alexander, ed. Western State Terrorism. Cambridge: Polity,
1991.
■ Hauerwas, Stanley, and Frank Lentricchia, eds. Dissent from the
Homeland: Essays after September 11. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2002.

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■ Perdue, William D. Terrorism and the State: A Critique of

Domination through Fear. New York: Praeger, 1989.
■ Williams, Rowan. Writing in the Dust: After September 11. Grand
Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2002.
■ Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! New York: Verso, 2002.

Conspiracy Theory

Related to the anti-globalization arguments against “Western state ter-

rorism” is the recent increase in popularity and respectability of global
conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories rose to prominence in the early
and mid-twentieth century in response to identifiable external enemies.
In the post-Cold War era, however, the lack of a major international
enemy has led the American public to turn their fears toward their own
government and suspect their own leaders of devising the ills that trou-
ble American society. This suspicion of institutional government has
shown an amazing ability to unite surprisingly disparate political groups
in a condemnation of the supposed secret operations of government.
The rise of a respectable anti-globalization elite, some say, has even lent
a degree of credence to conspiracy theories (Knight). Others scholars
(Parish and Massumi) see conspiracy theories as desperate narratives of
fear and suspicion that are prime examples of postmodern culture at
work. Amidst the decline of grand ideas (metanarratives) about the
meaning and structure of the world, they say, there has risen a multi-
tude of idiosyncratic, fearful narratives that attempt to make sense out
of a fundamentally incoherent political, economic, and social order.

■ Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and

Other Essays. New York: Knopf, 1965.
■ Knight, Peter. Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar
America. New York: New York University Press, 2002.
■ Massumi, Brian, ed. The Politics of Everyday Fear. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
■ Melley, Timothy. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in
Postwar America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.
■ Parish, Jane, and Martin Parker, eds. The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy
Theory and the Human Sciences. Malden: Blackwell, 2001.

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Fear in the Arts

Fear has become more and more prevalent in the arts in the twentieth
century, and much work has been done in trying to understand why
this is so. The origin of the art of fear is normally traced to the gothic
revival in architecture and literature that began in eighteenth-century
Europe. The conventions of horror stories have proved remarkably sta-
ble yet flexible enough to preserve a space for the projection of ever
changing societal fears for more than two centuries. Most of the books
below explain the propagation of horror stories as a cultural process of
psychological expulsion and repression of those elements of society—
visually identified with a certain race, class, or gender—that are fearful
to the dominant majority. Notably different are philosophical (Carroll)
and sociological (Tudor) approaches. Virilio and Steiner take a broader
path by seeing the popularity of fear in art as a characteristic of the
twentieth century, which commonly rejects beauty for the sake of a
cold, often cruel scientism.

■ Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart.

New York: Routledge, 1990.
■ Clemens, Valdine. The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from
The Castle of Otronto to Alien. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1999.
■ Ellin, Nan. Architecture of Fear. New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1997.
■ Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of
Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
■ Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. New
York: Norton, 1993.
■ Steiner, Wendy. Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth
Century Art. New York: Free, 2001.
■ Tropp, Martin. How Horror Stories Helped Shape Modern Culture
(1818–1918). Jefferson: McFarland, 1990.
■ Tudor, Andrew. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of
the Horror Movie. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989.
■ Virilio, Paul. Art and Fear. New York: Continuum, 2003.
■ Warner, Marina. No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making
Mock. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999.

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Fear in Philosophy

Recent philosophical discussions of fear often take the fearful images of

art as their starting point. Rarely do these discussions take up fear as a
topic directly, but a confrontation of individual and collective human
fear, along with an attempt to describe how fear is culturally embedded
in Western thought, is the driving motive behind the works listed
below. These works advocate philosophy as a thoughtful cure to the
cultural mania that often unfairly creates monsters and projects all dan-
gers to the society on these mostly imaginative monstrosities. Further,
they suggest that philosophy can employ critical judgment to discern
carefully between those fears that are legitimate dangers and those that
are fanciful. Here, Kearney is an excellent, readable synthesis of much
recent continental philosophy as well as an application of its most
important claims to familiar cultural events. I have included Burke and
Kant as predecessors who are overwhelmingly important to contempo-
rary discussions of fear and philosophy.

■ Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas

of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757; New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990.
■ Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. Monster Theory: Reading Culture.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
■ Ingebretson, Edward J. At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in
Public Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.
■ Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. 1790; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
■ Kearney, Richard. Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting
Otherness. New York: Routledge, 2003.
■ Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982.

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