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Fear : The History of a Political Idea by Corey Robin is a philosophy book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Fear : The History of a Political Idea about?

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

Who reads Fear : The History of a Political Idea?

Author

Corey Robin

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA; Oxford University Press

Published

2004

Language

EN

ISBN

9780195157024

Category

philosophy

Subjects

Political Science, Social Science, Fiction

Rating

3.91 / 5 (9 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-13