For many, September 11 inaugurated a new era of fear. But as 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. 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, equality, and freedom. But as fear becomes our intimate, we understand it less. In a stunning 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 those who sponsor and benefit from it. For fear, Robin insists, is an exemplary instrument of repression--nowhere more evident than in contemporary America.
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