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Fear: The History of a Political Idea
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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 than in contemporary America. In his final chapters, Robin accuses our leading scholars and critics of ignoring "Fear, American Style," which, as he shows, is the fruit of our most prized inheritances--the Constitution and the free market.
With danger playing an increasing role in our daily lives and justifying a growing number of government policies, Robin's Fear offers a bracing, and necessary, antidote to our contemporary culture of fear.
- ISBN-100195176197
- ISBN-13978-0195189124
- PublisherOxford University Press
- Publication dateJanuary 26, 2006
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions8.74 x 6.4 x 0.86 inches
- Print length316 pages
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- ASIN : 0195189124
- Publisher : Oxford University Press (January 26, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 316 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0195176197
- ISBN-13 : 978-0195189124
- Item Weight : 1.12 pounds
- Dimensions : 8.74 x 6.4 x 0.86 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,059,838 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,076 in Philosophy (Books)
- #2,728 in Political Philosophy (Books)
- #4,070 in History & Theory of Politics
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The major part of the book is spent looking at how fear and anxiety have been wielded by government (red scares, the PATRIOT act, etc, in the US, but also concentration camps in Nazi occupied Europe and the gulags of the Soviet Union) as he moves to the book’s conclusion, the author points out - and, of course, he’s not the first or only one to point this out - that as much as we in the United States celebrate the principles of democracy and citizens’ rights to principles such as the freedom of speech, association, privacy, and so on as spelled out or implied by the Constitution, those principles apply only to our dealings with the state; they do not apply to the workplace. We may say we live in a democracy, but most adults spend the majority of their waking hours at work in the context of autocratically structured hierarchies in which we are not free to speak our minds, associate with whom we wish and are constantly open to violations of privacy. Not only can your boss read your emails and monitor your phone calls, but can dictate how frequently you use the rest room, can search your bags and car if it’s parked on company property. In many states, you may be fired because of your political affiliations, or for political statements made in non-work hours. Fear and anxiety are used with intent, as supposedly effective management techniques - not necessarily to increase production but to increase the manager’s control of the workplace. Fear and the promotion of fear (of lay-offs, loss of hours and therefore of health coverage, arbitrary punishment) has become such a regular feature of the American workplace that Americans expect that they should live to in fear. And so, as we become inured to fear in the workplace where we spend most of our hours, we accept fear in the public sphere and accept the repression that follows. If we want to do more than simply give lip service to the principles that we say we stand for - liberty, justice, equality, democracy - then we cannot allow fear to be the foundation upon which we manage and govern.
For decades, as the power of the labor movement grew, fear and intimidation of workers in the workplace decreased and a respect for democratic government also grew in strength. Today and since the 1930s, the corporate power structure and conservatives in government are dismantling labor’s ability to organize. Union membership is very low today, and with every decrease in membership, there is an uptick in the use of fear, anxiety and intimidation by managers.
To that, I say...educate, agitate, organize. Join a union!
Well-researched and documented by nearly 50 pages of references, it's a watershed book on this subject like no other. Seldom will you find a more thought provoking book so in tune with the times.
Unfortunately this book derails in the final third, in which Robin attempts to tie these concepts into current events, but misses the boat badly. The supposedly authoritative closing chapter is an anemic summary of the lack of privacy in the workplace and corporate actions against unions. Robin postulates that this phenomenon indicates political fear amongst the workforce, but fails to adequately explain how this is so, missing the structural phenomena engendered by the ideological and economic connections between many corporate leaders and politicians. More fundamentally, Robin leans primarily toward blaming political "liberalism" for modern political fear of any stripe. I realize that Robin uses the intellectual political science definition of "liberalism" in terms of active government, which is far less accusatory than the version of that term used by politicians and media pundits. But any criticism of the equally inclusive practice of conservatism (once again, not just the pundit's definition of the term) is strangely missing from the book, even in Robin's long discussions of the (mostly) rightist-fueled McCarthyism. This indicates a creeping personal outlook into a book that started strongly and objectively.
And finally, there is a catastrophic omission here, especially since Robin claims that the book was partially inspired by 9/11 and subsequent events - the current conservative administration's use of fear, especially of terrorist attacks, to drum up support not just for war but their own policies and political plans. Regardless of whether Robin (or the reader) would be for or against current political trends, at the most basic of levels this would be an immensely illustrative example of the use of political fear that is supposed to be the reason for this book's existence. [~doomsdayer520~]





