The Concept and Its Iterations

Fear is a pervasive term used to describe an individual's or group's perceived insecurity, threat, and angst. It can also denote a person's wariness, suspicion, and skepticism about events that may soon occur which affect and alter one's standing. Furthermore, it can evoke a future threat to the person. Fear can therefore be applied in many different ways and contexts. When parts of a whole nation sense fear, the relevance and significance may affect its international relations, whether immediately or belatedly.

For a nation, the causes, sources, and bases of fear differ. In his seminal volume on Fear: The History of a Political Idea (2004), Corey Robin understands political fear as entailing “a people's felt apprehension of some harm to their collective well-being.” It has far-reaching repercussions: “It may dictate public policy, bring new groups to power and keep others out, create laws and overturn them.”

It is the politics of fear-making that Robin has called attention to, not fear ipso facto. He argues how “the politics of fear is far less dependent upon the actual psychic experience of the public than analysts would have us think. While many believe that the individual emotions of the citizenry propel the policies the government pursues, I see little evidence of this.” On the contrary, the author inveighs, “Even if we assume that each and every member of the public is experiencing fear, that experience still doesn’t explain the policies. A frightened population could just as easily inspire the government to pursue policies that would dampen rather than arouse fear.” In the end “It is politics that produces policies, not fear.” Or, we can add, it is the gunman, not the gun, who kills.

Political fear's main protagonist today is a transformed Western liberalism departing from its nineteenth-century counterpart. It has metamorphosized into a rigid and doctrinaire, even quasi-authoritarian philosophy. Its prevailing status in Western thought has led to it becoming a victim of its own success. In Patrick Deneen's timely volume, liberty is redefined in such a way as to signify the opposite of its original meaning that was a prerequisite for self-governance. Instead, it now insists on maximizing the greatest possible freedom from external constraints while maintaining order among unfettered individuals. The open society and its enemies, in Karl Popper's conceptualization, have merged into one.