The COVID pandemic provided a totally undesired but nevertheless useful natural experiment about fear and politics. With good reason, people feared for their lives – and many still do. The level of fear varied from country to country but was arguably present to some degree everywhere. Governments had to react, and made widely varying responses. Some prioritised health, imposed and enforce lockdowns, and were quick to develop or place orders for vaccines. Others privileged the economy over public health and denied the severity of this new coronavirus and its likely consequences. Still others vacillated between these responses. What accounts for this variation? What were its medical and political consequences?

Other contributors explore pieces of the puzzle. I will briefly review some of the most relevant findings and use them as a conceptual and empirical introduction to the questions I pose above. I go on to explore the concept of fear and distinguish it from fright. Fear generates strong public demands for protection. This pressure can constrain or enable leaders depending on the circumstances, their capabilities, but above all, their framing of the problem. Leaders can try to arouse or dampen public fears and make different tradeoffs about health versus other goals. Rationalist accounts would explain these choices as reasoned responses to the constraints and opportunities leaders face. Contributors disagree, as do I. There is considerable evidence that leaders failed to gather or evaluate relevant information. They often acted irrationally, defined here as pursuing policies that were made with little consideration of – or in the face of – what evidence was at hand, and continued even after accumulating evidence indicated that they were not achieving their intended goals. To explain this behaviour I draw on motivational psychology and political ideology. My accounts are merely suggestive as they are not the result of data gathered from carefully paired and exhaustively researched cases. The editors offer a set of propositions in their introduction. I return to them in the conclusion and argue in favour of four of them.

The problem

Contributors on the whole address three important questions: the role of fear in politics, governmental responses to it, and their consequences. Their investigations mostly take the form of general surveys or case studies. Like my analysis, they are suggestive rather than definitive.

In this concluding chapter, the authors summarize the findings of the volume’s contributions and further develop the notion of the Weimar analogy as providing central clues about conceptions of modernity in the postwar era. It further emphasizes the multiple ways in which Weimar has been mobilized in different contexts, how it has worked as a cultural symbol, and why it has had such a profound impact on postwar political thinking in the West. The chapter, finally, expands on what we may take away from the studies in this volume for a more general understanding of the role of analogies and historical lessons for political thought.

In this introductory chapter, Lebow and Norman identify the Weimar Republic and its collapse as the paradigmatic historical example shaping political thinking about fragility and robustness in the postwar world. It spells out the volume’s analytical focus on Weimar lessons in comparative perspective and identifies its theoretical starting points in a broader scholarly field concerned with the role of historical analogies in politics.

The Nazis could not ignore or suppress Shakespeare without alienating members of the educated middle classes. But to present him on stage involved directors and actors, many of whom were not friendly to the regime. Shakespeare posed a more fundamental conundrum because he encourages audiences to look beyond and above the divisions between protagonists and resist unalloyed support for either side. Through an exploration of the staging of The Merchant of Venice in Venice in 1943, this essay explores this conundrum and Nazi efforts to cope with it.

This chapter defines robustness and fragility, argues that they can only be determined confidently in retrospect, but that assessments made by political actors, whilst subjective, have important political implications. We suggest some of the consideration that may shape these assessment. They include ideology, historical lessons, and the Zeitgeist. We go on to describe the following chapters, providing an outline of the book.

I make two related claims: (1) assessments of stability made by political actors and analysts are largely hit or miss; and (2) that leader responses to fear of fragility or confidence in robustness are unpredictable in their consequences. Leader assessments are often made with respect to historical lessons derived from dramatic past events that appear relevant to the present. These lessons may or may not be based on good history and may or may not be relevant to the case at hand. Leaders and elites who believe their orders to be robust can help make their beliefs self-fulfilling. However, overconfidence can help make these orders fragile. I argue that leader and elite assessments of robustness and fragility are influenced by cognitive biases and also often highly motivated. Leaders and their advisors use information selectively and can confirm tautologically the lessons they apply.