Corey Robin — The History of Fear, Part 1

...with this post, I’m going to inaugurate a series on this blog, in which I post excerpts from each of my five chapters on the intellectual history of fear. Part 1, today’s post, will look at Hobbes’s account of rational fear; Part 2 will look at Montesquieu’s account of despotic terror; Part 3, at Tocqueville’s account of democratic anxiety; Part 4, at Arendt’s account of total terror; and Part 5, at the theories of fear we’ve seen since the end of Cold War, which I divide into two categories: the liberalism of anxiety (communitarianism) and the liberalism of terror (what is often called political liberalism).

The History of Fear, Part 1
Corey Robin