AshehougAgency

Fear

Fear is pervasive in contemporary cultue: It is a major influence in both ou priate lives and the public sphere. We are bombarded by warnings of danger from the media, politicians and interest groups. Fear undermines our freedom, creates distrust and even makes us irrational in our constant attempts to minimize risk.

The book consists of seven chapters.

Chapter 1 gives a brief description of the culture of fear, i.e. of how fear has become a dominant perspective on human life in contemporary culture. Chapter 2 is an attempt to describe what sort of phenomenon fear is, and addresses a great variety of approaches to fear, from neurobiology to phenomenology.
Chapter 3 investigates the role of fear in "risk society", and also shows how our attempts to minimize risk contain a number of irrational aspects. Chapter 4 attempts to come to terms with the fact that we often voluntarily choose to engage the sorts of things which create fear, e.g. In extreme sports and entertainment – which is paradoxical since we usually attempt to avoid the objects which create fear.
Chapter 5 is devoted to the notion of trust, and argues that the culture of fear undermines social trust, and that turn creates even more fear. When general trust declines in a society, social relations are impaired, but fear can also be socially integrating. The integrating role of fear is central to several political philosophies – like Machiavelli’s and Hobbes’s – and
Chapter 6 investigates the roe of fear as a foundation for political philosophy and the political use of fear in the "war on terror" in recent years. The final chapter addresses the question as to whether there is a path out of the current climate of fear, and the book ends on a positive note, embracing a humanistic optimism.

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