Fear

A broad survey of the psychological, biological, and philosophical basis of fear in historical and contemporary contexts.

Plamper and Lazier have rendered a major service by bringing this impressive set of contributions into conversation. Moving deftly from neuroscience and psychology to history and cinematography, they interrogate the scholarly, social, and political treatments of what is so often taken as the most hardwired of all emotions.

What a great book. It's important for the sciences and humanities to interact, and this is a wonderful example, covering fear from many angles. I recommend it.

This is a book about how we have come to know what we think we know about the emotion of fear. The editors, Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier, argue that we remain, to some extent, trapped in a 'phobic regime' that we have inherited from the nineteenth century. It was then that fear came to be seen as an evolutionarily conditioned, politically manipulable phenomenon, not necessarily directed toward any specific threat; and, at the same time, as the most ancient and thus the most decisive of human emotions. . . . The book is cleverly organized so that later chapters often serve to historicize earlier ones, and the editors' introduction succeeds marvelously in placing the chapters in dialogue with each other. . . . a truly multidimensional appreciation of the historicity of fear.

Jan Plamperis professor of history at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power.