We habitually say that we see fear, that we smell it, touch it, breathe it. But how, after all is said and done, do weknowit?

The chapters in this edited volume help us with just this question—how fear is variously constituted as an object of knowledge.¹ The contributions to this book emerged from a workshop in which a distinguished group of scholars (representing the fields of neuroscience, clinical psychology, philosophy, political theory, literary studies, film studies, economic history, intellectual history, and history of science) and one novelist gathered to reflect on the predispositions they and their disciplines...

The psychology of fear is haunted by the ghost of Descartes. The traditional view of fear as a subjectively distinct feeling state accessible only to the person experiencing it seemingly implies a Cartesian dualism that harkens back to psychology’s prescientific past. Accordingly, psychologists keen to establish a science of fear have endeavored to exorcise Descartes’s ghost by reconceptualizing fear (and anxiety) in ways that eliminate its subjective aspect. This effort has been driven by the mandate that data in science must be public and observable.

In a landmark paper, Peter Lang proposed “an alternative to the view that anxiety can...

Former U.S. president George Herbert Walker Bush and federal funding agencies dubbed the 1990s the Decade of the Brain.¹ Indeed, thanks to an increase in funding and publicity there was a rare explosion in knowledge and research techniques about what is conventionally called “higher nervous activity.” Partly as a follow-up, partly out of a concern that other aspects of brain activity had gotten short shrift during the so-called Decade of the Brain, and partly to shift attention back to the Decade of Behavior (2000–2010), a group of leading U.S. scientists in 2007 published a manifesto inScience, demanding a...

When on September 11, 2001, terrorists killed more than three thousand people in their attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, for Americans in particular the world suddenly became a much more frightening place. Insecurity became the norm as the Bush administration’s new Department of Homeland Security used its color-coded terror alert system to orchestrate and manipulate the public’s fears. Among the many consequences of 9/11 has been the flow of federal funds to scientists committed to finding ways to identify terrorists before they can act. One of those is Paul Ekman, a psychologist who has devoted...

Looking for the emotion of soldierly fear in first-person accounts of the War of 1812 resembles the proverbial search for a needle in the haystack. One is more likely to discover overt absences that sound like this comment made by officer Mikhail Petrov: “Yet the Russian soldiers looked at the huge enemy hordes with an unflinching spirit. With Faith, Hope, and Love, and with the Great Suvorov implanted in our hearts, our souls were prepared for sacrifices to save the Fatherland.”¹ Only the following quote from Petrov offers a deeper glimpse into the soul of the soldier in Alexander I’s...

In her 1973On Photography, Susan Sontag describes the West as “a society which makes it normative to aspire never to experience privation, failure, misery, pain, [or] dread disease, and in which death itself is regarded not as natural and inevitable but as a cruel, unmerited disaster.” The suggestion that human beings have difficulty acknowledging their own mortality is hardly novel, but Sontag draws an unusual inference from the observation, suggesting that “the feeling of being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful pictures, and looking at them suggests and strengthens the feeling that one is exempt.”¹ Her...

My topic here is the political language of fear and one language in particular: security. There are other languages of fear: racism, religion, risk assessment, to name a few. But security, both national and domestic, is the most potent and pervasive. Security is the one good, theorists agree, that the state must provide.¹ It has the ability, like no other language, to mobilize the resources and attention of the state and its citizens. It has arguably inspired—and, in the case of nuclear deterrence, certainly threatened—more devastation and destruction than any other language of the modern era.² It has...

The U.S. stock market crash of October 1929 is indisputably history’s most famous financial collapse. It is evoked wherever and whenever financial sentiment becomes nervous. And policy recommendations for the following eighty years have consistently been made on the basis of analyses or presumptions of what went wrong in 1929.

In particular, John Maynard Keynes’sGeneral Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money(1936) has at the heart of its diagnosis a critique not of the general operation of the stock exchange but specifically of the American market and its peculiar experience: its propensity to destabilizing and irrational speculation, which followed...

Fear and film have always been intimate companions. One of cinema’s primal scenes testifies to this intimacy and originates from the medium’s very beginnings: the famous screening in 1895 of Louis and Auguste Lumiere’sL’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat(Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, also known as Arrival of a Train at the Station) at the Grand Café in Paris. The spectators in the Grand Café, among cinema’s very first public audiences, responded to the image of a train pulling into a station with pure terror. The power of this new technology to grant movement...