Social Research articles from December 2004

Social Research archives from December 2004

Editor's introduction.
December 22, 2004... THIS ISSUE IS DEVOTED TO THE PAPERS FROM THE THIRTEENTH Social Research conference, which was held at the New School in February 2004. The decision to organize this conference, "Fear: Its Political Uses and Abuses," was motivated by the painful...

The politics of fear.(Part I: keynote address)
December 22, 2004... TERRORISM IS THE ULTIMATE MISUSE OF FEAR FOR POLITICAL ENDS. Indeed, its specific goal is to distort the political reality of a nation by creating fear in the general population that is hugely disproportionate to the actual dangers that the...

Fear and how it works: science and the social sciences.(Part II)
December 22, 2004... THERE HAS BEEN AN EXTRAORDINARY GROWTH IN RESEARCH ON emotions over the last 10 to 15 years across diverse subfields within the social and human sciences. The four papers included in this section exemplify this trend. Research across varied...

Fear and the brain.(Part II: fear and how it works: science and social science)
December 22, 2004... FEAR IS A NATURAL PART OF LIFE. IT OCCURS WHENEVER WE ARE THREATENED. Threats come in many forms. A snake on the ground in front of you is a biologically prepared threat, and so is being face-to-face with an angry human. Evolution has put this...

Narrative techniques of fear mongering.(Part II: fear and how it works: science and social science)
December 22, 2004... AMERICANS LIVE IN PERHAPS THE SAFEST TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY, SO how has it come about that there are so many fears and scares in the air, and so many of them are unfounded? Why, as crime rates plunged over the past decade, did substantial...

What are we so afraid of? A terror management theory perspective on the politics of fear.(Part II: fear and how it works: science and social science)
December 22, 2004... FEAR AND ANXIETY ARE TWO OF THE MOST INTOLERABLE EMOTIONS WE humans are capable of experiencing. People will do almost anything to avoid being afraid. When, despite their best efforts, these feelings do break through, people go to incredible...

The ministry of fear.(Part II: fear and how it works: science and social science)
December 22, 2004... WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD A FRIEND GAVE ME A NAZI FLAG THAT his father had brought back from the war as a souvenir. Despite my parents' warnings not to upset my grandmother, whose father, mother, and younger sisters (I later learned) perished...

Fear itself.(Part III: the political theory and vocabulary of fear)
December 22, 2004... AS A PRELIMINARY TO FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS OF FEAR, PARTICULARLY in a political context, I would like to comment on the language by which we have traditionally designated fear of various kinds: for example, acute (such as fright) and chronic...

A life of fear.(Part III: the political theory and vocabulary of fear)
December 22, 2004... WE ARE CAUGHT UP IN A COURSE OF EVENTS THAT ARE NEARLY AS opaque in motivation as they are dramatic and often tragic in their effects. The United States answered jihad by carrying the war on terror to Afghanistan, but then seemed to veer by...

Liberalism at bay, conservatism at play: fear in the contemporary imagination.(Part III: the political theory and vocabulary of fear)
December 22, 2004... While I was fearing it, it came, But came with less of fear, Because that fearing it so long Had almost made it dear. --Emily Dickinson AMONG THE GREAT COMMONPLACES OF MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT is the opposition...

Introduction.(Part IV: what we gain, what we lose: the effects of fear)
December 22, 2004... IT WAS CLEAR FROM THE DISCUSSIONS AT THE FEAR CONFERENCE, AT which the papers in this volume were presented, that most of those present--though by no means most of the country--think very negatively of what has happened to the foreign policy of...

Fear and liberty.(Part IV: what we gain, what we lose: the effects of fear)
December 22, 2004... INTRODUCTION When a nation's security is threatened, are civil liberties at undue risk? If so, why? Consider a plausible account. In the midst of external threats, public overreactions are predictable. Simply because of fear, the public...

Fear: what is it good for?(Part IV: what we gain, what we lose: the effects of fear)
December 22, 2004... "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror." --President George W. Bush, September, 2002 (quoted in Huffington, 2003: 344). THOUGH HISTORY TEACHES US TO AVOID THE SNAP...

America's new nationalism.(Part IV: what we gain, what we lose: the effects of fear)
December 22, 2004... I START WITH A DEFINITION OF TERRORISM; IT IS VIOLENCE AGAINST those with whom one does not necessarily have a quarrel in order to make a political point. One of terrorism's purposes and consequences is to inspire fear and other reactions that...

Thoughts on fear on global society.(Part IV: what we gain, what we lose: the effects of fear)
December 22, 2004... IN A WORLD OF COMPETING STATES, FEAR IS A CONSTANT CAUSE AND effect of their contest: "What made [the Peloponnesian] war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta" (Thucydides, 1954: 49)." Hobbes, who...

Introduction.(Part V: case studies: what can they teach us?)
December 22, 2004... THIS SECTION OF THE SOCIAL RESEARCH ISSUE DEVOTED TO THE FEAR conference addresses three very different case studies, all of which deal with a fundamental problem: the state as the source of fear, or as the exploiter of fear. I would like to...

McCarthyism: political repression and the fear of communism.(Part V: case studies: what can they teach us?)
December 22, 2004... THE 28-YEAR-OLD SEAMAN WAS PUZZLED. LAWRENCE PARKER HAD BEEN forced off his job as a waiter on the S.S. President Cleveland in February 1951 as a "poor security risk," but had not been told why. This was not the first time he had been barred...

The semeiosic economy of fear.(Part V: case studies: what can they teach us?)
December 22, 2004... AN ETHNOGRAPHIC CASE-STUDY This essay is based on field research carried out in Sri Lanka, a country where there has been a civil war since the summer of 1983: a period during which it has earned a place in the roster of nations where...

Fearing evil.(Part V: case studies: what can they teach us?)
December 22, 2004... Evil doers are evil dreaders. --Sixteenth-century proverb AMERICANS ARE LIVING IN A DREADFUL AGE: OF "SHOE BOMBERS" and orange alerts, of suicide-murderers and poisonous bombs, of pronouncements by our enemies that they will...

The politics of fear after 9/11.(Part VI: the politics of fear after 9/11: can the past inform the future?)
December 22, 2004... INTRODUCTION: KENNETH PREWITT OUR TOPIC, THE POLITICAL USES OF FEAR, HAS MANY FACETS. IT IS THE strength of this concluding panel that its participants bring these multiple facets to the surface. It is not a concluding consensus that we...