Fear: the history of a political idea Corey Robin Oxford University Press, 316pp, £14.99 ISBN 0195157028

The study of the politics of fear remains a relatively underdeveloped enterprise. To be sure, there is a vast literature devoted to totalitarianism and, increasingly, to terrorism, but while such contributions engage with instances of fear, they tend to take its existence for granted. However, as this important book makes clear, the problem of the origins of fear has concerned political philosophers since the days of Aristotle and Plato.

By means of an innovative rereading of four influential political theorists - Thomas Hobbes, Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt - Corey Robin offers a fascinating analysis of how we have formed many of our ideas about the role of fear in society. Hobbes's account is the most relevant today. He believed that people's fear of each other could be used to ensure submission to the state. He understood that fear had to be created - or, in today's language, "constructed". Through such acts of construction, danger would be magnified, "even exaggerated by the state".

For Hobbes, the principal reason to promote fear was to neutralise any impulse not to conform. People had to be persuaded that "the less they dare, the better it is both for the commonwealth and for themselves", and made to dread and think of that "which they never have experienced as harmful". Today, this fear of "unknowable harm" is transmit-ted through the precautionary principle, which holds that, faced with uncertain and possibly negative consequences, it is best not to act. Paradoxically, whereas Hobbes viewed fear of the unknown as a precondition for consolidating overwhelming state power, today its promoters argue that it is essential for protecting ordinary people from those in authority.

However, this separation of fear from the state and elite power, Robin argues, has led to a dangerous confusion about fear's role in society. He criticises Montesquieu, Tocqueville and Arendt for treating fear and terror not as creations of the state, but as psychologically motivated impulses, the products of social atomisation. He is particularly dismissive of Tocqueville's diagnosis of fear as a form of free-floating anxiety rooted in mass society. On the contrary, he suggests, one of the defining features of fear is that it is inflicted on the powerless by the powerful.

Robin points out that all four theorists lack a positive conception of human ends, and tend to compensate by advocating fear as the negative moral foundation for social unity. The promotion of fear for this purpose became, if anything, more prevalent in the period following the cold war, and has intensified further since 11 September 2001. Robin argues that, by "looking upon fear as an opportunity for collective renewal in the face of non-political threats, we help perpetuate the forms of fear that most constrain our aspirations and actions".

The book's main target is the "liberalism of fear" or the "liberalism of terror" - an outlook that in recent years was put forward most vigorously by the late Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar. According to Shklar, terror provokes the kind of universal reaction that helps forge a moral consensus. "Because the fear of systematic cruelty is so universal, moral claims based on its prohibition have an immediate appeal and can gain recognition without much argument," she wrote. Whatever the issues dividing society, a dislike of terror, cruelty and suffering can provide the foundation for a sense of common purpose. These arguments have become particularly relevant in recent years, as concepts such as "genocide", "ethnic cleansing" and "crimes against humanity" have come to occupy a central place in the west's collective consciousness.

While Robin blames Montesquieu, Tocqueville and Arendt for providing theories that make it possible to separate fear from politics, it is possible to argue that the Hobbesian theory of fear exercises a more significant influence over contemporary debate. Our risk-averse society has turned being fearful into a form of responsible behaviour. And perversely, once fear becomes a custom, it also becomes depoliticised. For fear to be used as a tool of state power, it has to become a common-sense response to reality.

Perhaps the one important weakness in Corey Robin's otherwise powerful story is a tendency to underestimate the non-political dimension of fear. Not everything about the politics of fear is reducible to the behaviour or interests of the powerful. The state and its institutions no longer possess a monopoly on its construction. Charities and special-interest groups, for example, continually exaggerate problems to "raise awareness" about the focus of their concern.

Perhaps the distinct feature of our time is not so much the cultivation of fear, as the cultivation of vulnerability. In an era where children, women, the elderly, the infirm and the poor - between roughly 80 and 90 per cent of the population - are routinely characterised as members of a "vulnerable group", there is little need for a Leviathan to remind us of our lack of power. And if vulnerability is the defining feature of the human condition, we are quite entitled to fear everything.

Frank Furedi's latest book is Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? (Continuum)

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