Reduction of fear to an individualistic, psychological and (psycho)pathological dimension

One of the most striking problematic features of the contemporary scientific (and, traditionally, also of the non-scientific) discourse on fear is the tendency to conceptualise it as an individualistic, psychological and (psycho)pathological phenomenon. This widespread view reduces fear to individual traits or states, thus often assuming the origin of fears was to be located within subjects. Yet such individualistic and psychological reduction tend to ignore the various social and societal moments of fear: that is, its social causes, enabling conditions, forms and consequences (see also Tudor, 2003). As research attests, fear is socially differentiated in its origins, objects and forms (Kemper, 1978; 1991; Barbalet, 1998; Schmitz et al, 2018; Eckert, 2019), and it is brought to life and shaped by discourses (Altheide, 2002), institutions and organisations (Flam, 1998), and social fields (Bourdieu, 2000: 238). Thus, there are good reasons to consider more systematically how society is involved in both the causes of emotions and affects¹ that might be understood as fears in a realist way and the construction of fear, such as the societal representation of objects, people or events as being threatening. Representation may well enter subjects’ life-worlds and seemingly personal accounts and can impact their sense making, such as when they perceive, accept and eventually incorporate concerns fostered by the media field (for example, in the case of moral panics; see Cohen, 2002). A relevant element of this representation is the dominant view of associating fears with (groups of) individuals, and as part of this, the tendency to associate fears with clinical (psychopathologies) deficiencies. Moreover, fears are often represented in the context of normative deficiencies, such as fear of ‘mass’ immigration as an expression of a reactionary mentality, and ascribed to certain societal groups: for example, those with different ideological stances from oneself.

A sociologically substantiated conception of fear may, then, serve to distance oneself from widespread pathological attributions. On this ground, a fear may well be understood as pathological, but from a sociological point of view, the question would then always have to be asked to what extent it is a matter of societal pathologies (or, more neutrally: causes and enabling conditions), which manifest themselves on the subject. Moreover, the sociological perspective we advance suggests not characterising fears prematurely and categorically as pathological. Fears are typically thought of as resulting from a lack of control, certainty and structure, but they can also be traced back to ‘positive’ conditions in the same way. One example is Durkheim’s concept of anomia, which describes how fears can result from any negative or positive societal transformation. Fears are essential constituents of human existence and social coexistence. An urgent question would then be, which (societal, political, academic and so on) actors are rendering a specific fear pathological and, even more fundamentally, what may be considered by whom as an ‘actual’ fear or even an anxiety disorder and which phenomena are perceived by them, for example, as a legitimate concern (Schmitz and Gengnagel, 2018; Schmitz et al, 2018)?

In short, society, in its different figurations, affective constellations and various mechanisms, is involved in producing, forming and representing fear. Moreover, and vice versa, fear is involved in the (re)production of society itself, such as by producing subjects (for example, fears as elements of one’s identity), classes (for example, class-specific fears), fields (for example, field-specific concerns), and discourses (for example, discourses centred on contemporary fears). Thus, fear may be observed on the subject but cannot be attributed to it in a definite, essentialist way.

Fear as a supposed distinctive feature of modern societies

The abundance of empirical and theoretical analyses of contemporary societies in the context of fear is accompanied by a – partly explicit, partly implicit – overemphasis on fear as an allegedly essential characteristic of our times. Social scientists diagnose a contemporary ‘society of fear’ (Bude, 2018), a ‘culture of fear’ (Glassner, 2010; Furedi, 2018), or a ‘liquid’ and free-floating fear (Bauman, 2006), but also the majority of current empirical research seems to agree that fear is a significant issue of our times and thus an important issue of research. According to many voices, fear has reached a unique quantity and quality today, so that it deserves the status of the central descriptive feature of society. The same picture is drawn by media discourses that increasingly present fear as an issue of our contemporary times (Altheide and Michalowski, 1999). However, despite all the significant insights this modernist view may provide for the ways contemporary society thinks about itself, it loses sight of a crucial historical aspect: every human society has always been a society of fear in that fears are affectively and effectively involved in every societal aspect, such as meaning, practices, social fields, social structures and so forth. Indeed, scientists proclaimed a society of fear in every decade of the 20th century (Wilkinson, 1999).

To counter the ‘retreat of sociologists into the present’ (Elias, 1987) – that is, the assumption that fear is a particularly central feature of our contemporary society – social scientists need not only put a stronger emphasis on historical contextualisation and historical comparison but also to understand fear as a fundamental constituent of human and social existence itself. A return to classical theoretical approaches may prove helpful in this context, not least to balance the shortcomings of current theories. Weber ([1905] 1930), for example, has shown how Protestants’ religious fears helped shape modern capitalism. Elias ([1939] 2000) has explored how fears and concerns became societal factors during the civilising process (for instance, how fear of shame developed within the courtly aristocratic societies of Europe in the course of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, and how this fear was effective in reproducing societal power relations). Durkheim (see Lussier, 2002) ascribed a fundamental role to fear in the context of moral integration as respect and awe towards the totem and as reverence for society.

Returning to the classic works of sociology as well as works of historical sociology may help us break free from the grip of the present. Any study of contemporary fears might benefit from a perspective that puts them into their respective sociohistorical and thus affective contexts. In doing so, scholars could analyse the social mechanisms of fear across time (and space) and investigate how specific sociohistorical conditions shape the emergence of particular fears and how fears are involved in the production of a respective society.

Spontaneous sociology of fear

Contemporary contributions in the realm of fear are often characterised by what can be labelled as ‘spontaneous sociology’, that is, as the practice of following unconscious preconceptions of fear which are taken for granted, if not seen as ‘natural’ and which are often predefined by other fields, in particular the media or politics (for a discussion of spontaneous sociology and the naive philosophy of action, see Bourdieu et al, 1991: 17). Perhaps the most striking example of such a spontaneous sociology of fear is the ‘spontaneous aetiology of fear’, which manifests in contemporary (scientific) fear discourses, which are haunted by hastily assigning the role of explananda to fears. Fears are used for explaining various social phenomena, perhaps since such emotions are seemingly easily understandable and moralisable (and, due to their attention-seeking potential: marketable) phenomena. One notable case in support of a spontaneous aetiology of fear are explanations for the recent rise of right-wing populism and extremism in Western countries. Taking up the ‘anxiety theory’ (Hunt, 1999), which circulates in public discourses, social scientists regularly identify populists’ and extremists’ fears as central driving forces for the appeal of these political movements and parties. While fear may indeed play a causal or constitutive role, a premature focus on this ‘usual suspect’ comes with some dangers (see also Flam and Kleres, 2016). The widespread spontaneous over-emphasis on fear as a cause tends to ignore other potential explanatory factors, such as alternative emotions and rationalities, not to mention societal and affective mechanisms beyond the actors’ emotions. Likewise, large parts of current sociology focus on right-wing populists as the carriers of fears and essentially ignore the fears of the political opponents of right-wing populism. Similarly, in the context of fear, specific population groups are given special attention (for example, in Germany, the descending middle class), while cultural and political elites are granted scarce scholarly attention. Another recent example is that, for many social scientists, fear of vaccination seems to be more intriguing (since it is contrasted with a ‘rational’ ideal position) than the fear of becoming infected (although this often relies on quite irrational considerations as well). This problem can also be observed in the context of political discourses and politics, which often narrowly focus on right-wing or neoliberal actors and positions while ignoring the fact that representing fear is a strategic task of all parties in the political field (Schmitz and Horneber, 2020). Against this background, the contribution of a general sociology of fear lies in preventing us from reserving our research interest for the ‘usual suspects’, an analytical and empirical decentring which can, for example, imply investigating fear in those actors who seem the least fearful as well as extending the ‘politics of fear’ (Wodak, 2015) to the political field as a whole.

Asymmetrical conception of fear in fundamental theory and empirical research

Another major problem of contemporary fear research lies in the fact that, in most cases, fear is given a subordinate status within foundational theory. There are only a few works on basic theory that would assign the realm of fear a systematic status comparable to ‘positively’² connoted elements of sociological theories. Whereas disposition towards a practice, for instance, is a theoretical core concept of Bourdieusian habitus theory, and interests and preferences towards an object or the choice of a good are central to rational choice theory, systems theory or lifestyle theory, fear seems to be merely added to the already elaborated theoretical models or simply treated as the logical inverse of a positively connoted disposition, interest or preference.³ Nevertheless, fears are certainly just as constitutive for actors’ identities, for their practices, communications and societal relations, as their ‘positive’ counterparts are, and, as we have argued, fear can have its own logic in organising practices and communication. It is important to note that fear towards an object (say maths) is not simply a symmetrical inversion of being positively interested in that object. As relational sociology can teach us, fear towards an object will be embedded in entirely different social, cognitive and meaning structures than its positive counterpart. The asymmetric relation between fearing an object versus desiring this object corresponds to a set of differences such as between the habitual traits of those who actively choose statistics in their study programmes and those who try to avoid statistics. It can be assumed that the two groups differ in many regards, but not necessarily in a symmetrical way; in other words, one cannot simply assume that the group of maths lovers would be highly educated while the group of maths-fearers would have a low level of education.

Nevertheless, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ forces can form complex interrelations; for instance, interest can create fear (for example, a love interest can be perceived as a potential source of loss), and fear can become an object of desire. In the simplest case, one may think of the thrill – that is, the gain of pleasure through fear (Balint, 1959; see also Lyng, 2005 and Zinn, 2015 for voluntary risk taking) – or the pleasure experienced when formerly threatening fears appear controllable. Thus, any sociological theory that puts ‘positive’ orientations centre stage (such as habitus theory, rational choice theories and interactional theories) may profit from symmetrically incorporating their ‘negative’ counterparts. Among other things, this implies that the formation of fears in socialisation processes and later in the lifecourse is given the same attention as the formation of preferences and interests.

Reduction of fear to its dysfunctional aspects

A particular limitation that results from the previous points is the focus on fear in its dysfunctional sense. Not only media and political but also scientific accounts tend to focus on the level of the subject and its pathologies or on specific groups whose fears seem likely to jeopardise the integration and functionality of society. Usually, the consequences of fears are reduced to harmful dimensions and, more general, societal problems.

Yet, from the perspective of a general sociology of fear, we must also inquire into the possible functional implications of fear. In the context of socially productive functions of fear, Schmitz (2019) emphasises eight ideal-typical functions of fear: socialisation, practice orientation, communication, concealment of power relations, legitimation of power relations, the substitution of more direct power mechanisms, (class) structuring of society, production of the symbolic order and social integration. Empirical illustrations comprise, for instance, phenomena of individuals engaging in ‘doing identity’ via claiming certain fears that can be used in boundary making (Pearson, 1983; Eckert, 2019). Proclaiming fears can also serve as a rhetorical device to make one’s position and requests incontestable (Luhmann, 1989; Eckert, 2019). Beyond that, the subjects’ fears can be functional in a societal sense. Gill and Burrow (2018), for example, have shown how fears contribute to processes of institutional reproduction and stability in the field of haute cuisine. This insight into the social functionality of fear can already be found implicitly in Weber’s work (fear of deprivation from goods of salvation can contribute to the emergence of the modern economy) or Durkheim’s writing (fear of the violation of rules is part of societal integration). Furthermore, early ethnographic and anthropological work has highlighted the social integrative function of fear (Hallowell, 1941; Homans, 1941) and its role in stabilising social order (Spiro, 1952). Similarly, in the context of anthropological studies, Elias ([1939] 2000) shows that fears can function as societal transmission paths between geographically or socially distant groups. More recently, Sik (2020) provides a theoretical analysis of how societal integration can be achieved through fear.

Further, societies can be investigated in terms of their respective (for example, cultural) ways and forms of absorbing fears, such as by generating dispositions, world-views, normative regulations, institutions, functionally differentiated fields and so on. In other words, institutions partially owe their genesis and continued existence to the fact that they prove to be suitable for making fears collectively and individually manageable, a functional aspect that may well inspire modern empirical sociology to raise a series of research perspectives.

Consequently, making a case for a general sociology of fear means postulating a neutral and agnostic stance towards the issue of negative and positive, or destructive and productive, functions that might be associated with fear. Given the common focus on dysfunctional aspects, scholars could be inspired by the general sociology of fear as sketched here so that they might pay particular attention to the productive or ‘functional’ effects of fear.

Lack of reflexivity in the observation of fear

Against the background of our previous considerations, one must also note a striking lack of reflexivity in contemporary fear research. First, we contend that scientists’ fears must be put centre stage. The immediate relevance of fear in conducting scientific research has been ingeniously described by Devereux (1967) in his anthropological and psychoanalytic investigation, which attests to how fear is involved in empirical research and the use of methods. Given the uncertainties that accompany direct interaction with research subjects and the affective impact that a concrete encounter with human fates can have on the researcher, social scientists might (largely unconsciously) employ ‘objective’ – that is, distancing – methods to defend themselves against the terrifying effects of fieldwork. Such methodical defence mechanisms, however, come at a price. Since crucial aspects of the social reality under examination are shielded from and by the researchers, their research is distorted. Distancing methods may, for instance, hinder researchers from immersing themselves in their interviewees’ life-worlds and fears so that they only scratch the surface of fear in everyday life (Eckert, 2020). Beyond that, Bourdieusian research sheds light on how the researcher’s position in society (for example, class), fields (for example, science or economy) or in the global social space (for example, a Western background) will structure their dispositions, including fears, and how these can structure their research practices (Schmitz and Gengnagel, 2018). For example, scientific interest in homophobia or lack of concern for the environment can be understood, to a considerable extent, as resulting from the positions of researchers that are associated with specific dispositions (for example, their concern about rampant homophobia or too little appreciation of the environment).

Second, the need for reflexive practice is evident in the issue of defining fear. Social scientists define fear according to their specific positions in society and the scientific field, distinguishing what they do or do not consider to be fear and opposing objectively founded Realangst (realistic anxiety) to merely subjective fears, irrational fears or anxiety disorders. The problem with this is that scientists run the risk of taking their own life-worlds and values as implicit references. This can be seen, for example, in the form of a middle-class bias in fear research: middle-class researchers tend to explore fears against the background of their own political and cultural standards. Thus, the central contribution of social sciences to the problem of the definition of fear lies in revealing existing (realexistierend) social definitions and how these are linked to societal positions. A major requirement for a general sociology of fear, then, is to be reflexive about which actors in which societal positions define something as fear in the ‘actual sense’ or as a ‘legitimate concern’.

Third, scientists tend to overlook their own role in contributing to the fear phenomena they assume they are simply analysing. Luhmann (1989: 127f), for instance, pointed out in the context of the debate on ecological risks that ‘[a]ttempts at a scientific clarification of the complicated structure of the problems of risk and certainty only supply anxiety with new nourishment and arguments’ instead of contributing to more rationalised debates and reduced concerns among the population through rational enlightenment. Fear, in this perspective, is not controllable by merely employing reason: it may sometimes even be exacerbated by scientific attempts at enlightenment. One may only think about the recent COVID-19 pandemic and how scientists daily provided new statistics and communiqués, which sought a rational audience and aimed to rationalise the public discourse, but also fuelled fears for some. Another example of the impacts of researchers on the phenomena they study is the ‘fear of crime’ complex. As Murray Lee (2001) has shown, fear of crime as a relevant social and political topic was ‘invented’ in the 1960s in the US; previously, only the ‘objective’ dimension of crime and crime rates had been of interest. This has led to a self-reinforcing fear of crime ‘feedback loop’ partly detached from the social reality it aims to describe because different stakeholders have picked up on this discourse in their own interests: the media have profited from increasingly employing the fear frame (Altheide and Michalowski, 1999), politicians use it to legitimise restrictive welfare policies (Betzelt and Bode, 2017) or security agendas (Buzan et al, 1998), economic actors refer to ‘security’ as part of their sales argument, and researchers can secure funding when their research is framed as ‘security research’ – even though alternative framings would have been possible or more pertinent – because Western governments have invested in security research programmes. Research in highly politicised contexts that are imbued with fear and (in)security almost inevitably includes ethical dilemmas (CASE Collective, 2006), which renders awareness and reflection of the possible (mis)uses of one’s research a necessary (yet not sufficient) condition.

The general sociology of fear, which we advocate here, thus demands to relate the realm of fear to our own scientific life worlds, ourselves, and the consequences of our actions. Such practical reorientation may be beneficial to science in general (with its public perception and self-image of rationality) as well as for the sociology of fear, in particular. A reflexive sociology of fear may foster a more exact understanding of the breadth of the socially relevant objects of fear, of the above-mentioned difficulties of the work of defining fear and of the intended as well as unintended societal effects of our practices.

The Western gaze in studying fear

The discussion on fear is mainly driven by scholars from Western societies and the Global North concerning their respective social environments, which is a revealing case for the selective perception, acknowledgement and attribution of fear. In this way, the conditions, constructions and experiences of fear in non-Western contexts such as Eastern societies and the Global South are largely ignored (but see Flam, 1998).

Rooted in the thinking of Enlightenment, the Global North runs the risk of an overly rationalised and individualist conception of human actors with ‘unfounded’ fears as their mere irrational counterparts. A widespread approach is to judge people’s everyday fears against scholars’ ‘objective’ assessments of the relevance of the respective risks. Often, lay people’s emotions are considered to result from ‘biased’ perceptions and ‘misperceptions’ of risks, which makes them a site for ‘risk education’ provided by experts (for example, Renn, 2014). While education about health risks, for example, has its merits, such an account falls short of understanding the social logic of fear that can imply culturally shaped rationality. The strict Western separation of rationality from irrationality runs the risk of failing to recognise the rationalities underlying seemingly irrational fears and the relevance such fears can have for everyday practices in non-Western societies.

The focus on Western societies in the study of fear also restricts our understanding of fear in the Global North. The work by Douglas and Wildavsky (1982) on the ‘cultural theory of risk’ illustrates how insights won from assessing fear logics and their respective cultural embeddedness in the Global South can be transferred to Western societies. Initially based on her study of the Lele community in Zaire and then extended to the US, Mary Douglas argued that what people fear does not mirror the most dangerous and deadliest – that is, the most ‘rational’ – threats they face in their respective environments, but depends, to a considerable extent, on the moral world-views of the different social groups and their respective societal organisation (Douglas, 1963; Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982). Thus, insights resulting from anthropological fieldwork (or alternative methodologies) in a society of the Global South can inform our understanding of fear in the Global North and pave the way for theoretical developments and sociological reflections (see Zinn, 2008; Lupton, 2013).

In sum, regarding a generalised sociology of fear, it becomes an urgent and worthwhile task to decentralise Western phenomena and discourses, to systematically assess fear objects in different cultures, to analyse their forms and functions in their respective contexts, and, overall, to increase our efforts in the direction of a comparative sociology of fear.

Division of labour in assessing fear

The last systematic deficit of current research on fear, which we would like to address, is that, so far, the various efforts in this research area are largely unconnected. Notably, fear research is fragmented into the countless individual phenomena that individual (social) scientists investigate, thereby ignoring the interrelation of these different fears. How does fear of crime, for instance, relate to fear in the context of the ‘war on terrorism’ (Altheide, 2018), to fears related to one’s work and social status or to seemingly personal fears such as fear of loneliness (Hookway et al, 2019)? The other extreme is to subsume all possible fears under a catch-all societal diagnosis of contemporary (Western) societies, which leaves little room for detailed empirical analysis and differentiation.

Further, empirical fear research is fragmented into several isolated endeavours such as large-scale quantitative analyses or qualitative in-depth studies. This unfortunate division of labour along methodological dividing lines reflects the general structure of the scientific field with its competing thought styles, and, in the context of fear, blind spots reappear with striking clarity. For example, within the field, there is the separation of long-term historical perspectives and present-oriented research, or the separation of structural preconditions of fear from its subjective dimensions. These separations haunt the sociology of fear to a considerable extent because one side tries to qualitatively capture the meaning level of the actors, while the other side aims to capture the structural level of society. Precisely because of such an established division of labour, the interplay or interpenetration of the inner workings of actors and social structures remain systematically underexposed.

In addition to these substantive and methodological dividing lines, we can observe the development of a largely unconnected body of research areas that deal with fear and related phenomena such as risk perception: for instance, societal diagnoses (for example, Beck, 1992; Bauman, 2006; Bude, 2018); the sociology of emotions (for example, Kemper, 1978; 1991; Barbalet, 1998; Flam, 1998; Kleres and Wettergren, 2017); the sociology of risk and uncertainty (for an overview, see Lupton, 2013 and Zinn, 2008); or the criminological fear of crime research (for an overview, see Farrall et al, 2009). Each of these research strands has contributed to our understanding of fear, but their respective insights do not regularly spread beyond their academic fields of origin. Societal diagnoses, for instance, help us to understand how profound social transformations can contribute to the rise of numerous and diffuse fears. One of its limitations, however, is that the social stratification of fears along the dimensions of power, status, class or gender is not considered sufficiently – which is a core subject for the sociology of emotions and fear of crime research. The sociology of emotions, on the other hand, can tell us a lot about the social organisation and structure of fear but has spawned only a few reflections on the more general level of societal structures.

Because of these different lines of fragmentation, multiple bodies of knowledge on aspects of fear exist, but there are few established ways to create dialogue and mutual learning. In consequence, empirical insights and theoretical contributions from one strand of research remain mostly unknown to other strands of research, which makes our understanding of fear less comprehensive and analytically appropriate than it could be. We hope that this special issue of Emotions and Society can make a modest contribution to the systematisation and integration of the hitherto scattered activities of the social and cultural science research on fear.