Collective Fear and Societal Change

Political tensions are immersed in emotions of every kind: primary, secondary, tertiary, moral, negative, positive, self-targeted, other-directed and so on. It is impossible to discern and describe their entirety, as affectivity is inseparable from every aspect of political activity, in spite of the misrecognition of this link on the part of academic political analysis over the last decades or so. Prominent among the emotions of political significance is fear, a basic or primary emotion which has been studied by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and political scientists. Of the voluminous scholarly and lay literature, this chapter addresses three common assumptions: first, fear is an individual reaction to physical or even socio-political threat; second, fear is exclusively an emotion of those in subordinate or weak positions or roles; third, fear is experienced as introjected or extrojected, corresponding respectively to behaviours of flight or fight, subjugation or rebellion.