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Stanley Hoffmann Thoughts on Fear in Global Society IN A WORLD OF COMPETING STATES, FEAR IS A CONSTANT CAUSE AND effect of their contest: “W hat made [the Peloponnesian] war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta” (Thucydides, 1954: 49).' Hobbes, who translated Thucydides, saw in the relations among “kings and persons of sovereign authority” a concrete example of what the state of nature would be in a world of individuals without superior power: the life of man in this state is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”: fear of death is the first of the reasons he gives of the “passions that encline men to peace.” When war prevails, in the absence of common power, there is no law, there is neither justice nor injustice, no property, “no mine and thine distinct”: the two cardinal virtues are Force and Fraud (Hobbes, 1943: 64-65). It is the domination of fear that drives men out of the state of nature, into the Leviathan. But there is no global Leviathan. If I may jump from the political thinkers to my own memories, it is in order to show that fear in the global state of nature is not only what grips abstractions such as Athens and Sparta, or their rulers. I was born at the end of 1928; my mother, a pessimistic Austrian, moved to Nice, France, the following year. My first political memory is the assas­ sination by the Nazis of the Austrian Chancellor Dollfus in 1934; my mother read about it in a French newspaper while vacationing with me in a hotel near Nice—a place where Matisse’s chapel was built 10 years later. I remember her reaction: this means the end of Austria, and a step toward a new war. Indeed, we saw her brothers flee from Vienna to social research Voi 71 : No 4 : W inter 2 004 1023 France in the following years, full of fear about their present and their future. My second memory is also one offear. This time, it was the spring of 1936; we had just moved to Paris, I was on the Champs-Elysées in a bus, and I saw huge headlines in the newspapers: “laguerre pour demain? “ This was the fear provoked by the Rhineland crisis, by Hitler’s destruc­ tion of the Versailles Treaty. In the next big crises, over the “Anschluss” of Austria and the Sudentenland, fear took a veiy precise and unforget­ table form: the voice of Hitler on the radio, threatening his enemies, screaming his grievances, mixing poisonous cocktails of savage warn­ ings and fake promises, the voice of a demonic Erlkönig that injected terror into the minds and hearts of his listeners. The two voices that are still with me, in me, are those of Hitler (I am forever grateful to Charlie Chaplin for having defanged it by derision in The Great Dictator ) and Charles de Gaulle, which called for courage and resistance, promised a great future, and provided hope without concealing the monumental difficulties ahead. Fear and hope; the threat of horror and brutality, and the appeal to freedom and pride—this was going to be the fundamental struggle between 1940 and 1945. THERE ARE MANY KINDS OF FEARS IN THE RELATIONS AMONG PEOPLES and states. More (or more sharply) than in domestic politics, these rela­ tions are manifestations of either friendship or hostility. And the conse­ quence of hostility in a world without a central power is the state ofwar, which, as Hobbes put it (and Rousseau and Kant after him) “consists not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known, and therefore the notion of Time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of w eather.. . . So the nature of war consists not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.”War, thus very broadly defined, is the domain of fear. There is the fear of war, which was so...

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