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Corey Robin Liberalism at Bay, Conservatism at Play: Fear in the Contemporary Imagination 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 between freedom and fear. From Montesquieu to the Frankfurt School, from Franklin Roosevelt to Burmese opposi­ tion leader Aung San Suu Kyi, fear has been viewed as the enemy of independent selfhood and political decency and has been opposed in the name of liberty, liberal values, the Enlightenment, or civiliza­ tion itself (Montesquieu, 1988; Kant, 1991 [1970]: 54-55; Sidgwick, 1891: 41; Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States, 1961: 235; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 3; Neumann, 1957; Shklar, 1989: 29; Kyi, 1991: 180-85). At the same time, many political theorists have suggested that fear may well be a necessary condition of selfhood and a free society. For theorists like Locke and Burke, fear is something to be cherished, not because it alerts us to real danger or propels us to take necessary action against it, but because fear is supposed to arouse a social research Vol 71 : No 4 : W inter 200 4 927 heightened state of experience. It quickens our perceptions as no other emotion can, forcing us to see and to act in the world in new and more interesting ways, with greater moral discrimination and a more acute consciousness of our surroundings and ourselves. According to Locke, fear is “an uneasiness of the mind” and “the chief, if not only spur to human industry and action is uneasiness.” Though we might think that men and women act on behalf of desire, Locke insisted that “a little burning felt”—like fear—“pushes us more powerfully than great plea­ sures in prospect draw or allure.” Burke had equally low regard for pleasure. It induces a grotesque implosion of self, a “soft tranquility” approximating an advanced state of decay if not death itself. The head reclines something on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently with an inclination to the object, the mouth is a little opened, and the breath drawn slowly, with now and then a low sigh; the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly to the sides. All this is accompanied with an inward sense of melting and languor . . . relaxing the solids of the whole system. But when we imagine the prospect of “pain and terror,” Burke added, we experience a “delightful horror,” the “strongest of all passions.” W ithout fear, we are passive; with it, we are roused to “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (Locke, 1959,11.20.6,10; 11.21.34: 304-5, 334; Burke, 1990: 32, 36, 123, 135-36). At the political level, modern theorists have argued that fear is a spur to civic vitality and moral renewal, perhaps even a source of public freedom. Writing in the wake of the French Revolution, Tocqueville bemoaned the lethargy of modern democracy. With its free-wheeling antimonianism and social mobility, democratic society “inevitably ener­ vates the soul, and relaxing the springs of the will, prepares a people for bondage. Then not only will they let their freedom be taken from them, but often they actually hand it over themselves” (Tocqueville, 928 social research 1969:444). Lacking confidence in the traditional truths of God and king, Tocqueville believed that democracies might find a renewed confidence in the experience of fear, which could activate and ground a commit­ ment to public freedom. “Fear,” he wrote in a note to himself, “must be put to work on behalf of liberty,” or, as he put it in Democracy in America, “Let us, then, look forward to the future with that salutary fear which makes men keep watch and ward for freedom, and not with that flabby, idle terror which makes men’s hearts sink and enervates them ” (cited in Lamberti, 1989: 229; Tocqueville, 1969: 702). Armed with fear, democracy would be fortified against not only external and domestic enemies but also the inner tendency, the native desire, to dissolve into...

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