Fear Across the Disciplines ed. by Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier, and: Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective ed. by Michael Laffan and Max Weiss (review)

In 1780 Jeremy Bentham wrote a private note to himself about the difference between killing an animal and killing a man. He would later famously publish part of this in his Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), noting that animals “are never the worse for being dead,” the sufferings of life being a pain to endure. The other half of his thought on the matter lies buried in a manuscript, even if it later found its way obliquely into his penal ethics. The “Killing of a man is the worst crime that can be committed against man,” Bentham jotted, adding in parentheses, “(Note: why? not on account of what the man himself has suffered who is killed: for that is commonly less than he would have suffered by a natural death).” No, the reason why murder was the most heinous offence against man was “because of the terror which such an act strikes into other men. In this horror other animals are not liable.” Terror thus framed a moral precept, but it could also readily be applied to the functions of justice, whereby the example of terror would deter would-be criminals from doing awful deeds.

The centrality of fear to Bentham’s balancing of the world’s suffering serves as a suitable entry point into these two books on fear, where the primary intellectual task, for the most part, involves the rejection of common assumptions about what fear is, what it does, and what it is for (good or bad). If it strikes the reader as odd that only fear prevented murder from being amoral in Bentham’s view, then the rich unpacking of what fear is, was and might be, across two self-consciously related volumes, will serve repeatedly to astonish. Central to the task of both sets of editors is the demolition of reductive conceptualisations of the emotions in general and fear in particular, whereby assumptions that fear can simply be found in the imprints of the face, the amygdala, the lit-up portions of an fMRI image, or the composite physiology of mammalian evolution are resolutely and convincingly unravelled. There is by no means complete agreement among the twenty authors on display here. Both books are strikingly multidisciplinary. But while Laffan and Weiss’s volume purports to be the historical volume and Plamper and Lazier’s purports to be the interdisciplinary volume, both draw their sharpest critical insights from a rapidly refining and increasingly important theoretical impetus to historicise the emotions.

While the agendas here are similar, the tone struck in each volume is distinct. Max Weiss’s introduction to Facing Fear makes a meaningful plea for a methodological treatment of the emotions by historians in keeping with the kind of critical approach applied in other historical fields. Simple philological accounts of historical changes in emotional lexica give way to cultural and contextual accounts of situated language; the general gives way to the specific; assumptions concerning the familiarity of historical forms are overturned in a bid to render difference accurately and sensitively, without anachronism; in short, historians should do with emotions what they have done with gender, race, ethnicity, culture, and so on. In the process, the “presumed elemental quality of the emotion” put forward by evolutionary and neuroscientists, as well as a raft of psychologists of the universalist school, will slowly collapse under the weight of critical scrutiny.

Plamper and Lazier present a more blistering approach in Fear Across the Disciplines, in which the notions of “basic” or “universal” emotions are struck from all sides. The editors’ introduction neatly forges the diverse approaches of the book’s contributors into a coherent set of levers with which to pry...