Fear figures prominently in political theory and the theory and practice of international relations. This volume examines fear as a source of political order and fear of enemies as a building block of group identity. Thomas Hobbes is rightly seen as the principal theorist of fear, but the author extends his analysis back to Machiavelli, St. Augustine, Sallust, Thucydides, and Aristotle and forward through Kant and Hegel to Schmitt, Morgenthau, and post–September 11 America.
The author's starting point is “Sallust's theorem” that metus hostilis, the fear of enemies, promotes social unity and its absence discord. He purports to develop a theory of “negative association,” whose fundamental assumption is that “differentiation from outsiders shapes the identities of political groups and their members in fundamental ways” (p. xii). In times of crisis, appeals to the differences between one's group and adversarial others “may be the only way of forestalling their dissolution” (p. xiii). As self-preservation is assumed to be the universal “bottom line” for individuals and social groups, fear of death, when successfully aroused, is the most effective means of building and maintaining group identity.
Of necessity, the readings of so many philosophers in fewer than 200 pages must be brief and somewhat superficial. Some of the interpretations are also questionable. Thucydides is treated as a run-of-the-mill realist and the author buttresses his argument with secondary sources that reflect this orientation. There is no recognition that fear is not a constant in Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War, but becomes increasingly prominent as reason loses control of appetite and spirit in Athens and spirit in Sparta. In the Melian Dialogue, fear is the dominant motive for Athens, although not for the Melian leadership, who are prepared to die in defense of their freedom, just as the Athenians were when they faced the Persian threat. I believe that Thucydides intends us to understand Athenian behavior at this point in the war as pathological. Thucydides and Herodotus alike treat self-preservation as one of many motives, not as any kind of prime directive. Nor do they see fear as a source of Spartan or Athenian identity.
The discussion of Aristotle is equally unsatisfying. His Politics is read to support the claim that defense and security are as central for Aristotle as they allegedly are for Thucydides. His Rhetoric and other works that discuss emotions are ignored, a surprising omission given Aristotle's very different take than many post-Darwinian moderns on the culturally specific nature of emotions and role of the intellect in mediating them.
The general discussion of emotions and fear makes a few genuflections in the direction of neuroscience but utterly ignores a rich corpus of research in social psychology on identity formation and the role played by hostile and negative stereotypes of others. This literature suggests that identities generally form prior to the creation of negative others, that stereotypes of others need not be associated with hostility, and that group identity and the defining characteristics of groups are remarkably fluid. It is remarkable that a political scientist would ignore research findings so central to his topic and take Kant and Hegel's views of the role of others in identity formation not as reflections of their particular understandings and projects, but as established social truths.
The readings of Hobbes, Kant, and Hegel are fairly conventional and unobjectionable as is the seemingly now-mandatory treatment of Carl Schmitt as part of the modern canon. The discussion of Morgenthau is another matter. Evrigenis exaggerates Schmitt's influence on Morgenthau, discounting the latter's reflections on this relationship as self-serving. The two men do share some fundamental assumptions, especially about the role of law, but also about the centrality of power. This is because they were both greatly influenced by Weber and Nietzsche. Evrigenis's attempt to see Hobbes being preserved by the Germans and reentering the American discourse through Morgenthau is overstated. So too is the labeling of Morgenthau as a conservative; his views evolved considerably during his decades in America and he became an early advocate of civil rights and opponent of the Vietnam War. By the 1970s, he considered it the principal task of international relations theory to educate political leaders of the need to accept supranational institutions to cope with the twin threats of nuclear weapons and environmental catastrophe.
Most objectionable of all is the author's treatment of “The Clash of Civilizations?” and the Bush administration's “war on terror” as natural mechanisms for preserving American unity (p. 196). The consequences of the “war on terror” and the invasion of Iraq have been to seriously erode American security and divide the American people in a way they have not been since the Civil War. Here too, the analysis is superficial and makes no use of empirical research, in this case, by fellow political scientists.
The theory of “negative association” is never developed. Nor is collective action – part of the title of the book – ever explored and connected to fear and “negative assumption.” What we have, in effect, is a volume that makes the claim for fear as a central concern of Western philosophers across the millennia, that asserts – contrary to evidence – that hostility to others is essential to form and maintain national identities. Intelligent readings of Thucydides, Homer, Vergil, Nietzsche, James Joyce, and above all, social identity theory from Gordon Allport on, would suggest a different and far more sophisticated take on this all-important subject.
