A (macro) sociology of fear?

Andrew Tudor
Abstract
A proper sociological approach to fear is of both empirical and theoretical significance in understanding late modern society. Normally fear has been explored psychologically, as one of the emotions, but recently a sociology of emotions has begun
to emerge. Furthermore, there have also been attempts to examine fear macroscopically, arguing for the existence of a distinctive culture of fear in contemporary societies. Furedis argument to this effect is explored here, suggesting the need
for a more systematic theorising of fear in its social contexts. Via an analysis of the
elementary characteristics of fear, a model is constructed of the parameters of fear.
This model serves as a guide to the classes of phenomena within which fear is constituted and negotiated. It is also used to further examine the virtues and failings
of culture of fear approaches to fearfulness in modern societies.

In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid.
Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for
a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people,
making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at
least one person. Each of these one hundred and twenty people is afraid
of the other one hundred and nineteen, and all of these one hundred and
forty-five people are afraid of the twelve men at the top who helped found
and build the company and now own and direct it.
Joseph Heller, Something Happened
How are we to understand fear? As Hellers ironic but pertinent observations suggest, fearfulness in varying degrees is part of the very fabric of
everyday social relations. Any sociology, therefore, must find ways of conceptualising fear and examining its social causes and consequences. More than
that, if we are to believe countless television, radio and newspaper discussions
of food scares, medical risks, security failings, urban disorder and looming environmental disasters, that need is pressing. Fearfulness appears to have become
a way of life in modern society. Many of us or so we are told are afraid to
go out on the streets of our towns, at night certainly, but even during daylight
hours as well. Yet staying at home carries its own threats: a whole industry
manufacturing alarms, locks and surveillance mechanisms has been founded
on our conviction that our homes are wide open to dangerous intruders. We
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A (macro) sociology of fear?

view strangers with suspicion and the future with trepidation. Our children are
no longer allowed to walk to school, and the landscapes of fear that we paint
for them are populated not with trolls, wolves or wicked witches, but with paedophiles, satanic abusers, and generically untrustworthy adults. Of course,
none of these fears may be merited. But they have become part of the common
currency of late modern society, and we do not have an adequate understanding of their genesis, their character, or their consequences.
Nor is a better sociological grasp of fear simply an urgent empirical requirement. The concept itself is central, though sometimes silently so, in several of
the general themes that have marked modern social and political theory. Risk,
for example, a pervasive topic in recent sociological thought, presupposes
different senses of fearfulness in the various forms in which it has been theorised (Beck, 1992; Beck, 1995; Beck et al., 1994; Douglas, 1985; Douglas, 1992;
Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982; Giddens, 1990). Similarly with the associated
concept of trust, which has also gained prominence in recent theory, whether
as a constituent of appeals for a more communally oriented or communitarian mode of social life or as part and parcel of an analysis of civility (or the
lack of it) in the modern state (Alexander, 1998; Carter, 1998; Etzioni, 1995;
1997; Giddens, 1990; 1991; Luhmann, 1979; Misztal, 1996; Tam, 1998). Where
risk and trust have been much explored as societal phenomena, however, fear
has remained relatively untheorised.
In this paper I want to examine some of the conceptual problems that
confront a sociological analysis of fear. I shall do so first by reflecting on
an apparently simple situation of fearfulness, hoping to illustrate, no
more, that even in its most elementary forms fear is embedded in a complex
of physical, psychological, social and cultural relations. Then I shall move up
the scale of abstraction to examine two of the most common ways in which
fearfulness has actually been conceptualised: as emotion and as culture.
Finally, in the light of those considerations, I shall explore some of the analytical requirements of a more macroscopically-oriented sociology of fear and
fearfulness.

Feeling frightened
Imagine that you are walking along a forest track, dense undergrowth on
either side, a thick silence emphasising the sound of your own footfalls.
Suddenly, no more than thirty metres in front of you, a large gold and
black striped cat emerges from the forest to halt on the path ahead. It is a
tiger. It stands looking intently towards you, its tail swaying slowly from side
to side. You freeze in mid-step. You experience the physical symptoms of
fear: your heartbeat accelerates; your breathing turns shallow; your mouth
goes dry. Perhaps you break out in a cold sweat. Then, after that frozen
moment of shock, you turn and take flight back down the path from whence
you came.
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Or do you? Although the flight or fight reaction to fear, pace Darwin, has
often been seen as a natural or evolutionary response that we share with
animals, its realisation in concrete circumstances is profoundly conditioned by
situational factors. Perhaps you do not recognise the beast ahead of you as a
tiger, lacking the appropriate cognitive map to identify it as aggressive and
carnivorous. Nevertheless you might still be frightened. This is a large, unfamiliar creature, the behaviour of which you may presume to be unpredictable.
But it is at least conceivable that your cognitive apparatus will be such as to
encourage you to approach the animal rather than flee from it, to indulge
curiosity rather than caution. Or perhaps you are a hunter, appropriately
equipped for just this exigency. Your route down this particular forest track
was chosen in the expectation of this meeting, for the big cat has been following the path on a regular basis as part of a pattern of terrorising a local
village. In a complex social exchange involving reciprocity and moral legitimation, you have been retained to eliminate the threat. Even then, you
may still be experiencing some of those physical symptoms of fear, but the
adrenalin associated with them is now channeled into the concentration of the
hunter face-to-face with the hunted.
Or perhaps you are not alone. Although you are unarmed, you are in
company with those who are. Not hunters, say, but guides, engaged to facilitate encounters in the wild for affluent tourists whose everyday world is a far
cry from this state of nature. The group encountering this solitary tiger, then,
has a culture, a division of labour and a clear hierarchy; it has carried its social
world out into the forest with it. In these circumstances the adrenalin generated by the tigers much hoped for appearance feeds into exhilaration as much
as fear. You are here for the spectacle, secure in the knowledge (as far as you
can be) that you are protected, that the tiger will not cross the intervening
thirty metres without being brought up short by your armed guardians. This
trust, which has been generated in a set of pre-established economic and social
relations (themselves constructed within a larger socio-cultural context), overcomes the fear response. You hold your ground rather than flee; raise your
camera rather than a gun.
All this is no more (or less) than to say that even the most seemingly
straightforward situation of fearfulness is heavily mediated through the physical, psychological, cultural and social environments in which it is located.
Although we can analytically deconstruct the elements of that mediation
and later I shall seek to do so more formally in a concrete situation, they
are inextricably intertwined in a skein of interconnected threads. Out of this
tangle emerges our emotional response, and, in turn, the further actions consequent upon it, for our emotions are, of course, constituent elements in our
actions. In that sense, fear has an important temporal demension, for, as
Barbalet (1998: 155) writes, the object of fear is not adequately conceptualised as a threatening agent who or which should be avoided. Rather the
object of fear is an expectation of negative outcome. Perceived (and thus
socially mediated) danger of a future state of affairs is constitutive of a present
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state of fear, and then that emotion itself may in turn be constitutive of further
danger as it is, for example, in William James (1979: 80) well known account
of the climber faced with the terrible leap whose ultimate success or failure
is as much a function of the confidence or fearfulness that he experiences as
of his physical ability.
This temporal dimension is important, because it extends the range of
phenomena to which the term fear is customarily applied from the superficially immediate physical experience of, say, the encounter with the tiger to
that generated in the larger time-horizon of anticipated states of affairs. This
range is reflected in the differing emphases found in common-sense usages
such as terror and anxiety. But care is required here. It would be a mistake,
though a common one, to view terror as somehow natural and immediate
while anxiety is predominantly social and deferred. Both are socially constituted in similar ways, though, as will become apparent, it is the extended temporality of anxiety which may prove of most sociological interest. For
although all fear is significantly moulded by its socio-cultural environments,
fear experienced and articulated over an extended period is likely to be more
open to socially patterned processes of reinforcement and routinisation, and
it is such sustained anticipation of negative outcomes across time and space
that is the stuff of what we will later discuss as the culture of fear.
Now, of course, we are straying away from the elementary forms of fearfulness and into the domain of what is much more clearly social fear, where
fears relate not to aspects of the natural environment (mediated by the social
though they may be) but to attributes of our and others social worlds. Such
fears, large and small, are significant features of many social situations and
have complex ramifications for the ways in which we live our lives. To examine
this, however, it is necessary to put into some clearer analytic order the elementary features of fearfulness that we have encountered thus far. How, then,
shall we conceptualise fear?

Fear as emotion, fear as culture

Traditionally fear has been understood as one of the emotions (often, indeed,
as a primary or basic emotion) and thus consigned to the tender mercies of
psychology. Contrary to sociologists worst stereotypes, however, that has not
meant that the prevailing conceptualisation of fear, and of emotions more
generally, has been little more than a behaviourist gloss on an emotional
black box. A glance at, say, Izards (1991) textbook or Ekmans and
Davidsons (1994) collection is enough to suggest the considerable variety
of psychologically grounded accounts of the emotions. What the appropriation of the study of emotions by psychology did mean, though, was that for
many years there was little attempt to develop a distinctively sociological
approach to the subject. Of course that was not simply a consequence of psychological imperialism. The mainstream sociological tradition neglected a
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range of what are now recognised as important subject areas, some of them
the body, for example closely related to the emotions. How these lacunae
came about, and how ramified were their consequences, need not concern us
here. Suffice to observe that until the last couple of decades the combination
of psychologisation and neglect meant that sociology remained conspicuously
silent on matters emotional.
More recently the discipline has woken up to the need to understand emotions as something other than a residual category, and various new perspectives have emerged (for a summary see Lupton, 1998: 1038). Unsurprisingly,
many are distinguished by their emphasis on the constructed character of
emotion. In reacting against the perceived reductionism of essentialist
approaches, whether biological or psychological, it was to be expected that
sociology would want to insist upon the importance of human activity in the
social construction and reproduction of emotion. As Harr (1986a: 3) optimistically observed early in the development of such views: the overwhelming evidence of cultural diversity and cognitive differentiation in the emotions
of mankind has become so obvious that a new consensus is developing around
the idea of social construction. A certain evangelism was apparent in the tone
of many of the essays collected in Harrs (1986b) pioneering volume, an
understandable desire to establish the credentials of the constructionist
approach as an alternative to the entrenched views attributed to psychology.
With the passage of time and the growth of research that tone has moderated
somewhat, as can be seen, for example, in the essays assembled recently by
Bendelow and Williams (1998). Indeed, even Harr now appears to subscribe
to a more multi-dimensional approach, at least as that is represented in the
introductory overview to the 1996 sequel to his earlier volume (Harr and
Parrott, 1996: 20). Human psychology is a complex pattern of cultural practices, discursive conventions, and physiological processes, the editors write.
None has priority since each interacts with and shapes the others.
Nevertheless, an element of constructionism must inevitably distinguish a
sociological perspective on the emotions from others more directly concerned
with physiology and psychology. How else could it be sociological? This is not
to suggest that physiological and psychological features have no place in a
sociological discussion; clearly they do. But, whatever other positions it might
espouse, a sociological account must of necessity deal in the socio-cultural
materials and circumstances through which social agents emotions are produced and channelled. There may be, as some have argued, a physiological
substrate to emotional responses. We may, as humans, exhibit certain dispositions which remain a constant backdrop to the culturally variable articulation of emotions in social action. But to inquire into emotions sociologically
is, minimally, to address those structuring and constituting resources which we
utilise in expressing our own emotional states and in responding to those of
others.
Of course, there are strong and weak constructionist cases. Armon-Jones
(1986: 37), for example, makes such a distinction, defining the strong thesis
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as one which claims that for any emotion, including the primary emotions,
that emotion is an irreducibly sociocultural product. The weaker case allows
that there may be a degree of natural emotional response, but still affords
to the socio-cultural domain a significant role in both channelling this affect
and, in some circumstances, in actively constituting it. I have no wish to intervene in the dispute between strong and weak cases, the distinction between
which has, in any case, become increasingly blurred since Armon-Jones
advanced her formulation. However, the strong case does exemplify a key
danger of the constructionist position. As Lyon (1998: 43) observes, wholly
constructionist approaches can obscure our view of the phenomenon of
emotion in the larger sense, that is, the understanding of the importance of
emotion not only in culturally produced and mediated experience, but in
social and bodily agency as conceived in terms of its foundations in social
structure. Because it affords ontological primacy to the cultural materials
through which emotion is socially constructed, the strong case excludes
serious consideration of the complex interweaving of the various parameters
within which emotions function. In effect, it can prove as reductive as the psychological or physiological perspectives against which it was a reaction. And
while the weak case avoids some of these difficulties in as much as it does not
in principle exclude other variables, in practice it often falls back into another
form of reductivism because of its contingent tendency to focus analysis at the
micro level. It is as if the very concept of emotion binds discussion to the
individual in whose person emotions are presumed to be located. Hence, even
a weak constructionist formulation is inclined to ask: in as much as individuals experience this emotion, from what social and cultural materials is it
constructed?
As far as it goes, of course, that is a fair question. Emotions are in certain
respects individual experiences par excellence, and sociological analysis must
recognise that. But it is also essential to think macroscopically, to view particular social formations as conducive to, and reflective of, specific forms of
emotionality. Or, even more generally, to characterise whole societies as
being emotional in distinctive ways in the sense that their members typically
exhibit certain emotional attributes in specifiable societal circumstances. Over
given time periods and in particular socio-cultural contexts, specific modes
of emotionality are widely practised, actively traded upon, and routinely
expected by members of a social collectivity. The so-called outpouring of
grief that the British media diagnosed (and amplified) at the death of Princess
Diana in 1997 is one dramatic instance of such a mode in operation; a transitory phenomenon as it turned out, but one which was at the time both widespread and articulated in specifiable patterns of essentially social activity.
More significantly, however, there are societal modes of emotionality which
are less transitory and, since they are routinised, less dramatically prominent
than the public mourning of a princess. Any culture seeks both to promote
and proscribe certain forms of emotional expression, options which are
realised by social agents in institutionalised modes of social activity. Social
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formations, therefore, are always pervaded by discriminable and culturally

specific modes of emotionality. We function as social beings, as agents, within
distinct emotional climates (Barbalet, 1998: 15961).
Fear, of course, operates in such an emotional climate for, as Scruton
(1986: 10) rightly observes, it is a social act which occurs within a cultural
matrix. A sociology of fear, then, cannot simply be concerned with the operation of the individual emotion of fear. It must examine the cultural matrix
within which fear is realised and attend to the patterns of social activity
routinely associated with it. Nor is it enough to develop a social psychology
of fear of the kind that we typically find in the sociology of the emotions. Fear
must also be examined at the societal level where it may even become the
very foundation of forms of social organization. As many have known to their
cost, whole regimes of domination can be founded on fear.
In the recent sociological literature there have been two extended attempts
to examine fear at this level of generality, both under the rubric of the culture
of fear. One, focused largely on American data, is Glassner (1999), which is
predominantly a descriptive and polemic account of the kinds of phenomena
which he considers to comprise the modern culture of fear. Why are so many
fears in the air, he asks, and so many of them unfounded? (Glassner, 1999:
xi). From road rage to youth at risk, from irresponsible mothers to new
diseases, he charts the rich variety of topics constituted as fearful in the
American news media. His data (notwithstanding a tendency toward rhetorical overstatement) does indeed suggest that there is a real set of questions in
need of analysis here. But the vividness of his descriptions is not matched by
incisiveness in his explanations. While he is clearly right to draw attention to
the complex role of the mass media in generating and amplifying collective
fears, his case is marred by an inadequate and undeveloped mass psychology
in which projection and displacement play key roles. From a psychological
point of view extreme fear and outrage are often projections he writes
(Glassner, 1999: xxvi): we displace discomfort at the shortcomings of our
society onto scapegoats, project our guilt about, for example, leaving childcare to strangers, onto fears about child pornography. Our fear grows, he
says, proportionate to our unacknowledged guilt (Glassner, 1999: 72).
While Glassners study does have virtues his point is well made that unjustified states of fearfulness are often exploited for profit and advancement by
various social groups and organizations it lacks analytic power, proposing
no coherent theoretical understanding. Furedis (1997) Culture of Fear,
however, is more interesting in this respect. He too provides much evidence
about contemporary fearfulness, but he also seeks a more comprehensive
explanation of how this situation has come about. Like numerous other analysts, not least those especially concerned with risk, he is much struck by the
widespread application of the precautionary principle in late modern
societies: the evaluation of everything from the perspective of safety is a
defining characteristic of contemporary society (Furedi, 1997: 4). This cannot
be understood simply as a rational response to growing dangers or as an
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automatic consequence of increased technical knowledge. It reflects, rather, a

moral climate. Perception of being at risk expresses a pervasive mood in
society he writes, one that influences action in general (Furedi, 1997: 20).
We perceive the world as dangerous and expect the worst of other human
beings, lacking trust in established authority and exhibiting little or no faith
in the efficacy of human intervention. In a word, we are in a constant state of
fearfulness.
Now it may be that he overstates the cultural grounds on which this distinctive fearfulness rests, relativising genuinely frightening aspects of modern
life and thus underestimating their real force. Certainly critics of such cultural
constructionism (eg Young, 1999: 70 and passim) would argue as much. But
it would be difficult to deny the proposition that late modern societies have
indeed developed a distinctive and troubling focus upon the fearful and that
this informs wide reaches of contemporary social activity. For Furedi this is
enough to justify speaking in terms of a culture of fear, and his underlying
analytic strategy is to postulate the recent emergence of such a culture, make
certain claims, sometimes implicitly, about the mechanisms through which it
functions, and offer a general account of its social origins.
Let us concede that Furedis (and, for that matter, Glassners) evidence is
such as to merit the hypothesis that modes of fearfulness in late modern
society are usefully described as constituting a distinctive culture of fear. This
can be maintained whatever views we might have about the realism or otherwise of the fears articulated within this culture. But the mere postulation of
such a culture is not enough. It is also necessary to document it systematically
and analytically, and, having done so, ask through what social mechanisms is
this culture effective? Here Furedi is rather less convincing. As his constant
recourse to terms like pervasive mood and moral climate might suggest, his
tacit account is a kind of diffuse cultural emanationism in which it is sufficient
to demonstrate the contours of a culture to show its effectiveness in moulding social action. More specifically, he seems to view the culture of fear as
working broadly on the model of an individual suffering from free-floating
anxiety, whereby a general state of pre-existing anxiousness, however caused,
is made available for subsequent focus on any feature of the sufferers situation. For Furedi, contemporary society is similarly afflicted. The pervasive
mood of fear, he suggests (Furedi, 1997: 20) appears as a free-floating consciousness that attaches itself to (and detaches itself from) a variety of concerns and experiences. He writes of societys disposition to panic (Furedi,
1997: 45) and claims that there exists a disposition towards the expectation
of adverse outcomes (Furedi, 1997: 53).
As a descriptive account all that is not in itself implausible. We can imagine
circumstances in which the resources that a culture provides will, if actually
used by agents in establishing and maintaining their routinised activities,
dispose them toward being fearful. We might even agree that a state of generalised fearfulness appears to shift its focus from time to time and situation
to situation. However, to conceive that process in terms of a free-floating
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consciousness is a form of theoretical short-hand that runs the risk of reifying society (societys disposition to panic) and so concealing the agents activity essential to transmute cultural resources into real patterns of social life.
It does not so much answer the question how is the culture of fear socially
effective? as repeat the assertion that there is a culture of fear which selfevidently impacts upon social action. Let me be clear about what I am saying
here. I think that Furedi is quite right to claim that a culture of fear is a
prominent and important feature of late modern societies. What needs further
examination, however, are the links between such a culture and everyday
activity, and what is needed to understand those connections is both a more
analytically grounded description of the culture of fear itself and, fundamentally, a systematic framework for analysing its relations with other features of
social life.
These Furedi does not provide. His primary project, after all, is to offer a
diagnosis of the ills of contemporary society, and none the worse for that,
drawing together a number of loosely related themes into an argument about
(in the words of his sub-title) the morality of low expectation. The ubiquity
of the culture of fear, he argues, is producing people who are fatalistically
resigned to their circumstances unwilling to take risks and given to celebrating suffering. It is a continuing accommodation to powerlessness. This
analysis has the virtue of directness, obvious relevance to many familiar features of modern life, and critical strength. However, it lacks analytic clarity
and leaves both the sociology of fear and the related analysis of modern
society with more problems than solutions.
Nevertheless, given his vivid descriptions and wide ranging analysis, it
should be possible to build upon Furedis insights with a view to developing
a less culturalist model of the relation between the culture of fear and other
aspects of modern society. But that requires us to give rather more systematic consideration to the analytical elements from which our sociology of fear
may be constructed.

Parameters of fear
There is, of course, a long sociological tradition of classificatory schemes
designed to categorise the factors presumed to be significant in the formation
of social regularities. The tripartite distinction between personality, social, and
cultural attributes, for example, was for many years a fundamental building
block in otherwise diverse social theories, summarising under those three convenient headings an array of features that came to an analytic focus in the
concept of status-role. In its Parsonian variant where the three became
systems the categories were supplemented with a fourth, the organismic,
thus conveniently mirroring at the most macro of levels the two-by-two
classifications around which Parsons built his elaborate theoretical edifice.
However, this history of constant use in the conceptual hinterland of
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structural-functionalism should not be allowed to disguise the more general

heuristic virtues of these categories; many a puzzling situation has been clarified by sifting social, cultural, personality and organismic elements one from
another. And while such distinctions are, in one sense, arbitrary, in that they
draw analytic boundaries where none may exist in the flux of social process,
the very consistency of that usage over the years should remind us of its
genuine utility.
To develop a more ordered understanding of the contexts within which fear
is organised I propose to adopt such a set of categories here, but with two
additions. One, environments, physical and built, is probably selfexplanatory. The other, social subjects, is perhaps less so, concerned as it is
with the fine but important analytic distinction between psychological and
social selves; hopefully that will become clearer in the discussion that follows.
My aim, then, is above all heuristic; to frame the construction of fear in terms
of six analytically distinct classes of variables or parameters. The categories
that I shall use are: environments; cultures; social structures; bodies; personalities; and social subjects. It should be noted that this usage is not conceived
as a neo-functionalist development of the classical Parsonian scheme. It makes
no assumptions about functional relations among the parameters, integrative
or otherwise, does not seek to conceive them as systems, and imposes no
hierarchy of determination upon them. This is a strictly classificatory enterprise, open to a variety of possible empirical configurations.
It is convenient to begin this task with a schematic representation of the
interconnections among these elements. (see Figure 1)
The parameters of fear given diagrammatic expression here are those discursively apparent in the various examples discussed above. The model proposes that the modes in which fearfulness is articulated and experienced are
a consequence of complex interactions among sets of grouped variables. Here
I have distinguished six such analytical groupings, the first set (environments,
cultures, and social structures) macroscopic and structuring in their emphasis,
the second set (bodies, personalities, and social subjects) more focused upon
the contribution of individual agents. Any concrete situation of fearfulness
will involve all six in a variety of possible permutations and combinations. In
the nature of things, however, they must be considered one at a time. Let me
enlarge briefly on each.
1. Environments
Physical environments (and features associated with them, such as tigers,
mountains and storms) are clearly significant, sometimes directly so where the
environment is itself the occasion of danger, more often indirectly where its
attributes may contribute in a variety of ways to the intensity, duration and
character of fear. This, of course, includes the built environment, at which
point the inevitable blurring between the physical, cultural and social is
particularly apparent. Urban streets or multi-storey car-parks may be just as
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MACRO (structure)
CULTURES

SO
CI
AL

EN
VI

P
H
Y
S
I
C
A
L

S
RE
TU
UC
TR

S
NT
E
NM
RO

Modes of Institutional Fearfulness

(constitution)

S
O
C
I
A
L

BJ

IE

BO

EC

TS

(negotiation)
Modes of Individual Fearfulness

PER

S O N A LITIE S

SO

L
IA

MICRO (agency)
Figure 1 Parameters of Fear.
conducive to fear as forest paths, as perceptions of crime risks in our cities
might suggest. But environments as moulders of fear also feature more indirectly than this in the form of perceived environmental threats, be they accidents, unanticipated environmental consequences of human activity, or
merely the result of our increasing ability to identify diseases and dangers and
thus multiply occasions for fear.
2. Cultures
Cultural environments too are of obvious significance in the ways in which we
construct states of fearfulness. In as far as cultures are the reservoirs on which
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we draw to make our everyday lives make sense, then that is as much a matter
of definition as of empirical observation. We are constantly choosing from the
array of attitudes, values, presumptions, stereotypes, routines, memories, ideas
and beliefs that are stored and circulated within and through cultural institutions. If our cultures repeatedly warn us that this kind of activity is dangerous, or that sort of situation is likely to lead to trouble, then this provides the
soil in which fearfulness may grow. Indeed, the very constitution of the ways
in which we experience and articulate fear is significantly dependent upon the
channels of expression made available to us by our cultures. That is particularly apparent where new fears emerge and become widespread in relatively
short periods of time as, for example, with the extraordinary Satanic Abuse
scares of the late 1980s in the US and the UK (La Fontaine, 1998; Showalter,
1998: 17188).
3. Social sructures
What we find fearful, and how we find it so, is deeply dependent upon the
social structures within which everyday life is conducted. The routinised and
repeated patterns of social activity that form our social structures, and the
relations among social actors that they presuppose, impinge on the construction of fear just as they do on every other aspect of human endeavour. Sometimes that may be deliberate, as it is in those authoritarian forms of social
organization most common in police-states where fear is an institutionalised
feature of social divisions and power hierarchies. Often, however, it is more
indirect, when the unanticipated consequences of changing social structures
may generate potential for fear. Social mobility and changing patterns of
kinship relations, for example, produce circumstances in which old people
experience more social isolation with concomitant increased potential for
anxiety about crime (Maxfield, 1984; Hough, 1995) and violence more
generally.
4. Bodies
Individuals, through whom fear as emotion is articulated, often experience
their emotional and bodily states as closely related. In the case of fear there
is a well established physiological pattern of response which, though it may
sometimes be debilitating, may also have various possible consequences in
combination with other aspects of the individuals constitution and with more
general features of the structuring environments of fear. The climber, the
hunter, the practitioner of dangerous sports, learns to channel the physiological response in the service of goal-directed activity. More generally, our awareness of our own bodily attributes will feed into potentially fearful situations.
To put it at its crudest, a 6ft 6in, well built young male in good health is likely
to be less fearful in a potentially violent situation than is an older, smaller or
simply physically weaker counterpart. Gender too will play a part here, as
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may the bodily attributes of ethnic difference, of age, and of physicality more
generally.
5. Personalities
An individual placed in a situation of fear will bring to bear a set of psychological dispositions established in the course of previous experience. Some
types of personality are given to anxiety; some are apparently fearless. Some
exhibit phobic fears of various kinds which in the limiting case may come to
predominate over the other environments of fear. But for the most part
individual personality traits interact with the social, cultural and physical to
generate the specific construction of fear at an individual level. They are a part
of what is brought to bear in the application of agency in human activity.
6. Social subjects
As well as being physical and psychological subjects we are also social subjects. That is to say, a significant element in the cluster that makes up our sense
of ourselves as individuals derives from our social circumstances. We are not
just a certain kind of personality and body; we are also a certain kind of social
being. And our social being our position within the elaborate nexus of structured social interactions will differentially impact upon our modes of fearfulness. Take a structuring pattern such as the life-cycle routines of modern
societies. At different points in the life-cycle (infant, child, adolescent, young
adult, family member, old person, and so on) our propensity to be fearful
differs, as does our perception of the dangers implicit in various situations.
This is not just a simple function of age, but reflects rather the social circumstances in which individuals at different points in the cycle typically find themselves. In our daily lives we move among a whole series of such social positions
derived from different social routines. All of them, severally and collectively,
will influence the character of our potential and actual fearfulness.
As will be apparent from the above, this account is designed to avoid the
temptation of reductionism postulating one or another of the six parameters as dominant. In figure 1 this is the purpose of the circle linking the six
and of the symbolic arrow heads on that circle. Environments, cultures, social
structures, bodies, personalities and social subjects are only analytically distinguishable. In a concrete situation they will mutually modify each others
effects in the elaborate flow of social action. Of course, there may be situations in which one or another might predominate. But that would not be a
product of some pre-supposed ontological primacy; it would be a contingent
consequence of particular circumstances.
As already observed, these parameters can usefully be grouped in terms of
the level at which they contribute to the construction of fear. Three of them
environments, cultures, social structures refer to macroscopic features of
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the fear environment. They are structuring factors to which we, as agents, are
obliged to relate. We may relate to them selectively, of course, and we are
certainly not out-and-out dupes of our environments, cultures or social
structures, but they play a broadly constitutive and trans-individual role in the
construction of fear. They are, as it were, the collective resources on which
agents are bound to draw in feeling fearful. The second group (bodies,
personalities, social subjects) are more microscopic in emphasis, relating to
agency rather than to structure. They provide the bases upon which we as
social agents negotiate the terms of our fearfulness. Our bodily, psychological and social characteristics impact upon the experience of fear, producing
different individual responses to similar situations, or, indeed, individual consistency over time and space in response to different situations. Central to this
conception is an image of social activity in which active agents establish
various modes in which they relate to their structuring environments, and in
which that activity itself is grounded in bodily, psychological and social identity. Fear, then, is a product of interlocking relations between what I have
called the modes of institutional fearfulness (given by the structuring
environments) and the modes of individual fearfulness (deriving from the
formations of individual identity).

Cultures of fear
We are now in a position to return to the analytical limits that need to be set
upon cultural constructionist approaches to fear. Cultures constitute only one
parameter of fear among the six, and, although clearly important, there is no
a priori reason to suppose that their terms will predominate over the other
parameters in constituting fearfulness. In as much as cultures are central to particular modes of fearfulness, they will be so because of their temporal and
socially specific conjunction with the other parameters, not because the very
existence of a particular set of cultural dispositions necessarily leads to fixed
patterns of social activity. In addition, the capacity of agents to choose among
and interpret the resources offered by their cultural environments opens a gap
between the terms of the culture and its instantiation in social activity. We do
not fear X simply because our culture tells us to; we fear it because a concatenation of factors, cultural and non-cultural, physical, psychological and social,
lead us to do so. Nevertheless, as one of the structuring environments of fear,
cultures are an essential starting point for analysis storing, as they do, the terms
in which we routinely give expression to our fears. To explore our cultures of
fear is definitionally incomplete as an account of the societal construction of
fear, but it is nonetheless a vital moment in any such investigation.
Thus far I have been careful to use the plural cultures of fear rather
than suggest that sociology should presume to attend to the culture of fear,
the self-identified focus of Furedis and Glassners studies. The reason for that,
of course, is that human societies, unless they are without any concept of fear
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at all, always have cultures of fear at least in the sense that they provide their
members with the cultural materials out of which fear and fearfulness are constituted. However, the multiplicity of cultural patterns that exist within a given
society may well be inconsistent with each other, and will also be differentially utilised by the various social groups whose property they are. They may
also differ in the social range over which they are effective and in the degree
of specificity with which they identify that which is to be feared. There are a
number of ways in which this cultural variation might be conceptualised, but
for present purposes it is enough to suggest that a culture of fear will provide
resources to agents at any or all of the following three levels.
Descriptions of, and prescriptions about, discrete phenomena that are to
be counted as fearful. In a given society these may appear to an observer
and, indeed, to a member of that society to be ad hoc and disconnected
from each other for example, our cultures may offer us ghosts, poisonous snakes, black cats, and still waters as things of which we should be
frightened without in any way linking those phenomena together into a
general cosmology of fear.
Descriptions of, and prescriptions about, classes of phenomena that are
to be counted as fearful. Our cultures may group together particular sets
of phenomena as potentially frightening, specifying criteria against which
such sets are constituted, and proposing appropriate fear responses. Over
time these classes will change. Although, for instance, there is still in
modern societies some fearfulness surrounding the supernatural, by and
large such fears are deemed unfounded and superstitious in comparison
with what was the case in, say, the pre-modern world. On the other hand,
fears about the hidden dangers of environmental pollution have become
widespread in many western societies in the latter quarter of the twentieth century, although relatively unrecognised before that.
Descriptions of, and prescriptions about, fearfulness in general. As well
as identifying specific phenomena of which we should be frightened, our
cultures may also encourage a general level of fearfulness. When Furedi
(and others) suggest that the precautionary principle has become a
widespread guide to action in modern societies they are, in effect, suggesting that there has been a rise in the general potential for fearfulness
that our cultures are predisposing us to be frightened but without any
necessary focus on specific phenomena. Cultures, that is, may promote a
generalised climate of fear.
How might this tripartite distinction aid us in further developing a sociological approach to cultures of fear? Consider, for instance, the common claim
that recent years have seen the growth of a widespread belief perhaps even
a moral panic that young children are likely to become victims of paedophiles. It would not be too difficult a task to document the expression and
amplification of such a belief in the various news and current affairs media,
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A (macro) sociology of fear?

to find evidence of altered social routines based upon it (changing patterns of

childrens play, stricter modes of transport to school, parental and educators
warnings, etc.), and to find dramatic instances of public concern (policies to
identify convicted paedophiles resident in local communities, campaigns and
demonstrations based upon alleged identification, public violence, etc.). The
paedophile threat, then, could be analysed as a discrete cultural pattern
articulated in a variety of contexts and acted upon by agents in distinct social
circumstances. Those social circumstances would have to be specified, as
would any interactions between the cultures account of paedophilia and the
various other parameters impinging upon the construction of fear. In what
physical environments is fear of paedophile attacks most acute? What kinds
of social subjects are most likely to embrace and act upon such a cultural
predisposition? In what kinds of social structures is such fear most likely to
become a routinised feature of social activity? Under what circumstances will
this fear be articulated in one way rather than another? Answers to such questions, systematically organised in terms of the parameters of fear summarised
in figure 1, would provide the basis for a more comprehensive characterisation of the manner in which fear of paedophile attack enters into the daily
pattern of social life via specific categories of social agents and in empirically
specifiable circumstances.
All that, of course, is focused at the first of the three levels sketched out
above that of discrete fears. But fear of paedophile attack is not merely a
singular element within late modern culture; it is arguably also a member of
a distinctive class of similarly disposed fears. In the last two decades of the
20th century, in Britain and elsewhere, much media and public attention has
been paid to a range of child sexual abuse: systematic abuse in childrens
residential institutions; alleged satanic abuse; recovered memory of hitherto unrecognised familial abuse; priests as routine abusers; and so on (for
summarising accounts see: Furedi, 1997: 73105; La Fontaine, 1998;
Showalter, 1997). The specific fear of paedophile attack, then, draws some of
its cogency for those disposed to act on its basis from its position within a
network of such fears. It is, from the point of view of the accepting agent, yet
another self-evident confirmation of more widespread sexually motivated
exploitation of children by adults. As so often in such cases, the apparent
facts of the matter do not impinge on the plausibility of the mutually reinforcing cluster of fearful beliefs (cf Scott et al., 1998: 693). Thus it was that
participants in the Portsmouth anti-paedophile demonstrations of summer
2000 were widely reported in newspapers and on television repeating the
charge that child abduction was now common. Such claims are not borne out
by the evidence, but their status as part of the larger cultural set of child-abuse
fears lends them additional force. By establishing distinctive classes of fearful
dispositions, our cultures of fear provide us with the materials for closing the
circle of self-confirmation. A publicly articulated and apparently interconnected set of fears constitutes a potentially much more powerful cultural
resource than a single fearful disposition.
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As before, however, and even allowing for agents greater inclination to

accept fears that belong to an already established class, the precise form in
which fears are actually utilised in social activity will depend on the overall
modes of institutional and individual fearfulness. Accordingly, a sociological
analysis would have to examine empirically the interaction of the various
parameters within which culturally articulated sets of fears are realised.
However widespread and however deeply embedded within an extensive class
of such fears, it cannot be assumed that a particular cultural predisposition to
be frightened will uniformly be implicated in social action. Fear of paedophile
attack, although clearly a prominent recent feature in some areas of British
culture, is by no means a universal fear even among parents of young children, and fear on behalf of young children more generally remains unevenly
distributed across the social landscape.
But what of the third level, fearfulness in general? Is there a case to argue
that fear of paedophile attack in the late modern period is not only embedded in a larger set of such child-related fears but is also the product of a culture
which simply encourages anxiety and fearfulness? This is certainly the tenor
of Furedis account in as much as he lays claim to there being a distinctive
culture of fear characteristic of the late 20th century. In documenting his array
of specific fears a range which encompasses all the abuse-related cases mentioned above, as well as a wide variety of others he also suggests that taken
together these fears constitute a significant pattern. Late modern society, on
his account, does not simply specify for us a wide range of things to be feared.
It also encourages us to be fearful across the full range of our activities; there
is, to borrow Furedis metaphor, a kind of free-floating anxiety embodied in
the culture of fear. We are not simply frightened of paedophiles, or of child
abuse more generally. We are frightened per se.
The difficulty with this kind of view lies in establishing what kind of
evidence would compel us to accept that there is indeed such a generalised
culture of fear. Simply to document the considerable range of fears given currency in our cultures is not enough, however striking that may be in itself. We
would also have to demonstrate that late modern conceptions of fear are distinctive in their fundamental character when compared with other periods and
societies, and that this feature of our cultures significantly impacts upon the
constitution of specific fears. In effect, to show that we have developed a new
conception of fearfulness which leads us to find fears for example, widespread fears about child abuse where they would not otherwise be found.
In part, such a case might be mounted on an account of the spread of the language of risk in late 20th century public discourse. In part, also, it would
require comparative and historical analysis. Other periods, both modern and
pre-modern, have attracted attention in terms of the distinctive fears articulated in their cultures. One might consider, for example, the popular cultures
of fear found in 1950s America in the context of invasion anxiety and concerns about the risks of nuclear energy (Biskind, 1983; Jancovich, 1996) or the
well documented history of 17th century English witch trials (Macfarlane, 1979;
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Thomas, 1979). What, if anything, serves to distinguish our culture of fear

from such historic episodes as these?
As it happens, I am sympathetic to the claim that there is a distinctive
culture of fear in late modern societies, and that its proper comprehension is
essential to a macro-sociology of the period. However, it does not seem to me
that this claim has been adequately substantiated in the existing literature. To
do so, as I have sought to show in this paper, we need to refine the theoretical resources that we have available for understanding fear sociologically.
Furthermore, we cannot simply assume that the much remarked diversity and
spread of modern fears is enough to justify their elevation into a distinctive
culture. That, too, will need a more refined and systematic analysis before we
can be justified in speaking of the contemporary world in terms of an all
pervasive culture of fear.
University of York

Received 17 April 2002

Finally accepted 3 December 2002

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Janet Heaton, Steve Yearley, and members of the University of York
Sociology Department seminar for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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