Thoughts on Fear in Global Society

Abstract

effect of their contest: What 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 law, there is neither justice nor injustice, 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 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 assassination 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