Book – Fear: An Alternative History of the World

Author: Robert PeckhamPublisher: Profile BooksReviewer: Stephen Keim

A glance at the Acknowledgments section of Fear emphasises that a book on the sociological importance of the emotion of fear has been a project in the mind of Robert Peckham for some time. A working interest in anti-Stalinist Russian literature around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union hints at an interest in fear in the service of totalitarianism.

In the Preface to Fear, Peckham tells of an incident in his life that occurred, much earlier, in 1988 when, as a backpacker attending a funeral in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, of a famous world figure, Bacha Khan, Peckham had found himself in a huge crowd which had, suddenly and unexpectedly, found itself in the middle of an armed attack with explosions occurring all around. His own fear in those circumstances had been a matter of much contemplation during the ensuing years.

Peckham’s brother, Alexander, to whom the book is also dedicated, was an environmentalist and organic cider maker. Alexander died of a malignant brain tumour and Peckham wrote his obituary published in the Guardian in May 2022. In the wake, thereof, Peckham would be forgiven for experiencing the fear associated with the mere vicissitudes of life.   

Peckham was testing ideas at workshops discussing Anxieties, Fear and Panic as early as 2012 and, at that time, wrote shorter works on the subject of fear as part of a contribution to volumes of essays on related subjects.

Both in the Preface and the Acknowledgments, Peckham reveals his own thoughts on geo-political matters when he claims the works of his students and friends in engaging in democratic protests in Hong Kong as a source of inspiration for him, forever. In retrospect, I have some difficulty in understanding western government and media praise for those significantly disruptive protests when we, ourselves, jail climate change protestors for momentarily blocking road traffic.

Fear is a universal. Peckham recognises this, citing both Darwin and American psychologist, Paul Ekman. It is not surprising that, across the eras, writers have turned their minds to describing the emotion and documenting its effects and uses. Peckham does an admirable job in collecting a great many such descriptions from different writers and different periods of history.

The history of human kind is one of violence and cruelty and the exercise of power. Those who have exercised power have instilled fear in those over whom they have ruled. The extent to which the instillation of fear has been uppermost in the strategies and tactics used by rulers has varied greatly over time although even the most benign form of government will rely upon fear of the law and its operation as a means of persuading those for whom anti-social actions are attractive.

In the chapter called The Great Pestilence, Peckham identifies a series of catastrophic events in fourteenth century western Europe among which plague and pandemic are important not only for the deaths they directly caused but, also, indirectly, for the social and religious upheavals they brought in their wake chief of which was the Reformation and its resultant fracturing of Christendom.

In Theatre of Power, Peckham uses as his example of fear in the service of absolutism and the divine right of kings, the long reign of Louis XIV of France from 1643 to 1715. Monarchies like that of Louis, according to Peckham, expertly claimed ownership of fear and built its management into the heart of their political calculus.

Other historical foci of fear examined by Peckham include the horrors caused by European colonialism; the excesses of the French Revolution; the slave trade; the First World War and the horrors of life in its trenches; financial disaster as experienced in the Great Crash of 1929;[1] and modern totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

Fear is brilliantly researched and “the alternative history of the world” traversed in each of the chapters is full of interest.

The history is interesting in its own right whether or not conveyed with an emphasis on the extent to which the events described have given rise to terror or the extent to which the actors in those events have manipulated fear to obtain their objectives including the exercise of power and influence.

By the end, however, the reader might reasonably wonder to what extent the careful tracing of the way in which fears have been experienced over centuries yields lasting lessons about the nature of our human existence.

The emotion of fear is such a universal that, instinctively, we tend to understand it remarkably well from an early age.

[1] I read a brief article, recently, that suggested that the rise of Nazi Germany was not caused by the harsh peace of Versailles (as we were taught) but, rather, by the devastation wreaked upon the German economy by the impact of the Crash. See, for example: https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-role-of-economic-instability/.