Over 20 yrs ago, a really important work on "Fear" appeared out of Europe by a Hungarian sociologist [1]. His name Eleme'r Hankiss. This book sat on my shelves for nearly 20 years as well, because when it first arrived, I was looking at it in a superficial way and it seemed that the focus was on a study of fears in human history related to religious, mythological, anthropological, philosophical, and literary arts and tradtions--which included indepth study of fears in jokes, plays, myths, religious beliefs and symbols, housing and cities, shopping malls and rationality etc.
Recently, having pulled it off my shelf, I began to realize what a gem of a socioogical study of fear (which is actually quite interdisciplinary, even transdisciplinary somewhat)--was going on and that the author was creating his own variant theory of fear/anxiety (used interchangeably) to explain the entire civilization process--and, he develops that theory in this book starting with a great synthesis of sociologists and anthropologists writings and how they support his theory but that the major theorists in those disciplines tended not to talk explicitly about fear as core motivator for humanity and civilization but they implied it was so. He discusses this as a problem itself in that fear thus remains hidden more or less when it is so critically important to study and know its massive influences. I agree. I agree. I agree. I and many other fearists have been saying this for decades.
So, Hankiss is no longer alive (died in 2015 in Hungary). He had written a fascinating book also with implications for Fear Studies in 2006 [6], though I have not found a copy to read yet. But this "Fears and Symbols" is more accessible and lays the ground for his critical thinking of fear within the symbolic interactionist tradition of critical theorizing in sociology. He is critical of the psychological schools of thought for often disregarding the social sciences overall and how they have theorized about fear and motivation and civilization processes. Ultimately, Hankiss marks a huge territory of understanding that fear within the social sphere of relations, is always a power in movement and constituted for a longer shelf life. Those are my terms on what happens to fear as it is phenomenologically passed in and through the social symbolic order of knowledge making (and ontology itself). Symbolic Fear in other words is made to last longer on the shelf (shelves) of human experiencing because it has potent creative and constructive (and destructive) capacities that regimes of power in history wish to manipulate--and, that's when history of fear becomes really intriguing and demanding. That's when Fear Study becomes very demanding. Only existential philosophy and psychological or theological discourses on fear really miss far too much information and phenomenological reality, says Hankiss, and I agree--especially with the construct of fear--that is symbolic fear.
I highly recommend this text. And, of course, there are a lot of areas where I think it needs upgrading and improvements, but I would label it a proto-fearist textbook essential to the new Fear Studies I have proposed for decades. From what I can tell, this book is little known around the world nor is it cited by most authors who write and/or theorize about fear.
Notes:
1. Former Director of the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and fomer fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford.
2. His two major books: Hankiss, E. (2001). Fears and symbols: An introduction to the study of western civilization. Central European University Press. and Hankiss, E. (2006). The toothpaste of immortality: Self-construction in the consumer age. John Hopkins University Press.
