• Complain

Heinz Bude - Society of Fear

Here you can read online Heinz Bude - Society of Fear full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2017, publisher: Polity Press, genre: Politics. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Heinz Bude Society of Fear
  • Book:
    Society of Fear
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Polity Press
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2017
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Society of Fear: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Society of Fear" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

From the rise of terrorism to the uncertainties associated with economic crisis and recession, our age is characterized by fear. Fear is the expression of a society on unstable foundations. Most of us feel that our social status is under threat and our future prospects in jeopardy. We are overwhelmed by a sense of having been catapulted into a world to which we no longer belong.Tracing this experience of fear, Heinz Bude uncovers a society marked by disturbing uncertainty, suppressed anger and quiet resentment. This is as true in our close relationships as it is in the world of work, in how we react to politicians as much as in our attitudes towards bankers and others in the financial sector. Bude shows how this fear is not derived so much from a powerful other but rather from the seemingly endless range of possibilities which we face. While this may seem to offer us greater autonomy and freedom, in reality the unknown impact and meaning of each option creates a vacuum which is filled by fear.What conditions lead people to feel anxious and fearful for themselves and others? How can individuals withstand fear and develop ways of making their fears intelligible? Probing these and other questions, Bude provides a fresh analysis of some of the most fundamental features of our societies today.

Heinz Bude: author's other books


Who wrote Society of Fear? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Society of Fear — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Society of Fear" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Contents
Guide
Pages
Society of Fear Heinz Bude Translated by Jessica Spengler polity First - photo 1
Society of Fear

Heinz Bude
Translated by Jessica Spengler

polity

First published in German as Gesellschaft der Angst Hamburger Edition HIS Verlagsges. mbH, Hamburg, Germany, 2014. This translation from German is published by arrangement with Hamburger Edition.

This English edition Polity Press, 2018

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

Society of Fear - image 2

P. vi: excerpt from The Waste Land from T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 19091962. Reprinted throughout world excluding the US in print format and the world in ebook format by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Reprinted in print format in the US by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright renewed 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot.

Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press
101 Station Landing, Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1953-8

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T. S. Eliot

Preface

If we want to understand a social situation, we must give a voice to peoples experiences. The public today is inundated with data on poverty risk rates, the dissolution of the middle class, the increase in depressive disorders, and declining turnout among first-time voters. But what these findings mean and how they relate to one another remains unclear.

There is no question that changes are brewing in the correlation between social structures and individual attitudes. Cognitive psychologists, behavioral economists, and neurophysiologists are therefore turning their attention to the black box of the self, which now has to mediate between these dimensions without the benefit of traditional paradigms or conventional models. The self-help books that are based on their research tout mental activation programs and physical relaxation techniques.

Sociology can play its hand here if it takes itself seriously as an experiential science. Experience is the source of evidence for empirical research and personal life praxis alike. This experience manifests itself in discourse and is based on constructs. But the point of reference for analyzing blog posts, newspaper articles, medical bulletins, or opinion polls must be the experiences that are expressed within them.

One important empirical concept in society today is the concept of fear. In this context, fear refers to what people feel, what is important to them, what they hope for, and what drives them to despair. Fears reveal the direction in which a society is moving, where the flash points are, when certain groups will mentally withdraw, and how doomsday sentiments or resentment can suddenly proliferate. Fear shows us whats wrong with us. Sociologists who want to understand society today must look to the society of fear.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Birgit Otte, who had the idea for this book, and Sabine Lammers, who edited the text with a steady hand.

Thank you to my wife, Karin Wieland, who saved me from fixed ideas, as always, and to my daughter, Pola, with whom I discussed the major ideas on our shared streetcar journeys.

Heinz Bude, June 2014

Fear as a principle

In modern societies, fear is an issue that affects everyone. Fear knows no social bounds. The high-frequency trader sitting in front of his computer is just as susceptible to anxiety as the deliveryman returning to his depot, the anesthetist picking up her children from kindergarten, or the model looking in the mirror. In its substance, too, fear is infinite: fear of school, fear of heights, fear of poverty, fear of heart disease, fear of terrorism, fear of losing social status, fear of commitment, fear of inflation. And fear can develop along any axis of time. We may fear the future because everything has gone so well up to this point; we may feel fear in the present because we worry about our next steps, since a decision in favor of one option is always a decision against another; and we may even fear the past if we think that something weve put behind us might rear its head again.

Niklas Luhmann, whose systems theory of functional equivalents always provides for alternatives in any situation, views anxiety as perhaps the only a priori principle in modern society about which all members of society are in agreement. It is the principle that applies absolutely when all other principles have been qualified. Anxiety can bring the Muslim woman into conversation with the secularist, the liberal cynic with the despairing human rights activist.

But no one can convince someone else that their fears are unfounded. At most, fears can only be contained and dissipated through discussion. Of course, this requires that we accept the fears of our interlocutors instead of denying them. This is a well-known therapy scenario; recognizing your own fears can make you more open and flexible, so you do not need to immediately react defensively and dismissively when fear comes into play.

Though they are obviously diffuse, the fears currently coursing through the public consciousness say something about a particular sociohistorical situation. Through concepts of fear, the members of a society come to an understanding about the conditions of their co-existence: who moves forward and who is left behind; where things break and where chasms open up; what is inevitably lost and what might yet survive. It is through concepts of fear that society takes its own pulse.

In 1932, on the eve of the Nazi era, Theodor Geiger published a classic work of social structural analysis The Social Stratification of the German People in which he describes a society dominated by fears of displacement, loss of prestige, and defensiveness. He introduces us to the characters typical of the time: the small businessmen with their burning hatred of social democratic cooperatives; the homeworkers with their tiny landholdings who have grown solitary and eccentric on account of their domestic isolation and who tend toward violent rebellion; the young secretaries with their bobbed hair who are threatened by rationalization and who dream of dashing gentlemen. There are also the miners who gain their sense of self-worth by heroicizing the dangers of their profession, and whose unionized collective interests are not so much institutionally organized and class-conscious in nature as they are comradely and professional; the petty bureaucrats who guard their tiny sliver of power all the more jealously and flaunt it all the more eagerly the more their positions are squeezed by pay grades and internal tasks; the army of young graduates who experience a decline in the value of their education, the disintegration of their status, and the exclusivity of the professional world; and, finally, the various characters from the capitalist class, between whom there is no love lost: the large-scale landowners who find capitalisms intrinsic concept of a global economy unpalatable, the

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Society of Fear»

Look at similar books to Society of Fear. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Society of Fear»

Discussion, reviews of the book Society of Fear and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.