Agathos: An International Review of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Nov 2011)
METUS REVEALED. HOBBES ON FEAR
Abstract
Fear is a universal emotion, experienced by everybody. When it becomes collective and social, it can enter into the processes of political imagination, being used for political purposes. This article is a brief examination of the meanings and functions of fear(s) in Hobbes’s thought. Some of his views may be ‘historically’ related to his own time, the Seventeenth Century, and others may be linked and confined to his own theory. However, his reflections on the importance of the perturbatio animi of fear for human psychology, and its impact on human interactions and collective behaviour, are still interesting for us today. The various meanings of fear highlighted by Hobbes (especially in his political works: Elements of Law, De cive, and Leviathan) are here synthetically reconstructed, with particular emphasis on fear as passion, expectation and will, and on fear in his various social aspects: mutual fear and fear of death, which give rise to the political community; fear of punishment and fear for the laws, which help to maintain the State and finally, fear of invisible power and timor Dei, from which religion originates, and the religious power that Hobbes wanted to be held by the State.
