Culture of Fear Revisited

When confronted with events like the destruction of the World Trade Centre, fear for the future is inevitable. But what happened on September 11th 2001 was in many ways an old fashioned act of terror, representing the destructive side of the human passions. Frank Furedi argues that the greater danger in our culture is the tendency to fear achievements representing a more constructive side of humanity. The facts often fail to support the scare stories about new or growing risks to our health and safety. In this new edition Furedi relates his own thinking on the sociology of fear to the thought of earlier thinkers such as Darwin and Freud and to the sociological tradition of Durkheim, C. Wright Mills, Anthony Giddens and others.