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not simply an individual emotion or a personal matter that only exists in the
realm of privacy, but it is also visible at the group level, and it can therefore
play a significant social and political role, such as in terrorism (Burkitt 2005),
in unemployment (Barbalet 1998), in elite circulation (Barbalet 1998), in
consumption (Miller 1998), in politics (Marcus 2000), in social movements
(Jasper 2011), and in economic processes (Berezin 2009).
Although fear has mostly been studied as an individual emotion, recent
years’ research has altered this tradition and found that fear is fuelled politically
and socially by the inadequacies of power structures and sheds light on
individual vulnerabilities (Barbalet and Demertzis 2013). At the social level,
therefore, the object of fear is not primarily manifested in imminent physical
threats, but it is rather based on social inequalities. Fear appears to a greater
extent in those social groups which are in subordinate or vulnerable positions.
David Kemper (1978; 1987), for example, explains the appearance of fear with
the overuse of power and the lack of power.
Emotions can also exist at the epochal level, that is their presence can
define an entire era (Jasper 2006). Many social scientists argue that we live in
an age of uncertainty and fear nowadays. The starting point of the sociology
of risk and uncertainty is that everything which was thought to be secure
and permanent once, lately has become eroded and lost its credit. Therefore,
people have to live their lives without solid foundations and a stable social
framework. Zygmunt Bauman uses the terms of ‘liquid fear’ and ‘liquid
modernity’ to describe this phenomenon (Bauman 2005; 2006). According
to him, in liquid modernity life changes faster than it can become a routine
or habit, and because of this rapid change in our circumstances, we have no
chance of making reliable calculations for the future.
The unpredictability of modernity and the diffuse nature of our fears are
also described in the concept of risk society by Ulrich Beck. The risk society
is not based on knowledge, but on ignorance. Our world is essentially post¬
rational, where the unforeseen side effect is the engine of change (Beck 1998).
One of the symptoms of modernity is the emergence of the precariat social
class, which is rooted in absolute uncertainty. The members of the precariat
mostly try to support themselves from casual work and they do not own
any form of job security that employees and working class have acquired
for themselves in the welfare state era. They are essentially rootless, because
they do not belong to any community and do not have any stable, permanent
form of identity (Standing 2011).
The moral dimension is also an important aspect of fear studied as a social
phenomenon. Until the First World War, fear was fundamentally based on
the moral perception of good and bad things. In other words, people feared
primarily the negative consequences of their inappropriate actions. This
belief was also generated by the fact that the laws of human survival were
mostly embedded in religious stories at that time. However, from the 1920s,
the way of thinking about fear has completely changed, as the intellectual