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This book is a result of my increasing irritation at the colonization of our life-world by fear. Books motivated by irritation have a tendency to be polemical, and this book is no exception. It is an attack on the tendency to consider practically all phenomena from a perspective of fear. A paradoxical trait of the culture of fear is that it emerges at a time when, by all accounts, we are living more securely than ever before in human history. One of my most important arguments against the culture of fear is that it undermines our freedom. It might seem strange to be writing a book about our living in a culture of fear after having previously written a book about our living in a culture of boredom. The two diagnoses of our present culture as being one of fear and one of boredom respectively would seem on the face of it to be contradictory. If one is consumed by fear, one is not bored. But every life will contain both elements. In the poem ‘Dockery and Son’ (1963), Philip Larkin seems to imply that these two emotions, broadly speaking, sum up human existence: ‘Life is first boredom, then fear.’ Every society – and not least postmodern ones – is characterized by many contrasting movements and phenomena. Two phenomena such as boredom and fear, however, do not simply oppose each other but can also build up under each other. Fear is not simply something we are exposed to against our will; it is often also something we voluntarily expose ourselves to in an attempt to transcend a banal, boring everyday existence. I attempt in this book to unravel what kind of an emotion fear is, what role it plays in present-day culture and, not least, what political use is made of it. The book consists of seven chapters. In chapter One I give a brief account of ‘the culture of fear’, that is, how fear has become a kind of culturally determined magnifying glass through which we consider the world. Chapter Two is an attempt to describe what kind of a phenomenon fear is, and adopts a number of different approaches, ranging from neurobiology to phenomenology. In chapter Three I examine the role of fear in ‘the risk society’ and demonstrate how our attempts to minimize risk contain many irrational aspects. Chapter Four deals with the fact that we often voluntarily seek what is frightening – in extreme sports and entertainment, for example – something that is paradoxical, taking into consideration that we normally try to avoid sources of fear. In chapter Five I take a look at the concept of trust and point out that the culture of fear has an undermining effect on trust – something that in turn increases the scope of fear. When general trust decreases, this has a disintegrating effect on social relations, although fear for its part can also have an integrating effect. This integrating role of fear is central in a number of political philosophies, not least those of Machiavelli and Hobbes, and in chapter Six I look at the role of fear as a basis for political philosophy as well as the political use that has been made of fear in the ‘war against terror’ of recent years. Finally, the concluding chapter asks if there is any way out of fear, if we can break down the climate of fear that surrounds us today. A theme that will only be dealt with to a slight extent is the fear of death in general, as this is such a wide-ranging theme – because it calls for a thorough thematization of our conceptions of death – and must therefore be dealt with elsewhere. Anxiety – or Angst – will also be dealt with just as briefly. An obvious question is: Why write a ‘philosophy of fear’ when it is not so much fear as anxiety that has been traditionally dealt with in philosophy? Since anxiety is in addition ascribed major metaphysical implications, fear would seem to be trivial by comparison. Anxiety is ‘deep’, whereas fear is ‘shallow’. In Roland Barthes’ words we can say that fear would appear to be a ‘mediocre and unworthy emotion’.1 Nevertheless, fear would seem today to have greater cultural and political consequences than anxiety. Furthermore, it is basically rather pleasant to do away with all the ‘metaphysical hand-luggage’ that accompanies the concept of anxiety.