Abstract
Financial crashes. Authoritarian leaders. Random violence. Downward mobility. This short and attractively presented book provides a welcome and timely analysis of a contemporary society widely characterized by fear, anxiety and insecurity. The reviewed edition is the English translation of Heinz Bude’s original 2014 text. Bude’s work is not widely available in English and this book, in keeping with some of his other writings (Bude & Dürrschmidt, 2010), provides some interesting perspectives to bear on macro-level discussions and concepts. Meta-theories such as globalization often fail to engage with the density of social relations and connections. Society of Fear attempts to provide overall ‘big picture’ erudition that we often expect from social theory, while keeping the narrative grounded in local, personal experience. Bude does this by orienting the book around a universal human emotion or condition – that of fear. Today’s society provides numerous examples to validate the book’s focus and make it powerful and relevant. Fear can be a pervasive element of organizational life (Gill & Burrow, 2017) and Bude’s work invites the exploration of organizational fear in the depth it deserves. Toxic leaders often manage by fear. People can make poor decisions when fearful. Fear can easily take hold in persons and groups, preventing them from speaking truth to power (Kish-Gephart, Detert, Treviño, & Edmondson, 2009).
Bude’s text has an engaging style. Chapter 1 introduces ‘fear as a principle’, in which fear is described as a universal, potentially infinite condition, affecting the high-frequency trader, the delivery driver, the anesthetist and the model (p. 1). Chapters 2 to 4 describe various manifestations of fear among the middle classes in particular, a part of society that ‘seems to be unravelling’ (p. 47). Bude creates ‘cut-out’ characters who experience fear in different ways: a frustrated singleton in search of a companion, followed by an ambitious social climber seeking wealth and status. Both are equally unhappy, unappreciated, vulnerable and fearful. Even if they gain the success and security they desire, they know they face the prospect of no further progress or the panic associated with the prospect of losing everything: ‘the image of fear slowly creeping up the office towers is a fitting one’ (p. 49). Bude writes elegantly about the inadequacy of such bourgeois comforts as ‘yoga classes, coaching sessions, and wellness weekends’ (p. 33). They cannot negate the ever-present feelings of fear. Fear and anxiety can be disproportionate, even groundless, such as the fear of being accused of wrongdoing even when a person has done no wrong (p. 44). In other contexts, fear is more understandably a reaction to really existing threats or risks, or to the general unpleasantness and unease of everyday life. Passages in the book resonate well, for example, with the intensified and increasingly precarious lives of the ‘neurotic academic’ (Loveday, 2018) where today’s universities have become hostile and undemocratic workplaces.
For Bude, a ‘society of fear’ is essentially a high-income country. A particularly important manifestation of fear is the status anxiety created by the recent economic growth of ‘low-income’ countries and the creation of a global labour market that can threaten ‘advanced world’ employment. While Bude does discuss precarious or low-income groups, his focus is mostly on middle-class anxieties. Citing data claiming the global growth of around 80 million new middle-class people per year, he argues that the middle class is growing at a much faster rate in low-income rather than high-income countries, meaning there will soon be more middle-class people outside the G7 than inside (p. 55). Bude suggests that those with lower earnings and status are less likely to experience fear because they have comparatively little to lose. The book briefly explores the drivers of working-class fear, such as automation, poor pay, job insecurity, unsocial hours and physically unforgiving labour (pp. 62–5). While the fear that stalks the middle class seems to be mostly mental and spiritual, working people feel ‘pressure and fear’ in their ‘bodies’ (p. 63). Fear is exhausting. ‘You feel harassed, driven, and attacked’ (p. 70).
From where does all this fear emerge? Why is it so pervasive? Bude’s explanation lies not only in the familiar issues of the competitiveness of global labour markets or the disruption of traditional stores of value. He also points to a more interesting idea of a ‘loss of orientation’ (p. 53). Class or occupational groupings now have less in common with each other as new divisions and schisms break out between region, generation and political persuasion. This discussion speaks powerfully to current developments such as Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of the Alt-Right and nativism (Wendling, 2018). On the other hand, the book does not comment on contemporary conflicts over other forms of identity politics, such as the increasingly fractious debates around gender, sexuality and ethnicity.
Chapters 7 to 11 broaden the canvas. They take in psychotherapy and the self, the condition of apparent ‘rule by nobody’ (even as people become ever more scrutinized by and dependent on the big data analytics of Silicon Valley capitalism), the power of emotions, fear of others and generational differences in social understandings of risk, fear and loss. The ‘rule by nobody’ chapter is perhaps especially interesting to organizational scholars, drawing as it does on Deleuze’s notion of ‘ceaseless control in open sites’ and including some mind-bending discussions of the size of the world’s money supply (apparently the volume of money across the globe was 2,000 percent higher in 2000 than it was in 1970 (pp. 80–1)). Such descriptions of social atomization combined with systemic financial instability are highly reminiscent of the 1990s ‘risk society’ and globalization literatures. Bude suggests that social solidarity has been steadily weakened. We are left to confront fear as an individual, lacking any broader security and solidarity that cohesive social groups might provide.
The book’s theoretical influences are many and varied. It contains regular (mostly passing) references to major figures in philosophy and social theory – Kierkegaard, Luhmann, Reisman, Goffman, Adorno, Parsons, Nietzsche, Dahrendorf – as well as to public intellectuals such as Geiger and C. Wright Mills. The book is essentially a present-day discussion of the ‘society of fear’, based on a rapid run through the intellectual history of fear, insecurity and anxiety. Throughout the book, the emphasis is on illumination, questioning and suggestion, rather than on structures, explanations and conclusions. The closing passages of Chapter 11 continue in this style, mentioning a string of interesting writings and ideas, but offering no real answers. Bude draws on Bakhtin, Mitscherlich, Tillich – even Socrates and Buddhism – but refuses to end his book with any suggestions about where the society of fear is headed, and whether or how fear could be addressed and dissipated.
Society of Fear is certainly an interesting and readable book. Organization Studies readers might note that it does not include a great deal of material on management, organization or work. Some of the specific things that working people dread and resent are mentioned in the text, such as annual appraisals, performance rankings and bogus metrics, but overall there is not much depth on the subject of organization or management. That’s not really the focus of the text. Society of Fear is more a kind of big-picture mood music, a backdrop that could provide useful context for teaching and writing about organization in such anxious, troubled times. There are many avenues in which the discussions of Bude could connect to specific concerns of organizational scholarship, such as wellbeing, dignity and stress; silence and voice; status and security; and the dynamics of organizational power.
While timely and relevant, I wasn’t sure how original the book was. Alongside fear, my encounter with Bude also triggered feelings of déjà vu. I could not figure out the ways in which the ‘society of fear’ might differ from high-profile early 1990s social theory on ‘risk society’ (for example Beck, Giddens, Lash, Bauman). It is not clear how Bude’s account of ‘fear’ is distinct from anxiety, uncertainty or precarity because Bude stops short of rendering ‘fear’ as an exceptional, distinct element of analysis. This strikes me as a missed opportunity. The book could have contained a lot more detail on how risk is entangled with fear. ‘Risk’ implies calculation and rationality, whereas ‘fear’ suggests irrationality and emotion. Focusing on fear could be an interesting way of pushing forward debates on risk, uncertainty and the rapidly growing ‘sociology of quantification’ (Berman & Hirschman, 2018).
I enjoyed reading this book. For a social theory text, I was pleasantly surprised at how quick a read it was, which is testament to the fluidity of the writing style, the short, punchy chapters and the clarity of the translation. But I was also somewhat disappointed by the limited ‘take away’ from it. The German edition pre-dates the electoral calamities of 2016. Feelings of fear have probably been amplified since then, and seem likely to remain very relevant as people in all kinds of occupation (or none) struggle with anxiety and poor mental health while confronting the increasing irrationality, arbitrariness and inequality of contemporary society. For that reason, this book is a very useful and worthwhile discussion of the fog of fear that has descended across Western modernity. In keeping with prevailing senses of hopelessness and uncertainty, it is far too knowing a text to provide its readers with a roadmap for how to escape the fog. This attests to the highly pertinent and instantly relatable ways in which Bude describes the society of fear – he has crafted a fine text that is likely to be a significant reference point for this troubled era. But I couldn’t shift the feeling that the book could have been more ambitious in terms of more clearly elucidating what the ‘society of fear’ really is; where it has come from, how it differs from the ‘risk society’, why fear as a social phenomenon is intensifying so powerfully, and how fear might be addressed, ameliorated, or abandoned.