Corey Robin
Associate Professor of Political Science
Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center
City University of New York
March 10, 2007
The Language of Fear:
National Security in Modern Politics
My topic here is the political language of fear and one of its idioms in particular: security.
There are, of course, other idioms: racism, religion, risk assessment, to name a few. But
security, both national and domestic, is probably the most potent and pervasive. Security is the
one good, theorists agree, that the state must provide.
It has the ability, like no other rhetoric, to
mobilize the resources and attention of the state and its citizens. It has arguably inspired – and,
in the case of nuclear deterrence, certainly threatened – more devastation and destruction than
any other language of the modern era.
It has also provided the single most effective and
enduring justification for the suppression of rights. Why that is so – why has security furnished
what appears to be the strongest reason for eliminating or otherwise limiting rights – is the
specific question I would like to address here.
At first glance, this probably seems like a question that answers itself. When people are
afraid for their lives, they will do anything to protect themselves and their families. And when
the safety of the nation or the state is threatened, it too will do whatever it takes to defend itself.
Limiting the rights of its citizens is the least of it. That is the theory, at any rate, and it is
commonly associated with Thomas Hobbes, whose name is often invoked as the guiding
1
Presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (Chicago, September 2, 2007).
Please do not cite or distribute without permission.
2
For contemporary theoretical statements of this position, see John Dunn, “Political Obligation,” in The History of
Political Theory and Other Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 66-90; Bernard Williams,
In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 3.
3
Even in the case of Stalinist and Nazi mass murder and their accompanying ideologies of anti-Semitism and
Marxism, the discourse of security – of safety, threat, danger – played a major role. See J. Arch Getty and Oleg V.
Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999); Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish
Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press/Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004).
1
Page 1 of 19 
Convention