ABSTRACT
The second point is that fear is incompatible with social life. On the one hand, sustained fear undermines social relations, so that in addition to being worse than various forms of poverty and deprivation it also contributes to them, by destroying the conditions that make wealth and “commodious living” possible. Fearful people lead “solitary” lives. Alone with their fears, trusting no one, they cannot sustain rewarding forms of interpersonal exchange. On the other hand, the establishment of society offers relief from fear and, in Hobbes’ view, it is to escape from fear that people form societies. The fear of death, he says, is the first of “the passions that incline men to peace” (Ch. 13, para. 14, p. 97). Indeed, and this is the third point, it is only within a stable political society that the miserable condition of unremitting fear can be kept at bay. In addition to being incompatible with social life, sustained fear is the inevitable fate of pre-social human beings.
