IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/rsocec/v72y2014i3p337-353.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Social Ontology of Fear and Neoliberalism

Author

Listed:
  • Mary V. Wrenn

Abstract

Fear is a primal instinct; it is a survival mechanism the evolution of which allowed the early humans, indeed all species to adapt, evolve, and survive. When humans moved into settled communities with more advanced means of production, the nature of fear-much like the nature of social relationships-changed. Once the means of social reproduction were secured, fear became less necessary as a survival instinct and more useful as a heuristic device. Fear evolved. Fear cannot be characterized solely as a socially constructed phenomenon, nor as the instinctual response to personally felt traumas. The growth and nature of fear must be studied as a process that develops under its own inertia, feeding off its antecedent past, and as a phenomenon that is shaped by and in turn shapes its institutional setting. Fear should be understood as both structurally determined and socially transformative. This research seeks to examine the ontology of fear, specifically as it relates to neoliberalism.

Suggested Citation

  • Mary V. Wrenn, 2014. "The Social Ontology of Fear and Neoliberalism," Review of Social Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 72(3), pages 337-353, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:rsocec:v:72:y:2014:i:3:p:337-353
    DOI: 10.1080/00346764.2014.927726
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00346764.2014.927726
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00346764.2014.927726?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Stephan Pühringer & Walter O. Ötsch, 2018. "Neoliberalism and Right-wing Populism: Conceptual Analogies," Forum for Social Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 47(2), pages 193-203, April.
    2. Ötsch, Walter & Pühringer, Stephan, 2019. "The anti-democratic logic of right-wing populism and neoliberal market-fundamentalism," Working Paper Serie des Instituts für Ökonomie Ök-48, Hochschule für Gesellschaftsgestaltung (HfGG), Institut für Ökonomie.
    3. Platsas Antonios E., 2018. "At the Crossroads of Law and Ideology: The Ideology of Law as a Reflection of Social Ontology?," Wroclaw Review of Law, Administration & Economics, Sciendo, vol. 7(2), pages 1-13, December.
    4. Karl Beyer & Stephan Puehringer & Markus Griesser, 2020. "Zwischen Meritokratie und Wohlfahrtschauvinismus," ICAE Working Papers 109, Johannes Kepler University, Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:rsocec:v:72:y:2014:i:3:p:337-353. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RRSE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.