The question of fear – how we perceive it, how it is used, and the responses it evokes, whether they are security-based, immunity-based, or community-based, political, social, religious, or economic responses – has returned forcefully to the center of public and academic debate in the last decades of the twentieth century and has become increasingly decisive in the new millennium. After all, language is not just a means of transmitting information: it is a form of action. Speaking means performing an act, and the words we use affect individual and collective behavior. This is exactly what happens when, both in the public space and in private conversations, we pronounce the word "fear".
Thus, centuries after Thomas Hobbes' reflections – reflections that marked the beginning of modern politics – we find ourselves, in the twenty-first century, once again grappling with the problem of the government of fear. But today something has changed. We are witnessing a profound shift in the very nature of the question: fear, which in modernity had to be neutralized and kept under control by the political order, has itself become the raison d'être of government. It is no longer a fear excluded from the order, but a fear that passes through it and dominates it. The first days of this 2026 bear witness to this dramatically.
The end of the 'post-1989' period has contributed decisively to this change. The illusion of a pacified world, cultivated by those who had enthusiastically announced the end of history, imagining that the victory of liberal democracies, the success of capitalism and a market economy that is now global could guarantee prosperity and even happiness for all, once the Soviet empire collapsed, has faded. On the contrary, in recent decades we have witnessed the introduction of new laws that limit civil liberties in Western democracies in the name of security, the exponential increase in inequality and exploitation and the frightening return of war, of the massacres of populations.
At the same time, the political debate has radicalized, both on the theoretical level and on that of concrete policies. National identity and multiculturalism, secularization and fundamentalism, clash of civilizations and cultural hybridization, freedom and security: these contrasts have contributed to creating a widespread climate of insecurity. A climate that destabilizes the present, because what supports our politics – its representative apparatus – appears for what it really is: an artifice, a curtain that, once torn, allows a glimpse of a disturbing void made of death.
The feeling is that a climate of fear is invading all areas of our lives. And this new "age of fear" risks being even more disturbing than the state of nature from which modernity had tried to escape. It is in fact a more impalpable, more anonymous, less easily localized fear. It is the global fear of terrorism, the disorientation produced by the compression of space and time, the fear of viral epidemics or climate change, the fear of migrants or those who are different: phenomena that have no precise place in which to manifest themselves and which, precisely for this reason, are more difficult to control. The result is a widespread, creeping, deeply distressing insecurity.
To this constellation of fears has been added, in recent years, the return to Europe of a fear that was believed to be consigned to the past: the fear of war. The armed conflict, which has returned to manifest itself on the European continent, has shattered the illusion of an irreversible peace and has reactivated deep historical memories, showing how war is not an archaic residue of history, but an ever-present possibility of the political order. This fear also contributes to redefining the relationship between security, sovereignty and freedom, bringing organized violence back to the center of the European political horizon. The re-emergence of the fear of war in Europe also shows how fear can be transformed into a resource of political legitimacy. In various contexts, it is assumed by governments not so much as a problem to be neutralized, but as a discursive lever to strengthen consensus and justify security policies and militarization of public space, confirming the contemporary trend towards a government of fear rather than a government against fear.
Fear becomes the ordering principle of political action, and the risk is not only a progressive erosion of freedoms, but a structural weakening of democracy itself. Governing through fear means implicitly admitting the inability to offer horizons of meaning, shared projects and credible forms of protection that are not resolved in the mere management of the emergency. A democracy that bases its legitimacy on production and administration renounces its function and is reduced to a defensive, reactive device, devoid of political imagination.
In this sense, the government of fear risks proving to be a double-edged sword: if on the one hand it promises security, on the other hand it exposes democratic institutions to internal attrition, since no power is able to keep indefinitely the absolute promises that fear demands. When security becomes the only language of politics, every failure translates into new fear, and every fear into an even more pervasive demand for control, into a crescendo that ends up crushing the very structures it claims to defend.