R. Cornelli (2019), La paura nel campo penale. Una storia del presente
September 27th, 2019
Reflecting on the intertwining of fear, violence and order as a constitutive trait of modern societies and on the projection of this intertwining in the contemporary world is essential to critically read today's political orientations and choices in the field of criminal law, urban security and counter-terrorism and, at the same time, allows us not to look away from that emptiness of imagination that is linked to the difficulty of thinking differently about the role of politics, which is forced into increasingly narrow and narrow spaces of action.
The contribution intends to discuss, first of all, the results and limits of criminological and sociological research on the subject of the fear of crime. It will then address the theme of emotions and their transformative potential and how fear, from Hobbes onwards (but in fact Hobbes was reading Plato!), has played a crucial role in the legitimisation of institutions. The third topic will focus on current political trends and their impact on the democratic question. Finally, I will focus on the thesis of the imagination gap and the need to put a face to power in order to reposition our emotions in the political arena.
The expected result is to offer a path of analysis that, drawing on different disciplinary contributions, recognises the political and creative nature of fear, understood as an exploratory passion with a specific ‘vocation to “structure” collective relations by giving rise to institutions capable of guaranteeing order’.
The contribution is published in the Quaderno di storia del penale e della giustizia, no. 1, 2024 in La paura