Thucydides was convinced that the study of the Peloponnesian War constituted a phenomenon having extraordinary significance. But in his focus on collective fears experienced by the populations of Athens, Sparta, and other ancillary towns taking part in military conflicts, he may have overlooked, or at least undervalued, a simple behavioral reaction—fear of the individual. Wars typically evoke concepts of balance of power and bandwagoning versus balancing behavior and submission of the weak to the strongest. The contemporary focus is on structural levels of analysis. It comes as no surprise, then, that the individual level of analysis is frequently left out.

Regardless of international relations theories, fear is a primal sensation experienced by individual human beings. In the case of divine intervention, fear can play a constructive role: principium sapientiae timor Domini, the fear of God, is often regarded as the beginning of wisdom. But in interpersonal relations, fear and its related sensations—anxiety, concern, dread, loathing, prejudice, and other reactions leading even to paranoia—appear natural and have both functional and dysfunctional consequences. This study supplements Thucydides’ classification with an asymmetrical addition comprising individual fear.

Understanding Angst

Arguably, the appropriate word to capture individual fear is angst, introduced into English from the Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, and German languages. In the nineteenth century, it was used in translating the works of Søren Kierkegaard and, later, Sigmund Freud, among others. Absent Thucydides’ guidance, let me focus first on these two existential and psychoanalytic approaches.

For Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, Angst (with a capital “A”) is a desire for what one fears. It is also relevant to his conception of original sin. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, written in 1844, was originally rendered in translation as The Concept of Dread.

This is how he approached the concept. Kierkegaard used the example of a man who was standing on the edge of a cliff. When he looked over the edge, he realized there was a chance of falling over it and even felt a terrifying impulse to throw himself over the precipice. This psychological experience signified anxiety or dread because of the freedom to choose whether to throw oneself off or to stay put. The fact of such a terrifying possibility triggered dread, what Kierkegaard called the “dizziness of freedom.”