Anxiety and social explanation: some anxieties about anxiety.
It is the contention that anxiety theory is a widely employed explanatory strategy, but that even its most polished and sophisticated exponents have not felt the need to explore its unspoken assumptions or to justify their reliance on it.
Abstract
Anxiety is invoked as an explanatory device in a wide variety of historical and sociological writing. The general form of such accounts is that the occurrence and timing of some social phenomena is explained by reference to the presence of some elevated state of anxiety which elicits social or political responses by an identifiable group of social agents. I will refer to this form of explanation as 'anxiety theory.' Anxiety analysis takes the general form of seeking to identify an underlying social anxiety or a combination of anxieties which can explain why some specific social response or social action occurred when and where it did. I place 'anxiety theory' in quotes to draw attention to the fact that those who employ this variety of explanatory strategy do not themselves use this label. There is no school of anxiety theorists. Yet it is my contention that it is a widely employed explanatory strategy, but that even its most polished and sophisticated exponents have not felt the need to explore its unspoken assumptions or to justify their reliance on it.