Winner of the International Psychoanalytical Association's 2023 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Prejudice Award

A Bloomberg Best Nonfiction Book of 2021

A startling work of historical sleuthing and synthesis, Of Fear and Strangers reveals the forgotten histories of xenophobia -- and what they mean for us today.

By 2016, it was impossible to ignore an international resurgence of xenophobia. What had happened? Looking for clues, psychiatrist and historian George Makari started out in search of the idea's origins. To his astonishment, he discovered an unfolding series of never-told stories. While a fear and hatred of strangers may be ancient, he found that the notion of a dangerous bias called "xenophobia" arose not so long ago.

Coined by late-nineteenth-century doctors and political commentators and popularized by an eccentric stenographer, xenophobia emerged alongside Western nationalism, colonialism, mass migration, and genocide. Makari chronicles the concept's rise, from its popularization and perverse misuse to its spread as an ethical principle in the wake of a series of calamites that culminated in the Holocaust, and its sudden reappearance in the twenty-first century. He investigates xenophobia's evolution through the writings of figures such as Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus, and Richard Wright, and innovators like Walter Lippmann, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon. Weaving together history, philosophy, and psychology, Makari offers insights into varied, related ideas such as the conditioned response, the stereotype, projection, the Authoritarian Personality, the Other, and institutional bias.

Masterful, original, and elegantly written, Of Fear and Strangers offers us a unifying paradigm by which we might more clearly comprehend how irrational anxiety and contests over identity sweep up groups and lead to the dark headlines of division so prevalent today.

• We started tracking this book on January 9, 2021.
• This book was $13.48 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 15 times in the past 1,953 days.
• The current price of this book is $9.99 last checked 2 hours ago.
• The lowest price to date was $9.99 last reached on May 16, 2026.
• This book has been $9.99 4 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $15.37 last reached on March 17, 2024.
• This book has been $15.37 one time since we started tracking it.
• This book is currently at its lowest price since we started tracking it.

• Politics & Social SciencesSocial SciencesAnthropologyCultural

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• File Size: 230 KB