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Article: Anxiety and social explanation: some anxieties about anxiety.
- Article from:
- Journal of Social History
- Article date:
- March 22, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Journal of Social History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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I. ANXIETY AND SOCIAL EXPLANATION
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 ...