The debate that we live in a society of fear has found new points of contact not only with the shift to the right. The more comprehensive conditions of late modernity are also increasingly leading us to devote new attention to fear as a central emotion of our present. The promise of the anthology by Susanne Martin and Thomas Linpinsel, entitled Angst in Kul- tur und Politik der Gegenwart (Fear in Contemporary Culture and Politics), now lies in differentiating this formative status through empirical, cultural-scientific, and modernization- and affect-theoretical additions, that is, through an interdisciplinary perspective on fear. Accordingly, the individual contributions aim at "exemplarily delineating the field of an interdisciplinary social science of fear" (p. 15).