the dominant idea was that, as the conference's thematic statement put it, fear was being "encouraged by our government and exacerbated by our media." It was compared with the irrational fear of Communism and the perversions of McCarthyism. It was described as part of a counter-constitutional coup by a radical right. Talks about other aspects of fear — how, for example, it tends to drive out reflective thought with its stimulus of the "lateral nucleus of the amygdala" — mainly served to frame the theme. Mr. Hollander devoted some time to discussing Roosevelt's classic statement that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," but after a while it became evident that "fear itself" was what many speakers wanted to inspire, not just to describe.

Mr. Gore asserted that a "powerful clique" had the run of the White House. We were being ruled, he said, by a president with a "determined disinterest in the facts," who "abused the trust of the American people by exploiting the fears of the American people," and a Republican party that thinks of other Americans as "agents of treason." The "machinery of fear is right out in the open," he said, "operating at full throttle."

This image, which was meant to frighten not a little itself, did indeed galvanize the audience; later in the conference some speakers pushed it in even more radical directions.

Mr. Kateb, an emeritus professor of politics at Princeton, saw a conspiracy at work. He compared President Bush to a "despot." In Chomskyesque fashion he argued that the American government is using its war on terror "to justify the national security state" and feed its economy, and that terrorism is just a stand-in "for a much larger enemy, which is made up of Arabs and Muslims everywhere" who are now being tyrannized in a "racist" and "imperialist" enterprise...There was a reluctance to use the concept of an enemy to refer to anything but domestic political opponents. This is similar to a problem described in Lee Harris's "Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History" (Free Press, 2004), a new book that in its idiosyncratic brilliance and unrelentingly aggressive vision about the war on terror is bound to stir more controversy — and fear — than the New School conference. For we live, according to Mr. Harris, in a civilization with an intellectual culture that is reluctant to take the idea of an external enemy seriously; its enemies, though, have no such qualms.

"We are caught," Mr. Harris writes, "in the midst of a conflict between those for whom the category of the enemy is essential to their way of organizing all human experience and those who have banished even the idea of the enemy form both public discourse and even their innermost thoughts."

For those prepared to accept even some of Mr. Harris's premises, there is nothing to fear but the lack of fear itself.

Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe....They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish....They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the enemy.

"That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn't done enough for yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part -- something that we could correct....

"Our first task is therefore to try to grasp what the concept of the enemy really means. The enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the enemy always hates us for a reason, it is his reason, and not ours."