Delouvée, S., Rateau, P., & Rouquette, M.L. (Eds.) (2013). Les peurs collectives. Toulouse : Erès.

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With the participation of Virginie Bonnot, Gérald Bronner, Ewa Drozda-Senkowska, Andréa Ernst-Vintila, Christèle Fraïsse, Toshiaki Kozakai, Silvia Krauth-Gruber, Estelle Masson, Élisabeth Michel-Guillou, Birgitta Orfali, Florian Pacotte, Rafael Pecly Wolter, Adeline Raymond, Jean-Bruno Renard, Jean-Louis Tavani

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Collective fear is not simply associated with "high-level" fears such as terrorist attacks, natural disasters, AIDS or epidemics. It also covers what many academic studies have called the "quiet fears" of everyday life.
This polymorphism of the notion of fear undoubtedly explains the difficulty of theorizing it, particularly in the human and social sciences, which tend to develop and describe those of risk or threat. However, several questions arise: from the small individual phobia (such a particular individual being afraid of ants) to the "big" collective fears (the fear of wild nature for example), how to determine what is the share of one within the other? In other words, is there, in this field, primacy of the individual over the group or the other way around? Is it the "totalization" of individual phobias that creates a fear of small, medium or large groups? Or, on the contrary, is it a collective fear that individualizes into particular phobias, which in turn contributes to maintaining and perpetuating collective fear?
In the tradition of Michel-Louis Rouquette, the authors of this book use the notion of "social thought" as a matrix for an explanatory approach to contemporary collective fears. They propose models (elaboration rules, functioning), analyse the influence of major social factors (social heritage, culture) and the importance of identity issues to understand socially shared fears.