How have we come to depend so greatly on the words terror and terrorism to describe broad categories of violence? David Simpson offers here a philology of terror, tracking the concept's long, complicated history across literature, philosophy, politic...

In our post-9/11 world, the figure of the stranger – the foreigner, the enemy, the unknown visitor – carries a particular urgency, and the force of language used to describe those who are "different" has become particularly strong. But arguments abou...