Fear of Home Surroundings

How Southey used the word

Robert Southey, the English Romantic poet and essayist, used it in Letters from England in 1808 for a desire, particularly among the English, to leave home and travel. Wanderlust is what he means by it. He puts it down to a certain state of civilisation or luxury, and the examples he reaches for are the summers wealthy people spent at spa towns and seaside resorts, and the vogue for picturesque journeys into wild country like the Scottish Highlands.

Other writers picked the association up, and dictionaries cited it. An essayist of 1829, writing up what he saw after Waterloo, used it as an ordinary word for a familiar national habit. "The love of locomotion is so natural to an Englishman, that nothing can chain him home, but the absolute impossibility of living abroad." No such necessity applied to him, he explained, so he gave way to his own oiko-phobia and spent the summer of 1815 in Brussels. The idea was still working in 1959, when Bothaina Abd el-Hamid Mohamed, an Anglo-Egyptian author, took Southey's concept as the frame for a book about what its subtitle called a literary craze for education through travel.

What the West German usage meant

In West Germany after the Second World War, some commentators used the word for something else entirely, a fear and loathing of housework among women who worked outside the home and were drawn to a consumerist life. Same word, different house, and the object of the aversion is the labour rather than the building or the leaving of it.

How Scruton redefined oikophobia

Roger Scruton, the English conservative philosopher, put the word into print at Boston University in 1993 and gave it its working sense eleven years later in England and the Need for Nations. There it names the repudiation of inheritance and of home. He treats it as a stage the adolescent mind normally passes through, and also as a feature of certain political impulses and ideologies, typically leftist, that espouse xenophilia, a preference for foreign cultures. Xenophobia is the term he sets it against. He also identifies a chronic strain of it loose in the American universities, wearing political correctness as its disguise.

Mark Dooley, writing in Roger Scruton: Philosopher on Dover Beach, locates it in the academic establishment of the West and runs its lineage back through Derrida and through what he calls Foucault's assault on bourgeois society, an assault he says produced an anti-culture with holy and sacred things as its target. Derrida he calls a classic oikophobe, on the grounds that deconstruction blocks the path to the core experience of membership that Western theological, legal and literary traditions satisfy, preferring a rootless existence founded upon nothing. The underlying motif, on this account, is an extreme aversion to the sacred rather than the replacement of Christianity with any other coherent belief. The paradox Dooley identifies is that on this reading any opposition to the Western tradition is to be encouraged even when the thing doing the opposing is significantly more parochial, exclusivist, patriarchal or ethnocentric.

Scruton's usage travelled. American commentators took it up for what they see as the liberal elite's rejection of traditional American culture, and in August 2010 James Taranto ran a Wall Street Journal column under the title Oikophobia: Why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting, aimed at supporters of the proposed Islamic centre in New York. In the Netherlands the politician and writer Thierry Baudet adopted it and wrote a book called Oikophobia: The Fear of Home.

What that adds up to

Four meanings, three of them in use:

• wanderlust, from 1808
• distaste for housework, from the 1950s
• cultural self-rejection, from 1993 onward
• a clinical definition, sitting unused underneath A word with this history is not describing a fear. It is describing whoever is holding it.