‘The Coronavirus (Covid-19) poses interesting questions for social and political thought. These include the nature and limits of the ethical responsibility of the state, personal liberty and collective interests, human dignity, and state surveillance. As many countries throughout the world declared states of emergency, some of the major questions in political philosophy become suddenly highly relevant. Foucault’s writings on biopolitical securitization and Agamben’s notion of the state of exception take on a new reality, as do the classical arguments of utilitarianism and libertarianism. In this paper, I discuss six main philosophical responses to the pandemic, including provocative interventions made by Agamben, Badieu, and Zizek, Latour on the governance of life and death as well as the Kantian perspective of Habermas on human dignity...
‘If there is a single conclusion to be drawn from these philosophies, it is that the Coronavirus is more than a pathogen that threatens the lives of many people, but democracy is also in danger from the recent experiments with emergency government. These may not result in a permanent state of exception or the suspension of democracy – letting aside the Anthropocene scenario of extreme climate change requiring long-term states of exception – and the solution is not a simple restoration of individual liberty. Perhaps then more significant in the long-term will be new technologies of emergency governance that are now taking shape in large-scale societal experimentation with the technocratic management of populations in rapidly changing circumstances. Governments have acquired considerable technocratic power over their populations, which have been disciplined in the late Foucauldian sense of the term to desire safety over liberty.’
Download here (LSE European Institute, May 2020)
