Pandemics, Politics, and Society

This volume is an important contribution to our understanding of global pandemics in general and Covid-19 in particular. It brings together the reflections of leading social and political scientists who are interested in the implications and significance of the current crisis for politics and society.

The chapters provide both analysis of the social and political dimensions of the Coronavirus pandemic and historical contextualization as well as perspectives beyond the crisis. The volume seeks to focus on Covid-19 not simply as the terrain of epidemiology or public health, but as raising fundamental questions about the nature of social, economic and political processes. The problems of contemporary societies have become intensified as a result of the pandemic. Understanding the pandemic is as much a sociological question as it is a biological one, since viral infections are transmitted through social interaction. In many ways, the pandemic poses fundamental existential as well as political questions about social life as well as exposing many of the inequalities in contemporary societies. As the chapters in this volume show, epidemiological issues and sociological problems are elucidated in many ways around the themes of power, politics, security, suffering, equality and justice.

This is a cutting edge and accessible volume on the Covid-19 pandemic with chapters on topics such as the nature and limits of expertise, democratization, emergency government, digitalization, social justice, globalization, capitalist crisis, and the ecological crisis.

Contents

Notes on Contributors

Preface

Gerard Delanty

1. Introduction: The Pandemic in Historical and Global Context

Part 1 Politics, Experts and the State

Claus Offe

2. Corona Pandemic Policy: Exploratory Notes on its 'Epistemic Regime'

Stephen Turner

3. The Naked State: What the Breakdown of Normality Reveals

Jan Zielonka

4. Who Should be in Charge of Pandemics? Scientists or Politicians?

Jonathan White

5. Emergency Europe after Covid-19

Daniel Innerarity

6. Political Decision-Making in a Pandemic

Part 2 Globalization, History and the Future

Helga Nowotny

7. In AI We Trust: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Pushes us Deeper into Digitalization

Eva Horn

8. Tipping Points: The Anthropocene and COVID-19

Bryan S. Turner

9. The Political Theology of Covid-19: a Comparative History of Human Responses to Catastrophes

Daniel Chernilo

10. Another Globalisation: Covid-19 and the Cosmopolitan Imagination

Frédéric Vandenberghe & Jean-Francois Véran

11. The Pandemic as a Global Total Social Fact

Part 3 The Social and Alternatives

Sylvia Walby

12. Social Theory and COVID: Including Social Democracy

Donatella della Porta

13. Progressive Social Movements, Democracy and the Pandemic

Sonja AvlijaS

14. Security for Whom? Inequality and Human Dignity in Times of the Pandemic

Albena Azmanova

15. Battlegrounds of Justice: The Pandemic and What Really Grieves the 99%

Index

Auteur

Gerard Delanty, University of Sussex, Brighton, Vereinigtes Königreich

Contenu

Introduction
Gerard Delanty

The introduction will set the scene for the volume by discussing the various questions that the pandemic poses for social and political analysis.

Battlegrounds of Justice: what really grieves the 99%
Albena Azmanova (University of Kent, Brussels)

Before the pandemic, progressive forces were mobilising under the banner of fighting inequality. The pandemic, however, has revealed that the scourge of our societies is the generalised precarity the massive economic and social fragility generated by four decades of cuts to public spending. What policies are necessary for a swift change of direction?

Unhinged: Risks and globalisation in a pandemic world
Daniel Chernilo (Santiago, Chile)

This chapter argues that the current Covid-19 crisis can be understood as a crisis of globalisation itself. From the rapid worldwide expansion of the virus to its unprecedented impact on the global economy, this pandemic is likely to be remembered as the most global event in human history yet, as it has put 70% of the world population under similar restrictions of movement, work and education. As it was first formulated in 1986, Ulrich Beck's risk society theory played a visionary role in highlighting the global nature of those challenges that come from the decoupling of politics, culture and the economy. I contend that we have now reached a new stage in this process, as this pandemic has led to the realisation that current globalisation has moved beyond a point of 'decoupling' and has become 'unhinged'. The solution to this global crisis requires more rather than less globalisation. But it will have to be a globalisation of a different kind, one that will no longer be a zero-sum game between the global and the national but will require us to rebalance the dynamics global economy, the role of international institutions and the fiscal position of nation-states.

Donatella della Porta (Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence)

A title and summary is currently not available. The chapter will focus on social movements and democracy in the context of the pandemic.

Six Political Philosophies in Search of a Virus: Philosophy and the Pandemic
Gerard Delanty (University of Sussex, UK)

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 chapterr, I discuss six main philosophical responses to the pandemic, including provocative interventions made by Agamben, Badieu, and iek, Latour on the governance of life and death as well as the Kantian perspective of Habermas on human dignity and utilitarianism. The chapter includes a short discussion of nudge theory. Tipping Points: The Anthropocene and Corona
Eva Horn (University of Vienna) The chapter deals with structural analogies between the complex ecological meta-crisis we have come to call the Anthropocene and the acute crisis we are facing with the Corona pandemic. Instead of trying to pinpoint causal relations between the Anthropocene and Corona, the text focuses on the type of event that is common to both crises: the tipping point, i.e. process that links a long, seemingly slow and incremental latency period to a short and very rapid change within a complex system. In the first part, I examine the different propositions for an Anthropocene starting date as attempts to understand the new geological epoch as a threshold, attempts that each bring the focus to different factors and aspects. Secondly, I describe the structure of tipping points as types of events both in natural and social complex systems. The reason why they are highly unpredictable, I argue, lies in their temporal structure, connecting a long and slow, seemingly linear process to a sudden and radical turning point. An understanding of such tipping points in natural processes, e.g. in climate science, ...