Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters: Reflections of Political Theory from Antiquity to the Age of COVID

Description

This book examines diseases and disasters from the perspective of social and political theory, exploring the ways in which political leaders, social activists, historians, philosophers, and writers have tried to make sense of the catastrophes that have plagued humankind from Thucydides to the present COVID pandemic. By adopting the perspective of political theory, it sheds light on what these individuals and events can teach us about politics, society, and human nature, as well as the insights and limitations of political theory. Including thinkers such as Thucydides, Sophocles, Augustine, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Publius, Bartolomé de las Casas, Jane Addams, Camus, Saramago, Baudrillard, Weber, Schmitt, Voegelin and Agamben, it considers a diverse range of events including the plagues of Byzantium and 14th century Europe, 9/11, the hurricanes of Fukushima, Boxing Day, and New Orleans, and the current COVID pandemic. An examination of past, present, and future diseases and disasters, and the ways in which individuals and societies react to them, this volume will appeal to scholars of politics, sociology, anthropology and philosophy with interests in disaster and the social body. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of contributors Introduction: The Politics of Diseases and Disasters SECTION I: In the Time of COVID 1. The Permanentisation of Emergencies: COVID Understood through Liminality 2. World War IV and the COVID Apocalypse 3. Factions and Not Facts: David Hume, James Madison, and America’s Response to COVID 4. Solidarity in Action: Catholic Social Teaching in Response to COVID 5. Hull House: “An Oasis in a Desert of Disease” . SECTION II: Modern Solutions, Modern Problems 6. A Remedy for It: Locke, Plague, and the Two Treatises of Government 7. Disaster, Nature, and Baconian Science 8. Perfectibility, Disaster, and Disease: Rousseau’s Application of the Natural Goodness of Man 9. The Role of “Pestilence” in the Historical and Political Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas 10. Plagues and Globalism SECTION III: God, Plagues, and Empires in Antiquity 11. Saint Augustine and the Politics of Sovereign Charity: Love and Disaster in The City of God 12. On the Uses and Abuses of Disaster for Life: St. Augustine’s Theo-politics of Flood 13. Sophocles’s Philoctetes: Disease and the Interconnected Needs 14. Plague and Empire in Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian War 15. Athens and Oran: Heroisms in Two Plagues SECTION IV: Reflections on Surviving Disasters 16. The Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster of 2011: Fukushima’s Dialogical Negotiations of Identity 17. Capturing Disaster: Redefining Trauma through “Going Ashore” and The Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 18. Hurricane Katrina: Finding Freedom in James Lee Burke’s The Tin Roof Blowdown 19. 9/11 and the Solitary Soul in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man 20. Catastrophe and Community in José Saramago’s Blindness Index