We’re publishing an original essay today by Dr. James Alexander, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey, in which he sets out the rudiments of a political theory of COVID-19, drawing heavily on Hobbes’s Leviathan. This is how his essay begins:
Political theorists have been mostly silent about COVID-19, as far as I have seen. There was Georgio Agamben, who, early on in 2020, suggested that what was going on bore out his view that the exception was now the norm. For thirty years or more Agamben has gone on, to great applause from admirers and publishers – he is one of those writers for whom every lecture in Italian becomes a handsomely bound book in English – in a paranoiac metaphorical erudite leftist manner. But now events have borne him out. And since he was willing to say that something bad was going on, we have to give him credit, not only for that – saying so – but also for having worked on a theory which, no matter how irrelevant it seemed in the old days (except, perhaps, to Guantanamo), now has something to say to everyone.
Apart from him there is no one I know of. They continue in conference and on Twitter while the world burns. So I asked myself which of the great political philosophers would have approved of the government-corporation-media response to this novel coronavirus (and the apparently necessary consequence that all discussion, debate or disagreement be suppressed, avoided, deplatformed)? And the answer was bare, to say the least. Plato might come to mind, because he advocated rule by the wise, and because he mentioned “the noble lie”: but the lies told this time around have been ignoble; and, anyhow, it is far from obvious that our philosopher-kings (Whitty, Vallance, Cummings, Hancock, etc.) know what the good is. In addition, Plato was not in favour of extending life by the use of medicine. He might not even have granted citizenship to modellers and behavioural scientists.
Other political theorists could not have approved of the rigmarole of distancing, masks, lockdown and vaccination. Not Aristotle, who was moderate in almost every respect, including in seeing both sides of every question. The polis for him had good reason to be aristocratic, but was also, emphatically, a place in which citizens were equals, so that they ruled and were ruled in turn. Not Augustine, who said that Rome had originated in injustice, and that one should opt out of it and think of oneself as a member of a societas perfecta, a city not of this world, the civitas Dei. Not Aquinas. Not even Machiavelli, despite all the force and fraud, because he was, in the end, a good republican, a believer in vivere civile e politico, civil and political life. Not Locke, of course, the father of liberalism. Not Rousseau, not Kant, not Hegel – not without distortion. Not Burke. Not Paine. Not Bentham. Not J.S. Mill. Not John Rawls. No. They all valued something which would have disqualified them, whether it was truth, tradition, reason, utility, liberty, or justice. Not Marx, of course, since he was concerned with emancipation, and was against alienation. Most modern thinkers, from Heidegger, through Adorno, Schmitt and Foucault to Habermas, have been opposed to technical or instrumental rationality. So it is actually quite hard to think of a theorist of this brave new world.
The only obvious candidate is Hobbes…
Worth reading in full.
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Piers Morgan?
Well, I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.
And it ain’t any of this New Normal…
Green ideology has been taught, virtually unopposed for decades.
Lockdown is green ideology, repackaged communism/fascism, put into practice.
Indeed. I remember the teacher, when I was perhaps fourteen years old, in my “geography” class, telling us how manmade chloroflourocarbons were creating a huge hole in the ozone layer, over Antarctica.
After a little thought, I raised my hand. I always had to hold it up for some minutes; he (like most other teachers at that school) had grown accustomed to my asking silly questions and he always tried to tire me out.
Eventually, he condescended to point at me. “Yes?”
“When did the hole appear, Sir?”
“…”
He was saved by the bell.
The hole? It’s still there, of course.
I always found it increasingly interesting, frustrating and a little disillusioning that as I left school and entered the world, so many of the things I had been taught as ‘known’ were challenged and changed. We really do know so little about the world and are infuriatingly hesitant to admit it.
The latest series of Veritasium videos on YT are quite illustrating of this point. Amazingly they have proven something, in scale model and life size, that many thought impossible in physics and still a professor bets them $10,000 that they are wrong because his knowledge says so.
For the cost of an open mind, the ability to change ones views and admit a mistake (and also $100 and a few bits of 3d printed model) he could have saved himself the 10k.
Empiricism is a lot cheaper than “An Education” – and “The Educated” don’t like that.
Remember how AIDS/HIV was going to kill everyone (especially the naughty teenagers) who dared to have sex?
You’re confusing “a hole” and “a bigger hole”. The hole has always been there – or for as long as we’ve studied it – but in the 1980s it was expanding at a fast rate, actually reaching places like Puntas Arenas and there was a genuine danger to humans. The reduction in CFCs was a success story as the hole retreated.
Sadly it proved an enabler for climate bollox. People sometimes forget that Margaret Thatcher was an enthusiastic “global warmist” as the new orthodoxy emerged and she saw an opportunity to repeat the success of the ozone hole action. She was a chemist of course, originally. so probably liked the idea of a little more gas having a big effect.
Fun fact
The guy that invented CFCs was also the guy that put TetraEthyl Lead in petrol to prevent engine knocking / damage… But causing subtle brain damage to millions of children ( it’s taken decades for the lead in the air to reduce )
He had polio and invented a system of ropes and pulleys to help himself move around.
He ended up accidentally strangling himself to death in said contraption
In addition to loving that story, I love your mom de plume.
As yes, Thomas Midgley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
(sorry for Wikipedia link)
Hm. Not sure, OKUK. I think you may have fallen for it.
When did we first notice The Hole?
When do we believe the The Hole appeared?
For how long have we been measuring the periodic fluctuations of the shape, size and location of The Hole?
All awkward questions, sorry!
BBC Censors their Own Climate Change Page – Watts Up With That?
Yep
we’re all going to die due to a 1C change in “average” temperature (whatever that is) over 100 years because apparently it’s impossible for things to adapt to that and yet somehow here in London we manage to survive a 46C variance in temperature in a single year.
yes. somehow I manage to walk from the car to the house in winter. 20C variance in 30 seconds
Not Hobbes, Plato, the father of modern totalitarianism
I’m a terrible philistine and ignoramus, so one day I thought I ought to read “The Republic” as everyone raved about it.
The Allegory of the Cave was OK, though it has been done better elsewhere, but most of the book seemed to be an explanation as to why people like Plato should be in charge of everything, with no plausible mechanism proposed as to how these people should be selected. Unimpressive to say the least.
For good reason, both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks taught Plato in schools.
Just got done watching Carnival Row (spoiler alert) , black arm bands in the chambers, opposite political parties joining forces and the pix species being herded into rail cars…
Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor had a similar world view as Hobbes and our current lot of evil politicians and brainwashed people. https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/die-unertragliche-freiheit
This is a brilliant article and new book, which will hopefully be published in English as well.
The author’s topic is how and why the people could change so much over time, so that they became what they are now, namely Linke Spiesser (explanation of the term see second link below).
In Germans case, war guilt exaggerated these reasons and trends applicable to all other nations and people further, making them the most zealous disciples and practicioners of the now fully developed ‘hyper-moral’, which is also behind the Covid responses, of course.
“The buildup of a replacement-moral beyond religion, the deconstruction of strong institutions, role- and lead models and above all the loss of transpersonal certainties of what makes sense are crucial factors for the development of the spiritual surrogate we have now: the hyper-moral.
And with that the open renaissance of neo-marxist politics, disguised as gender-, migration- and climate (and Covid…) programs.
Der Aufbau einer Ersatzmoral jenseits von Religion, die Dekonstruktion fester Institutionen, Rollen- und Leitbilder und vor allem der Verlust transpersonaler Sinngewissheiten sind wesentliche Faktoren für das Entstehen eines spirituellen Surrogates: die Hypermoral. Und damit auch für die unverhohlene Renaissance neomarxistischer Politikansätze, getarnt als Gender-, Migrations- und Klimaprogramme.”
https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/linke-spiesser
https://blogs.transparent.com/german/untranslatable-words-der-spieser/
Really interesting. Nice to see an intelligent look at the politics and philosophy around this.
I’m reminded of the 17th Century Political Theorists who taken to Bedlam Hospital
He was left on a ward for a day to observe
When later asked what he thought it all meant he replied ‘Feck knows’
Henry V Act 3 Scene 2…… we talk and do nothing
MACMORRIS
It is no time to discourse, so Chrish save me. The day is hot, and the weather, and the wars, and the king, and the dukes. It is no time to discourse. The town is beseeched, and the trumpet call us to the breach, and we talk and, be Chrish, do nothing, ’tis shame for us all. So God sa’ me, ’tis shame to stand still. It is shame, by my hand. And there is throats to be cut and works to be done, and there ish nothing done, so Chrish sa’ me,
Beautiful writing. Especially about the masked state, exchanging adoring gazes with its masked citizens.
This fascinating and all but they are literally trying to genocide us.
Coming food shortages in the UK per The Grocer:
https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/supermarkets/food-shortages-now-inevitable-due-to-labour-crisis-industry-warns/657227.article
https://youtu.be/6a9wFLxA-E8
This is not a drill.
no such thing as labour shortages – there’s just low wages
Did you watch the video? This is not just about labour shortages.
I haven’t even told you about magnetic meat yet. Yes, it’s real and extremely serious.
Takes me back to my university days and the dusty copy of Leviathan I have somewhere! Thanks for a brilliant, original essay, James.
Doctor Richard Fleming on all things Covid. Great video. It’s a long one but well worth your time if you’ve not seen it in full.
https://media.livecast365.com/highwire/thehighwire/content/1622927384709.mp4
Is this guy actually legit or a nutter? I’m really surprised no-one else who is on “our team” is finding and reporting what he is.
I do feel in an Augustinian moment or two that it’s better to try to imagine and inhabit a civitas veritatis – a city of truth. I think that’s what many of us are trying to do on this forum.
As for Marx favouring “emancipation” – total tosh. He favoured emanicpation of the working class – as a class – from domination by the bourgeosie/feudal classes. Not the same as wanting emancipation of people.
He didn’t want people to be free any time soon. In fact he wanted (see the Communist Manifesto) all peasants to be recruited into a compulsory rural “army” with military discipline (something Mao and the Pol Pot tried to implement and succeeded in doing so, to some extent). Nearly all the major Marxist/Far Left groupings have been big supporters of lockdownism because of the damage it is doing to capitalism, the impetus it gives to action by the state, and the way it prepares the ground for further radical action (e.g. destroying our historyand cultural heritage).
The question I have is this: the hour is certainly cometh but where cometh the man or woman for the times? We need a populist charismatic leader to focus people’s resistance.
What needs to be done? (as Lenin was always asking).
The Conservative Party has to be destroyed one way or the other. It has become the biggest single impediment to us reclaiming our liberties. It is a fake party from top to bottom selling itself as patriotic, pro-border, dedicated to people’s welfare, in favour of freedom, supportive of British culture and opposed to “PC nonsense”. But this is all a big lie. This is all bogus. Its actions belie the words.
Only once it splits and a populist faction is able to rebuild a party that is genuinely committed to these things can we begin to reclaim our birthright, when we have a party that supports borders, British culture, economic policies that work for the people not for elites, traditional family values, and freedom not to be jabbed, masked or locked down. Alternatively, if it won’t split, it needs to be destroyed comprehensively at the polls.
I agree with everything you wrote except this:
Dr. Vernon Coleman, Peter McCullough, Dr. Roger Hodgkinson, Dr. Mike Yeadley of this parish, Dr. Simone Gold, Dr. Fuellmich and many more.
The problem is people want a charismatic leader. We ALL need to be leaders in our own lives. No-one is coming to save us. This isn’t a superhero movie. We need to save ourselves.
No.
Thomas Hobbes, is the (often wilfully) misunderstood and much maligned pragmatist, who rationally observed and explained the bloody turmoil of the 17th century in terms of an essentially Contractarian process; an idea also embraced by Rousseau and Locke among others.
His relentless and timeless logic does not so much provide a theoretical basis for this current opportunistic mess (as opposed to an ideological ‘Brave New World’), as explain how (bit by bit) its arrival (indeed periodic re-emergence over the ages, to be more exact) is chillingly inevitable.
Think not only of wars, revolutions and dictatorships but periods such as the precarious post WW2 cold war ‘peace’. In truth Hobbes never went away, but certain periods always threw his writings into much sharper focus.
To now attempt to credit this woefully incompetent wannabe corporate-totalitarian government and its spineless “vaxx-me-&-my-kids-first” subjects as having any sort of underlying theoretical political rationale (beyond opportunism and greed) is wishful thinking. To (all too predictably) pick on Hobbes to provide such a rationale is a downright insult to the great man.
“opportunism and greed” Yup, I think that sums it up pretty well
I’ve never read any philosophy (dreadful philistine that I am), but started listening to the History of Ideas podcast the other day, starting with Hobbes and Leviathan. It did strike me as a very apt description of what was happening today.
Can it not be a theoretical basis despite lack of design? Doesn’t his theory just describe innate human nature?
My point is that Hobbes, and the Leviathan in particular, have always remained relevant in explaining the complex contractual relationship between the State and the people. The book is no more or less theoretically applicable in 2021 as was in any other previous political era – even the supposedly comfortable ones.
The Leviathan is certainly not a handbook for totalitarianism as so many (lazily) try to portray it. When read alongside Rousseau and Locke (the two comparisons I made) it always comes across as refreshingly rational, direct, unaffected and timeless in its analysis (if occasionally uncomfortable); making it easier to transpose to contemporary scenarios when that balance between the State and the people goes seriously awry. This ‘ease of transposition’, however, is not the same as being uniquely theoretically applicable above all others, as Dr James Alexander tries to spin it.
Hobbes dispels the convenient Western myth that democracy can be a universal panacea for the ills of tyrannical despotism, for democracy is just as capable of setting and sustaining (and worse still legitimising) the very conditions for totalitarianism to thrive, as this last 16 months has tragically demonstrated. In this respect his writings are relevant to 2021, but no more so than in explaining the happy-clappy Blair era or Thatcher’s permanent majority for privatisation underpinning a police-led deconstruction of the leftist class narrative.
Great, if depressing, essay. How to convey its meaning – and the truth of its meaning – to virtually everyone I’ll come across today…?
Hancock is an immature arts graduate who was incapable of critical analysis of any data. His to curling adolescent behaviour on video would suggest his major philosophical aims were Fruedian.