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.
Author(s): Lee Trepanier
Series: Contemporary Liminality
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 238
City: New York
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
