Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters

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. <p>Introduction <b>Part 1: In the Time of COVID</b> 1. The Permanentization of Emergencies: The Case of Epidemics 2. The COVID Apocalypse: Doing Your Job in World War IV 3. Situating Solidarity in the Time of COVID: Disaster, Dignity, and Difficult Decisions in Catholic Social Thought 4. Hull House and Disease: Interconnectedness, Creativity, and Community 5. Factions and Not Facts: David Hume, James Madison, and America’s Response to COVID <b>Part 2: Modern Solutions and Problems</b> 6. Locke, Plague, and the <i>Two Treatises of Government</i> 7.<i> </i>Natural Science, Disaster, and the Wise Management of Passions in Francis Bacon 8. Perfectibility, Disease, and Morality: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s teaching on Modern Science 9. Acts of God and Acts of Men: Bartolomé de las Casas’s Interpretation of Sixteenth-Century Epidemics 10. Plagues and Citizenship: How Disease Changed the Meaning of Political Membership in Ancient Athens, Byzantium, and 14th Century Europe <b>Part III: Love, God, and Plagues in Antiquity</b> 11. St. Augustine and the Politics of Sovereign Charity: Caritas Contra Cupiditas in The City of God 12. On the Uses and Abuses of Flood for Life: St. Augustine’s Theo-politics of Disaster 13. Sophocles’ <i>Philoctetes</i>: Disease and the Interconnected Needs 14. The Plague in Thucydides’s Account of Civilization 15. Athens and Oran: The Loves and Lessons of Two Plagues <b>Part 4: Past and Present Reflections</b> 16. The Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster of 2011: An Analysis of Fukushima’s Dialogical Negotiation of Identity 17. Redefining Trauma through ‘Going Ashore’ and The Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 18. Hurricane Katrina: Finding Freedom in James Lee Burke’s <i>Tin Roof Blowdown </i>19. 9/11 and the Solitary Soul: The State of the Person in Don DeLillo’s <i>Falling Man </i>20. The Doctor’s Wife: The Limits of Compassionate Rule in the State of Nature in Saramago’s <i>Blindness</i></p>