Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters
Reflections of Political Theory from Antiquity to the Age of COVID
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Book 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.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Lee Trepanier
Part 1: In the Time of COVID
1. The Permanentization of Emergencies: The Case of Epidemics
Arpad Szakolczai
2. The COVID Apocalypse: Doing Your Job in World War IV
Paul Corey
3. Situating Solidarity in the Time of COVID: Disaster, Dignity, and Difficult Decisions in Catholic Social Thought
Jeremiah H. Russell and Michael E. Promisel
4. Hull House and Disease: Interconnectedness, Creativity, and Community
Lorraine Krall McCrary
5. Factions and Not Facts: David Hume, James Madison, and America’s Response to COVID
Jordon Barkalow
Part 2: Modern Solutions and Problems
6. Locke, Plague, and the Two Treatises of Government
Kevin Kearns
7. Natural Science, Disaster, and the Wise Management of Passions in Francis Bacon
Evan Lowe
8. Perfectibility, Disease, and Morality: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s teaching on Modern Science
Benjamin Isaak Gross
9. Acts of God and Acts of Men: Bartolomé de las Casas’s Interpretation of Sixteenth-Century Epidemics
Brian Hamm
10. Plagues and Citizenship: How Disease Changed the Meaning of Political Membership in Ancient Athens, Byzantium, and 14th Century Europe
Jason Wallace
Part III: Love, God, and Plagues in Antiquity
11. St. Augustine and the Politics of Sovereign Charity: Caritas Contra Cupiditas in The City of God
Paul Krause
12. On the Uses and Abuses of Flood for Life: St. Augustine’s Theo-politics of Disaster
Alicia Rolsma Richard Avramenko
13. Sophocles’ Philoctetes: Disease and the Interconnected Needs
Marlene K. Sokolon
14. The Plague in Thucydides’s Account of Civilization
Khalil Habib
15. Athens and Oran: The Loves and Lessons of Two Plagues
Thornton C. Lockwood
Part 4: Past and Present Reflections
16. The Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster of 2011: An Analysis of Fukushima’s Dialogical Negotiation of Identity
Matthew Nall
17. Redefining Trauma through ‘Going Ashore’ and The Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004
Aimee Pozorski
18. Hurricane Katrina: Finding Freedom in James Lee Burke’s Tin Roof Blowdown
Catherine Craig
19. 9/11 and the Solitary Soul: The State of the Person in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man
Michael Buhler
20. The Doctor’s Wife: The Limits of Compassionate Rule in the State of Nature in Saramago’s Blindness
Erin Dolgoy and Kimberly Hurd Hale
Editor(s)
Biography
Lee Trepanier is Professor of Political Science at Samford University, USA. He is the author of Political Symbols in Russian History: Church, State, and the Quest for Order and Justice and Political Science: Concepts, Methods, and Topics, the editor of Eric Voegelin’s Asian Political Thought, and the co-editor of Walk Away: When the Political Left Turns Right and Eric Voegelin Today: Voegelin’s Political Thought in the 21st Century.