The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures introduced to purportedly contain its spread have wrought an unprecedented global social transformation. Authoritarian measures such as lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the enforced wearing of facemasks, have led to a biopolitical disenfranchisement of human rights and the encroachment of state and corporate directives onto private lives. By supporting these measures, the left has lost sight of its traditional critique of capital, the state, and class society and has instead reinforced existing power structures in the name of ‘saving lives’. In doing so, the left has contributed to widespread suffering, especially among the ‘vulnerable’ groups in society the measures claimed to protect, particularly children, the elderly, and the poor. COVID-19 and the Left explores why the left has departed from its self-understanding as a critical force against state power, unfettered capital accumulation, the digital transformation, biopolitics, and a politics of social discrimination, and instead has largely assumed a stance in line with the neoliberal consensus. In particular, the essays in this collection explore the role of fear, panic, and psychological blackmailing as a tool of domination in late capitalist society and consider whether the left has been a victim, or an active perpetrator, of a ‘tyranny of fear’. Drawing upon approaches from various disciplines and interrogating shibboleths on the left and right, the essays in this volume consider the ideological, sociocultural, and economic implications of the historical rupture that the COVID-19 pandemic presents and instead argue for a counter-narrative to fear and its harmful consequences. This provocative collection will be of considerable interest to those with an interest in the contemporary left and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the onset of the pandemic, progressive opinion has been clear that hard lockdowns are the best way to preserve life, while only irresponsible and destructive conservatives like Trump and Bolsonaro oppose them. But why should liberals favor lockdowns, when all the social science research shows that those who suffer most are the economically disadvantaged, without access to good internet or jobs that can be done remotely; that the young will pay the price of the pandemic in future taxes, job prospects, and erosion of public services, when they are already disadvantaged in comparison in terms of pension prospects, paying university fees, and state benefits; and that Covid's impact on the Global South is catastrophic, with the UN predicting potentially tens of millions of deaths from hunger and declaring that decades of work in health and education is being reversed. Toby Green analyses the contradictions emerging through this response as part of a broader crisis in Western thought, where conservative thought is also riven by contradictions, with lockdown policies creating just the sort of big state that it abhors. These contradictions mirror underlying irreconcilable beliefs in society that are now bursting into the open, with devastating consequences for the global poor.

‘No one till now has written on the coronavirus against a cultural backdrop as vast as this—crossing centuries, continents and disciplines. This small book will outrun all the repetitive details of the pandemic with which we are being regularly bombarded’ ASHIS NANDY ‘Vinay Lal's 3-D analysis of the what and the why of the COVID experience, is a must read for grasping the finer lines of history, culture and literature invisibly woven into the global response to the pandemic’ GANESH DEVY ‘Lal writes with an ease that is a pleasure to read. This book shows how we can see ourselves in the crisis of COVID-19, in the mirrors of our common, shared but unfinished humanity’ SATENDRA NANDAN There has never been anything like the Covid-19 pandemic in history. The world as we knew it has changed and the fury of Covid-19 has unleashed new forces, leaving us with an uncertain future. Though its fatality rate, in comparison with some previous epidemics such as the Black Death and the ‘Spanish flu’ of 1918-20, is strikingly low, and though it follows in the path of epidemics such as HIV, SARS, and Ebola, the coronavirus pandemic has produced outcomes which are altogether unprecedented. There is no other instance where the world was, over three months, brought to a standstill and the global economy shuttered. Most countries imposed a ‘lockdown’ and shut down their borders. In Italy and Spain, old people were left to die; in India, millions of migrants took to the road. In some countries rulers have assumed emergency powers. America, the world’s superpower, has been brought to its knees. The economic impact of the outbreak has been shattering; the environmental implications may yet be monumental. Investigating all these trends and the social, cultural, political, and philosophical aspects and implications of the pandemic, this book evaluates the fate of humankind and the earth in its wake.

During the first years of the pandemic, the political mainstream agreed that ‘following the science’ with hard lockdowns and vaccine mandates was the best way to preserve life. But social science reveals the true human cost of this policy. The Covid Consensus provides an internationalist-left perspective on the world’s Covid-19 response, which has had devastating consequences for democratic rights and the poor worldwide. As the fortunes of the richest soared, nationwide shutdowns devastated small businesses, the working classes and the Global South’s informal economies. Gender-based violence surged, and the mental health of young people was severely compromised. Meanwhile, unprecedented health restrictions prevented participation in daily life without proof of vaccination. Toby Green and Thomas Fazi argue that these policies grossly exacerbated existing trends of inequality, mediatisation and surveillance, with grave implications for the future. Rich in human detail, The Covid Consensus tackles head-on the refusal of the global political class and mainstream media to report the true extent of the erosion of democratic processes and the socioeconomic assault on the poor. As the world emerges from the pandemic to confront new modes of monitoring and control, this left-wing reappraisal of global Covid policies exposes the injustices and political failings that have produced the biggest crisis since the Second World War.

"The COVID-19 response was a collision of politics and public health-a volatile combination that produced predictably bad results. As public-health expertise became a tool for serving political ends, it did more than just prolong a crisis; it left the public-health establishment, like the country, mired in polarization. It was, Sandro Galea argues, a crisis of liberalism: a retreat from the spirit of enlightenment and its reliance on evidence-informed reason above all else. In Within Reason, Galea offers a critical appraisal of public health's capture by the lesser angels of today's society. Across 50 spirited essays, he shows that this is a story much larger than COVID or Trump. The diminishing of US public health is symptomatic of the same insidious social trends that were accelerated under COVID and now pervade the administration of public good everywhere: an intolerance for incrementalism, an intolerance of tradeoffs, an expectation of absolutism and moral purity. Galea challenges this recent intellectual drift while articulating how it has undermined much of the progress of earlier eras. With his trademark incision, he makes a case for a return to critical, unbeholden inquiry as a guiding principle for the future we want-and will have to work in order to achieve"--

From QR codes to stay-at-home orders and mask mandates, the pandemic posed intriguing questions about the nature of political power in a time that is increasingly being classified as marked by democratic erosion, backsliding, or populism, Through a multi-methodological analysis of datasets covering different characteristics of pandemic responses in 54 liberal democratic states, Authoritarian Liberal Surveillance and the COVID-19 Pandemic draws attention to a different set of processes and dynamics. By adopting the theoretical frameworks of authoritarian liberalism and surveillance capitalism, a new explanation of political, economic, and social outcomes that arose over the course of the pandemic is provided in a critical cross-national inquiry. Findings turn attention to a previously neglected set of factors that were behind the emergence of widespread illiberal practices. Many liberal democracies experienced a metamorphosis that arose out of the unfettered implementation of authoritarian liberal economic policy making which merged with previously embedded structures of surveillance capitalism.

This volume is an important contribution to our understanding of global pandemics in general and Covid-19 in particular. It brings together the reflections of leading social and political scientists who are interested in the implications and significance of the current crisis for politics and society. The chapters provide both analysis of the social and political dimensions of the Coronavirus pandemic and historical contextualization as well as perspectives beyond the crisis. The volume seeks to focus on Covid-19 not simply as the terrain of epidemiology or public health, but as raising fundamental questions about the nature of social, economic and political processes. The problems of contemporary societies have become intensified as a result of the pandemic. Understanding the pandemic is as much a sociological question as it is a biological one, since viral infections are transmitted through social interaction. In many ways, the pandemic poses fundamental existential as well as political questions about social life as well as exposing many of the inequalities in contemporary societies. As the chapters in this volume show, epidemiological issues and sociological problems are elucidated in many ways around the themes of power, politics, security, suffering, equality and justice. This is a cutting edge and accessible volume on the Covid-19 pandemic with chapters on topics such as the nature and limits of expertise, democratization, emergency government, digitalization, social justice, globalization, capitalist crisis, and the ecological crisis. Contents Notes on Contributors Preface Gerard Delanty 1. Introduction: The Pandemic in Historical and Global Context Part 1 Politics, Experts and the State Claus Offe 2. Corona Pandemic Policy: Exploratory Notes on its ‘Epistemic Regime’ Stephen Turner 3. The Naked State: What the Breakdown of Normality Reveals Jan Zielonka 4. Who Should be in Charge of Pandemics? Scientists or Politicians? Jonathan White 5. Emergency Europe after Covid-19 Daniel Innerarity 6. Political Decision-Making in a Pandemic Part 2 Globalization, History and the Future Helga Nowotny 7. In AI We Trust: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Pushes us Deeper into Digitalization Eva Horn 8. Tipping Points: The Anthropocene and COVID-19 Bryan S. Turner 9. The Political Theology of Covid-19: a Comparative History of Human Responses to Catastrophes Daniel Chernilo 10. Another Globalisation: Covid-19 and the Cosmopolitan Imagination Frédéric Vandenberghe & Jean-Francois Véran 11. The Pandemic as a Global Total Social Fact Part 3 The Social and Alternatives Sylvia Walby 12. Social Theory and COVID: Including Social Democracy Donatella della Porta 13. Progressive Social Movements, Democracy and the Pandemic Sonja Avlijaš 14. Security for Whom? Inequality and Human Dignity in Times of the Pandemic Albena Azmanova 15. Battlegrounds of Justice: The Pandemic and What Really Grieves the 99% Index