A novel (coronavirus) reading of Hobbes's Leviathan

In the style of Swift and Wollstonecraft, I contribute to the growing pandemic literature on Hobbes by writing a feminist satire of the Leviathan for the age of the novel coronavirus. Hobbes's conceptions of the state of nature and the body politic are eerily relevant to the present political c...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:History of European ideas 2021-01, Vol.47 (1), p.33-37
Main Author: Botting, Eileen Hunt
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
Descent
Feminism
Hobbes
Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)
Pandemics
Political crises
Political philosophy
women
Writing
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In the style of Swift and Wollstonecraft, I contribute to the growing pandemic literature on Hobbes by writing a feminist satire of the Leviathan for the age of the novel coronavirus. Hobbes's conceptions of the state of nature and the body politic are eerily relevant to the present political crises, especially in the United States. In a personal narrative that is both arch and absolutely serious, I reveal how a woman-empowering vision of a healthy global body politic can be teased out of Hobbes's political thought and used to combat the fatalistic view of humanity's inevitable descent into a chaotic state of nature during times of crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic.
ISSN:0191-6599
1873-541X
DOI:10.1080/01916599.2020.1792059