Pandemic as Political Theory

Does the COVID-19 crisis reveal anything about the nature of politics or political theory in general? This chapter argues that the pandemic has, in large part, simply provided more vivid evidence of something we already knew – that we live in societies where people are subject to unjust laws made in unjust ways. Nonetheless, slightly more optimistically, it considers the possibility that the pandemic might function as a wake-up call, alerting us all to quite how bad things have got and showing that big changes are politically possible. We can only hope that the pandemic will prove a more effective teacher of political theory than political theorists have been.