key: cord-0064123-inxaawwq
authors: Outhwaite, William
title: Book Review: Pandemics, Politics, and Society. Critical Perspectives on the Covid-19 Crisis
date: 2021-05-26
journal: Front Sociol
DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2021.699018
sha: e4e3174edc0d9d3ebbacdc170c8f83c98877be20
doc_id: 64123
cord_uid: inxaawwq

nan

within social relationships and brings into movement the whole of society. . .' (p. 175) As Chernilo points out, 'At its peak, lockdowns, quarantines, restrictions of travel, work and education reached around 80% of the world's 7 billion of inhabitants.' (p. 167) While Véran, who had worked with Médecins sans Frontières in Paris and contracted Covid, Vandenberghe, less dramatically, 'endured the anguish of social isolation. We were experiencing, perhaps, the inversion of Sartre's formula: hell, after all, might be the absence of other people.' (p. 186).

In the third and final part, Sylvia Walby shows how social democracy can mitigate the social consequences of the pandemic, and Donatella della Porta suggests that emergencies such as the current one can open up opportunities for social movements, as well as curtailing their activities. The political economist Sonja Avlijaš argues that, in a context where we are all more or less seriously threatened, 'the coronavirus pandemic has made a big dent in the already weakened ideology that the "competitive society" does not need security and protection' (p. 240). Albena Azmanova takes a similar line that the 'battlegrounds of justice' against inequality and catastrophic climate change now include a third battleground directed against precarity resulting from social polarisation: 'the pandemic showed precarity to be the real grievance of the 99 per cent... ' (p. 254) .

This wide-ranging book is a timely and extremely important contribution which will stand comparison with the host of subsequent books on the topic which we can expect to follow.

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

The New Logic of Democratic Politics

Six Political Philosophies in Search of a Virus: Critical Perspectives on the Coronavirus Pandemic. LEQS Paper No

The author declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.Copyright © 2021 Outhwaite. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.Frontiers in Sociology | www.frontiersin.org