‘There will be no recovery. There will be social unrest. There will be violence. There will be socio-economic consequences: dramatic unemployment. Citizens will suffer dramatically: some will die, others will feel awful.’footnote1 This is no eschatologist speaking but Jacob Wallenberg, scion of one of global capitalism’s most powerful dynasties, envisaging a world-economic contraction of 30 per cent and sky-high unemployment as a result of the coronavirus lockdowns. While philosophers worry that our rulers are exploiting the epidemic to enforce biopolitical discipline, the ruling class itself seems to have the opposite concern: ‘I am dead scared of the consequences to society . . . We have to weigh the risks of the medicine affecting the patient drastically’. Here the Swedish tycoon echoes Trump’s prognosis that the therapy will kill the patient. While the philosophers view anti-contagion measures—curfews, closed borders, restrictions on public gatherings—as a sinister control mechanism, the rulers fear the lockdowns will loosen their control.

In assessing the impact of covid-19, the philosophers in question have cited the extraordinary pages on the plague in Discipline and Punish, where Foucault describes the new forms of surveillance and regulation occasioned by the outbreak in the late-seventeenth century.footnote2 The thinker who has taken the most clear-cut position on the pandemic is Giorgio Agamben, in a series of combative articles starting with ‘The invention of an epidemic’, published by il manifesto on 26 February 2020. In this piece, Agamben describes the emergency measures implemented in Italy to stop the spread of the virus as ‘frenetic, irrational and completely unfounded’. ‘The fear of the epidemic gives vent to panic’, he writes, ‘and in the name of security we accept measures that severely restrict freedom, justifying the state of exception.’ For Agamben, the coronavirus response demonstrates a ‘tendency to use the state of exception as a normal paradigm of government’—‘It is almost as if, with terrorism exhausted as the cause for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic offered the ideal pretext to uphold them beyond any limitation’. Agamben reasserted these ideas in two other texts that appeared on the website of the Italian publishing house Quodlibet in mid-March.footnote3

Now, Agamben is both wrong and right; or rather, drastically wrong and somewhat right. He is wrong because the basic facts contradict him. Even great thinkers can die of contagion—Hegel perished from cholera in 1831—and philosophers have a duty to revise their views when circumstances call for it: if coronavirus denialism was faintly possible in February, it is no longer reasonable in late March. However, Agamben is right that our rulers will use every opportunity to consolidate their power, especially in times of crisis. That coronavirus is being exploited to strengthen mass-surveillance infrastructure is no secret. The South Korean government has analysed the spread of infection by tracking the location of its citizens via their mobile phones—a policy that caused uproar when it exposed a number of extra-marital affairs. In Israel, Mossad will soon implement its own version of this tracker, while the Chinese government has doubled down on video surveillance and facial-recognition devices (not that the world’s intelligence agencies were waiting for the excuse of an epidemic to start digitally shadowing us). Many European governments are currently deciding whether to imitate South Korean and Chinese digital-monitoring programmes, with Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office rubber-stamping this measure in late March. Agamben is not the first to argue that one of the goals of social domination is to atomize the dominated; Guy Debord wrote in The Society of the Spectacle that the development of capitalist-commodity utopias would isolate us together in ‘perfect separation’.