Covid and the Politics of Risk

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  • Article: Covid and the politics of risk. By Adam Arvidsson.



Via Adam Arvidsson, via email, April 2022.

See also: New Political Philosophy for the Post-Pandemic World


Adam Arvidsson:

"In the 1986s, just around the time of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Ulrich Beck published what was to become a sociological best seller: Risikogesellshaft, or in English, Risk Society. There he suggested that in what he called ‘reflexive’ or ‘advanced’ modernity- a condition he thought to mark Western societies at the time of his writing- ‘the social production of wealth is systematically accompanied by the social production of risks’. Concomitantly, politics would become more concerned about risks and safety, than with equality and class interest. The Covid pandemic has unquestioningly brought this gravitational shift to the fore. For two years we have been overwhelmingly preoccupied with safety, almost worldwide, at the cost of rendering alternative political concerns, such as inequality, virtually invisible.

However, our current politics of safety is subtly but crucially different from Beck’s vision. Beck (and others before him, like Claus Offe) saw the rise of the Green Movement and related New Social Movements in the 1980s as harbingers of a coming politicization of risk production: of nuclear power, environmental pollution, genetic engineering, and so on. However, during the Covid pandemic the politics of safety has been overwhelmingly concerned with the circulation of risks not with their production. We have focused on attempting to limit the spread of the virus through masks or social distancing or limiting its effects through vaccination campaigns. Indeed, much more concern was given to measures to contrast the risks inherent in social interaction, than to productive investments like the expansion of hospital beds or the creation of a network of territorial medicine and first response measures. At the most extreme this led to a novel politicization of interpersonal relations where ‘keeping others safe’ by wearing a mask or otherwise practicing social distancing was elevated to a moral imperative.

Perhaps this focus on circulation instead of production is self-evident. Covid is a natural risk, you might say, and the pandemic a natural disaster; something that we cannot do anything about. The risks Beck discussed were instead manufactured risks; they were manifestations of reflexive modernization itself, and as such potentially open to human agency through political action. But as Latour, Descola and other contemporary anthropologists have taught us, there is preciously little (nothing at all?) that is genuinely natural. The origins of Covid, whether zoonotic or lab grown, are intrinsically social, the results of highly complex actor networks that stand at the very basis of contemporary existence and that need to be addressed as part of any serious politics in the Anthropocene. We need to politicize the nature of the global agro-industrial complex- if nothing else because it is likely to breed new and perhaps more serious pandemics in the future. We also need to politicize the politics of biotech, as this sector promises to bring about new risks (biological weapons, genetically modified organisms) as well as potential solutions, that might themselves turn out to be risky in new and as of yet unforeseen ways, and that, like vaccines, need in any case to be distributed more equally. Yet the Covid pandemic did not lead us to take issue with, say, the structure of the global food economy or to engage with the messy realities of ‘gain of function’ research in biotech.

Perhaps the reason that the politics of risks stayed at the level of circulation is that contemporary processes of risk production- contrary to the Chernobyl disaster that helped drive the popularity of Beck’s book- have now been naturalized. They have been turned into furniture, to use Latour’s phrase: to the extent that they appear as inalterable features of an unchanging present, as part of the natural order of things. Even as we suffered the worst consequences of the pandemic, during the ‘First Wave’ of the spring of 2020, supermarket shelves needed to be kept full of intensively farmed eggs and poultry meat, produced in ways that are highly likely to generate new zoonotic jumps. There was simply no alternative, as Mark Fisher would have had it.

Instead, the politics of risk circulation concentrated on the level of interpersonal transmission, of immunity to use Esposito’s (2022) term. As Esposito suggests ‘immunity’ has risen to parallel ‘community’ as a central concept in modern political discourse. The two terms are interrelated, not only in sharing the same etymological root in the Latin munus, signifying ‘gift’ as well as ‘obligation’. They also mutually presuppose each other: There can be no community without immunity, without mechanisms, identarian or other, that mark a boundary and separate community members form others. However, the emphasis on immunity has grown in the 20th century, from the Victorian politics of public health and its focus on protecting the civilized bourgeois from the promiscuity and health dangers that came with urban crowds, and particular proletarian crowds, to the contemporary ‘mask wars’. Indeed, Benjamin Bratton’s recent attempt at an ethics of ‘immunological commons’, signifying something like the common microbial context in which we all dwell, provides an extreme version of such a politics of immunity. Here every fellow human being is treated as a dangerous Victorian crowd and the overall imperative is to keep safe from each other. ‘The epidemiological view should shift our sense of subjectivity away from private individuation and towards public transmissibility. Emphasis shifts from personal experience and toward responsibilities couched in the underlying biological and chemical realities that bind us’. From this point of view, the mask is not simply a device for a (desirable?) process of de-individualization: it is also a commitment to a new kind of biopolitical solidarity. Wearing a mask is part of what Bratton calls a new ‘ethics of the object’: it entails understanding oneself, not primarily as a singular individual, nor as a member of an exclusive collectively kept together by its ‘allegiance to a set of symbolic obligations’ but as a vessel for the flows of data and biochemical matter that make up the ‘immunological commons. As such the primary moral obligation becomes that of guaranteeing interpersonal immunity. ‘The mask keeps you and others safe but also communicates solidarity with the immunological commons, just as its absence signals a refusal of it'.

Indeed, the dominant political response to the Covid pandemic was organized around the principle of ‘safety’ or ‘security’. French historian Patrick Zylberman has argued that, as a political principle, security has come to refer to an ideal of zero risk. This position is well illustrated by philosopher Jurgen Habermas’ position in the German debate around restrictive measures. In his interventions, Habermas argued against critics of Germany’s strict lock-down policies and suggested that there can be no ‘trade-off between the right to life and those competing basic rights that public health measures do indeed seriously impinge upon’. There had to be a precedence for the protection of life over all other concerns. Apart from the question as to whether and to what extent lockdowns have actually worked to limit contagion and deaths – there is, so far, little substantive evidence in either direction- the position paradoxically introduces much more stringent limits to our tolerance of risks in pandemic emergencies than in normal times, where the fact that we allow for, say, private automobiles or the legal sale of alcoholic beverages indicates that we are prepared to tolerate a certain number of deaths in order to exercise what we understand to be ‘competing basic rights’. The contradiction illustrates the ideological nature of the principle of security. An impossible zero tolerance of risks only applies to issues that have been brought into the public, politicized and, as such, subjected to ideology. As to the number of choices that kept being made in ways that were hidden from the public domain, we were quite happy to risk the lives of logistics and delivery workers to keep the locked-down middle classes safe and comfy with their pizza deliveries and toilet paper. Indeed, as an ideological concept ‘security’ is inherently slippery and extendable. As Harvey Molotch argued in his Against Security (addressing the rise of the concept in the wake of the US ‘War on Terror’) ‘Airlines have long had trouble with coach passengers using business class toilets. For some years they instructed over the intercom that all passengers (rich and poor alike) must use the bathrooms in their designated cabin. After 9/11 they added “as a matter of security”.’

The ideological ideal of security as the suspension of all risks was whole-heartedly embraced by many, and particularly by the managerial, symbol-analytic middle classes. There are probably many reasons for this. Lockdowns hurt them less. They could work from home more easily- indeed many corporations like, notably digital giants like Facebook (Meta), Microsoft or Twitter, plan to keep some kind of ‘smart working’ going even after the pandemic. For some, the lock-down was even a boon: an opportunity to cuddle up with kids and family in cozy surroundings instead of fighting the incessant war of office politics, day to day. But, as Molotch illustrates, the middle classes have also been progressively accustomed to accepting security as a supreme value. Starting with predictive medicine in the 1960s, passing through safety belts and motorbike helmets in the 1970s, to passive smoking and over-protective child rearing and culminating in the events after 9/11, the middle classes have come to accept safety as an overriding concern while at the same time, their commitment to other collective values has dwindled. Safety or security has become the main manifestation of contemporary post-ideological middle-class status quo, the only possible politics at the End of History.

One significant novelty however has been the ways in which contemporary discourses on safety focuses on language. The identity or ‘Social Justice’ politics that now dominates Anglo-Saxon campuses and, increasingly, corporate environments is focused on keeping peoples identities and experiences, as well as their bodies, safe from contagion. (Indeed, the US universities that are most dedicated to Social Justice policies for the student population are generally also the ones that are implementing the most stringent anti-Covid policies.) At the heart of this paradigm there is a paradoxical ontology where the self is understood as both socially constructed and metaphysically solid to the point of requiring protection from the kinds of further social construction that can happen through the unprotected interaction with others. Safety entails protection against risks that come with social interaction - whether linguistic or immunological- particularly those forms of social interaction that might lead to collective solidarity and struggle. Amazon’s ‘fulfillment centers’ in the UK still use AI enabled cameras to signal infringements of social distancing measures, even as all official anti-Covid restrictions have been lifted. Maybe it is good to keep the workers separated so that no crowds can form.

Perhaps the strict control of language at the heart of the predominantly middle-class politics of safety comes natural; the symbol analysts work with language after all, and it constitutes their reality. During the pandemic, such a politics of discursive control manifested itself in the total absence of recognition of alternative perspectives of safety and a continuous rejection of debates of the worldviews that support them. Rather, contrarian arguments are deemed ‘unsafe’ and generally frowned upon or even censored. People who questioned whether ‘racism’ is really the mother of all evils or who ended up at the wrong side of absurd debates as to whether a trans woman was really a ‘real woman’ were banned from speaking on campuses and generally ‘de-platformed’. People questioning the efficacy of lockdowns, like the signatures of the (highly debatable) Great Barrington declaration were branded as amoral assassins. The politically correct middle classes discovered what the Chinese Communist Party calls ‘discourse power’ in full. Very likely however, such strong conerns over the correct and safe use of language are also a reaction to the very instability of truth. In a situation of information overload and no shared values to guide interpretation most people tend to stick strongly to their own truths, which quicky become a matter of identity. They also tend to embrace magic and irrationality, as in the case of the many conspiracy theories that now flourish.

Even resistance to the dominant safety paradigm shares its basic ontological premises. It is organized around the ideal of freedom, rather than safety. Freedom has two meanings. First, the freedom of speech: not only in the sense of resisting censorship but also in the sense of the freedom to create one’s own truth, to ‘do your research’ as the gamified Q-anon universe urges its members. This is in part the fruit of a genuinely popular participatory culture. Hoi polloi have invaded the internet and there they find an abundance of information, feel empowered inform themselves and entitled to speak up against scientists and other authorities (whom they do not trust anyway). Second, it means the freedom to go on living as before. To the small scale entrepreneurs in sectors like logistics, corporate services or food and hospitality that make up their core component of most anti-covid restriction movements- like the Canadian Freedom Convoy or the German Querdenken, the fight is about the freedom to stay on the market while accepting higher levels of risk. Theirs is a politicization of a safety ideal which is presented as purely technical and apolitical. Their critique of zero risk safety comes from the point of view of people who are accustomed to lead more precarious lives, and to face higher levels of risk as a matter of course. But there is no vision beyond the present. As Diego Fusaro, an Italian right-wing pundit who has jumped on the no-vax bandwagon urged in one of his many tweets: ‘We need to fight for things to go back as they were before 2020.’ In many ways the anti-corona restriction protests resemble the early 19th century Luddites. They see the lockdowns as the preparation for, or the beginning of, a new wave of digitalization that will threaten their freedoms as well as their established livelihoods. But they never question the structural foundations of that livelihood itself. They just burn down the 5 G masts to resist what they see as a coming ‘Great Reset’ (a term actually borrowed form the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab who uses it to describe precisely the kinds of further digitalization that they resist.)

Do we have the political rationality to problematize production and not just circulation of risks? Just like in 19th century, contemporary politics of circulation gets it wrong. The proponents of security above all remain limited by their commitment to this abstract ideal and tend to brand popular protest against safety measures as egoist, fascist, unethical, un-informed or populist, without considering the real basis of its claims and positions. Observers sympathetic to popular protests instead identify the symbol analytic middle classes and their isolation from ‘reality’ as the new class enemy, guilty of perpetuating a new repressive ideology through censorship and de-platforming. However, the real class enemy is not the to be found among the politically correct middle classes, but in the one per cent who have gained massively from the Covid pandemic, and who are in control of most of the world’s markets, as well as its information and productive infrastructures. They have an interest that the production or risks, which is also the production of their wealth and power, remains immune to political struggle."


Beck, U. Risk Society, London; Sage, 1992, p. 19

Bratton, B. The Revenge of the Real, London; Verso, 2021, pp. 33-34

Zylberman, P. Tempêtes microbiennes. Essai sur la politique de sécurité. Paris; Gallimard, 2013,

Verovsek, P. ‘Habermas on the legitimacy of lockdown’, Eurozine, Feb 14, 2022,

Molotch, H. Against Security. How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

O’Connor, S. ‘How did a vast Amazon warehouse change life in a former mining town?’ Financial Times, March 17, 2022,