[T]he key point here is that a tacit naturalization of the household, and consequent neglect of inequalities both within and between actual households, is a pervasive confounding error in political philosophy. It invites perennial, dead-end debates between negative and positive concepts of “liberty,” to borrow Isaiah Berlin's terminology. Rarely does it raise explicit consideration of the tenets of private property law that underwrite the idea of legal personhood and “potential” (or life chances) implicit in both concepts of liberty. This error sets the racialized (and gendered) limits on presumptions of destiny and reckonings of justice through the course of the pandemic.
...
Even leaving aside that what is confirmed today of infection rates may not be true tomorrow, and the impact of preventative measures, epidemiology's reliance on nationalist methods of classification—the endemic, epidemic and pandemic, and concept of community transmission—encourages the mistaken view that these are quantitative indices. They are, however, qualitative categories associated with divergent system of national and global health governance. Epidemiology, as the statistical branch of medicine, has certainly altered its methods over a century, but it still mathematically encodes a border or limit through formulated delineations of variables, constants, and spaces of equivalence.
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The broader answer to why the quarantine has assumed a central role is that its epistemology aligns with the resurgence of ethnonationalism, the far Right and conservative jurisprudence—all of which turn on categorical reasoning, some explicitly in deference to Natural Law. Neoliberalism never represented the eclipse of territoriality. Instead, neoliberalism conserved and reconfigured an oikonomic division between private, “self-regulated” governance and authoritarian control over the movements of populations. With the pandemic, the conditioning of life chances by assets and inherited wealth across that oikonomic division is grimly unambiguous. The pandemic calls for better than the rehearsal of rival positions within economic liberalism or the categorical fatalism of Natural Law.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl
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