The idea of a 'body politic' is as old as Aesop's Fables. Conceived as a living body, a political community can be described as healthy or as sick. Political philosophers—from Plato, to Seneca, to Marie de France and Christine de Pizan, to Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—have invoked the idea of a body politic. In "Disease as Political Metaphor," Susan Sontag reflects on the uses and misuses of ideas of health and illness for describing political life. We are living under different conditions from those Sontag describes—for us, illness is not just a metaphor, but a reality. Does this affect the philosophical value of the metaphor? Does COVID-19 show the body politic metaphor as deficient in new ways? Or does the metaphor appear more philosophically relevant for thinking about the vulnerabilities and strengths of our current situation, so that we might treat not only sick individuals, but also the other maladies that threaten us as a collective? Join us for this week's P4L as we read passages from Sontag's piece and discuss its usefulness for philosophically elaborating our unprecedented political situation today.

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