Agamben We are experiencing the end of an era in the political history of the West, the era of bourgeois democracy founded on constitutions, on rights, on parliaments, and on the division of powers. This model was already facing a crisis: constitutional principles were increasingly being ignored, and the executive power had almost entirely replaced the legislative by operating — as it now does exclusively — through legislative decrees [aka “executive orders”]. With the so-called pandemic, things went further: what American political analysts called the “Security State” — which was established in response to terrorism — has now given way to a health-based paradigm of governance that we term “biosecurity”. It is important to understand that biosecurity, both in its efficacy and in its pervasiveness, outdoes every form of governance that we have hitherto known. As we have seen in Italy — but not only here — as soon as a threat to health is declared, people unresistingly consent to limitations on their freedom that they would never have accepted in the past.
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