Abstract

ABSTRACT In the style of Swift and Wollstonecraft, I contribute to the growing pandemic literature on Hobbes by writing a feminist satire of the Leviathan for the age of the novel coronavirus. Hobbes's conceptions of the state of nature and the body politic are eerily relevant to the present political crises, especially in the United States. In a personal narrative that is both arch and absolutely serious, I reveal how a woman-empowering vision of a healthy global body politic can be teased out of Hobbes's political thought and used to combat the fatalistic view of humanity's inevitable descent into a chaotic state of nature during times of crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic.