Whereas public choice theory focuses on the incentives facing agents to examine related questions, this paper understands those incentives as shaped by discursive social constructions, and especially a scientific rationalism that may affect the identity, power, and positionality of the actors concerned.įoucault’s perspective has been very influential for interpretive political scientists (Bevir & Blakely, 2018) and the analysis here shows its relevance for the ‘economic approach to politics’. While not rejecting a role for the state in public health, this paper draws on the perspectives of the French social theorist Michel Foucault and the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek to illustrate the mechanisms through which public health discourses may undermine a liberal social order. Prior to the pandemic those discourses appear also to have contributed to the expansion of the regulatory state into ‘lifestyle governance’. The coronavirus pandemic has led many countries to introduce unprecedented restrictions on personal and enterprise freedom, restrictions justified by scientific discourses on ‘public health’.
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