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The tough choices democracies now face

<span>Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Getty</span>
Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Getty

David Runciman makes a number of compelling points in his analysis of Hobbes’ relevance to understanding how coronavirus has revealed the nature of political power (Coronavirus has not suspended politics – it has revealed the nature of power, 27 March).

However, there is another way of thinking about the relevance of Hobbes’ political philosophy to our viral times. The Leviathan was condemned on publication as the work of a dangerous radical. Hobbes showed that political power was an invention. There was nothing “given” or divinely ordained about the legal order founded by the Leviathan – it was invented by those who agreed that the Leviathan was necessary.

Hobbes’ lesson is that a democracy can be seen as an invented political order. Surely, this is now the moment when we can collectively make some radical choices. The general quarantining of politics gives us the space to imagine a fairer, greener and more decent world: the Leviathan is our invention. The Leviathan is our collective, democratic power.
Prof Adam Gearey
School of law, Birkbeck College, University of London

• David Runciman speaks of “the democratic imperative to seek consensus”. Yes. But when it comes to elections, the imperative of any political party is to get the votes in. A party will have forged a sort of consensus if it can get enough votes in, whatever its unspoken ideology and whether or not its leader and its candidates are honest.

Runciman says our political world is still recognisably Hobbesian. There seems to me to be something right about that if the political world is the world of our government, with a governing party that’s a strange mix of libertarian and authoritarian. The libertarian prime minister manifestly found it difficult to recognise that the principle of “personal freedom” had to be abandoned if the pandemic was to be fought. The authoritarian home secretary manifestly delighted in announcing punishments for infractions, with nothing about why they were thought necessary.

Politicians could do better than the latest slogan “Flatten the curve”. They could explain the massive difference social distancing makes to reducing the spread of any communicable disease. Perhaps the present government’s recent electioneering targeted the nastier and more brutish among us. But there’s now a message that needs to be received by everyone. And it would be good if they could appreciate the power of persuading using simple facts.
Jennifer Hornsby
London

• I feel that Prof Runciman may be right about a layer of politics being stripped away and, as he describes it, “a trade off between personal liberty and collective choice”. Addressing his nation on the Edison phonograph at the start of the first world war, Kaiser Wilhelm II concluded with the words, “I recognise no parties any more, only Germans”.

Whether we like it or not, what we are now in the middle of is a war; but not as we know it. Wilhelm was the head, despite the trappings of democracy, of a basically autocratic regime, which sought to shore up its power by enlisting patriotism, and it worked for a while as it also did in Tsarist Russia, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey.

But you can’t fight an enemy you can’t see with guns and you can’t negotiate with a virus. My wife and I stood at our front door last Thursday evening clapping and banging a saucepan, as did many people on our road. Times like this make me realise what is important in life. I just hope that, to return to the first world war, we’re not “lions led by donkeys”.
John Marriott
North Hykeham, Lincolnshire