In his recent book Virus e Leviatano, the veteran Italian journalist Aldo Maria Valli analyses how coronavirus has led to a form of health despotism replacing the rule of law. He pointedly employs the image of the leviathan, the Biblical sea monster, which symbolises a powerful and destructive enemy. 

Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 treatise Leviathan, adopted this image to argue for an all-powerful state, or ‘sovereign’. In Part II of his work — Commonwealth — Hobbes argued: 

The commonwealth is instituted when all agree in the following manner: I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou give up, thy right to him, and authorise all his...