“Il Quarto shock: come un virus ha cambiato il mondo” by Sebastiano Maffettone, the latest release from LUP, is now available.

With a preface by Giovanni Lo Storto, Luiss's Director General – available as an eBook starting May 18 and in bookstores from June 4.

After listening to scientists and doctors, and after considering privacy and economic dynamics, it's time to answer a fundamental question: what does the pandemic mean for society as a whole? What important lessons can we learn from the crisis, and what potential outcomes must we avoid?

The emergency that followed the spread of COVID-19 was not a “normal” crisis, even though it was serious. According to Sebastiano Maffettone, humanity is facing the fourth shock: a microscopic virus has revealed to humans their complete insignificance, as only giants of thought like Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud had done before. Suddenly, we realized that the super-technological and hyper-globalized society we’ve built is facing an existential threat. This stems both from external forces—nature, which we still tended to think was tamed and controllable—and from its own capacity for innovation.
While scientists, economists, and various experts are busy meticulously planning the recovery phase, other more pressing and broader questions risk going unanswered: what will become of our society?

The Fourth Shock, the first attempt of its kind to provide answers and policy proposals using the tools of political philosophy and ethics, addresses crucial issues. These include the potential rise of social unrest and how to address it, growing income inequality (for example, between the North and South of our country), the need for international relations to move beyond mere competition, the consolidation of the Green New Deal, the rethinking of schools and universities, and the most equitable way to manage the expected growth of web multinationals.

Sebastiano Maffettone's book is both a profound reflection and a programmatic document upon which to build the politics of tomorrow. What kind of society do we want to rebuild? What dangers do our democracies face? And how can we reshape the capitalist system to build a world that's more sustainable and fair? By analyzing the relationship between the environmental crisis and the pandemic, the individual and society, and the economy and technology, The Fourth Shock becomes an indispensable book for understanding how to act (and why) if we truly want to maintain confidence and change our history, both during and after COVID-19.