The introduction of regulations such as quarantine and cordons sanitaires in late-medieval societies had significance well beyond public health, because they extended state power into areas of human life that had not previously been subject to political authority. Michel Foucault saw the shift in the focus of states from controlling territory to governing people’s bodies as a key feature of the modern world.[35] (During the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdowns and other restrictions on movement were controversial precisely because they so starkly revealed the enormous power of the modern state over
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