Freedom Without Responsibility: the Promise of Bolsonaro’s COVID-19 Denial

Abstract

Jair Bolsonaro, the current President of Brazil, has made himself into one of the most influent advocates of COVID-19 denial. His health policy and his political doctrine are partly based on an implicit moral claim, which is neglected by contemporary political theory. Bolsonarism’s rhetoric raises a moral claim to freedom without responsibility, which relieves its followers from the burdens that emerge from liberal accounts of liberty or from basic goods accepted in a political community. In opposition to liberal or communitarian accounts, Bolsonarism endorses a Hobbesian concept of freedom that describes it as the absence of ‘impediments to motion’. Nonetheless, it differs from Hobbes because it treats this liberty as endowed with moral value and non-negotiable through a social contract.