ABSTRACT
A crucial line of defence of public health and public safety faced with the global novel coronavirus pandemic is of course non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs). Decivilization is the consequence of the damages inflicted on the social bond by the impacts of the free enterprise economy, by a narrow individuated consumer-oriented rights culture, and by the undermining of public and community life in favour of the exorbitation of private commercial interests by the neoliberal state. Neoliberalism as an ideology is thoroughly permeated by neo-classical economics and classical liberal social theory. As a force of decivilization, individualization also allows public non-compliance with NPIs to be explained sociologically. Such an explanation would attribute the phenomenon of non-compliance, or at least the potential for it, as residing to some degree at least in the basic cultural structures of a modern society. Emile Durkheim was the first to theorize modern individualism, seeing this as emerging from the specialized social division of labour characteristic of modern industrialism.
