Taming the European Leviathan: The Legacy of Post-War Medicine and the Common Good

Beyond the east-west divide: a history of Europe with health as the common good

What is Europe? When studying post-war Europe, the focus is on ideological divisions, competing economic models and on the different political systems separating Western and Eastern Europe. The EU-funded LEVIATHAN project challenges existing east-west interpretations of European identity. Rather than studying postwar Europe’s two halves separately, we aim to understand Europe as one. European history, we argue, is characterised by a preoccupation with health as the common good. By taking medicine as an analytical lens, we will develop a common history of Europe beyond the usual east-west dichotomy. LEVIATHAN takes a multidisciplinary approach: neither economics nor politics nor ideology nor everyday life, but an integration of these perspectives makes it possible to understand the pursuit of the European common good.


Objective

What is Europe? The status of the European Leviathan is in doubt today as never before. Whether in the form of authoritarian governments or populist agitation, there is intense contention over what the role, size, and scope of the state in the 21st century should be. What can a historical account tell us about the European Leviathan then and now? What holds our European community together?
Amid this uncertainty our project calls attention to a common concern for the health of the individual and the well-being of the social body. We argue that post-war European history on each side of the so-called Iron Curtain is characterized by a preoccupation with health as the common good. Taking medicine as an analytical lens offers a common reference point through which a shared and integrated history of Europe can be developed beyond the usual clichés and dichotomies of the period. That is the unusual but promising argument that underlies our project.
Our project is distinguished by its multidisciplinary approach: Neither economics nor politics nor ideology nor everyday life, but an integration of these perspectives makes it possible to pursue the development of the common good both, in state socialism and in the capitalist state. To do this, we propose a multi-layered investigation of medicine, which came to represent a significant—if not the decisive—institutional, conceptual and legitimating framework for all efforts towards the common good.
Thus, on the one hand, the life sciences’ claim to universal truth offers a privileged perspective beyond the usual oppositions of ideology, economic and political systems. On the other hand, medicine is socially, politically, economically, technologically and culturally determined more than nearly any other field of our modern life. The innovative approach of our project goes beyond our heuristic methodology. Rather than merely studying postwar Europe’s two halves separately we aim to understand Europe as one.