On Health and Loneliness

Abstract

This essay connects loneliness with health problems and argues that both are comorbid with authoritarian politics. Although an old idea from Plato and Aristotle, this problem takes an acute shape in the contemporary world, as argued by Hegel, Hannah Arendt, and Kate Manne, and has a gendered dimension, as men are lonelier than women. This article also attends, briefly, to empirical material about loneliness in the contemporary world.