Pandemic Politics within a System of Entangled Political Economy

This essay uses entangled political economy to explore how concerns over Covid-19 have influenced conduct within the public square. Entangled political economy represents a merging of ideas that Frank Knight (1933) and Harold Lasswell (1936) set forth to indicate that politics and economics dealt with the same societal material. We explore the relationship between entanglement and public reason within a context of Michael Polanyi’s (1962) conceptualization of a Republic of Science. The point of our paper is not to offer some critique of particular policy measures but to advance our understanding of how democratic societies operate in stressful times.