Archive | 2021
Power, Authority, and Leginitmacy in Times of Lockdown
Abstract
The 2020/21 COVID-19 crisis demonstrates the intricate relation between power, authority, and legitimacy. The strategy chosen to confront the COVID-19 pandemic was a historically unprecedented global lockdown on social and economic reproduction. The global lockdown produced another social and economic crisis of yet unforeseeable magnitude. This article sets off with the question about the nature of power that informed the political decision-making in the deliberation of the appropriate strategies in confronting the global pandemic and the structure of authority that deliberated, implemented, and legitimated the chosen strategies. The answers have to do with the specific allocation of power in the 21st century: economic capital, imaginary social orders, and institutional settings. It concludes by identifying three main patterns: the expertization of knowledge and technocratic global governance, the triumph of Rawlsian liberal ethics, and the rise of a new global accumulation regime.