Morbus Anglicus; or, Pandemic, Panic, Pandaemonium

Abstract

Mid-17th century England births two fateful new signifiers: pandemic and pandaemonium. Although both words are founded on a Greek root pan, meaning all, neither designate a firm or flourishing polity. The words also retain close etymological, homophonic, and semantic relations to another crucial word of the time: panic. Yet these terms do not simply indicate the destruction or abolition of politics or the political, but rather reconstitute the problem of politics according to a radical paradox. This essay examines the emergence and reconstitution of these signifiers in a philological matrix inflected by plague, civil war, religious violence, scientific inquiry, and monarchical restoration, in order to proffer several theses about their significance and operations in and for politics that subsists beyond the specificities of that site.