This chapter introduces the reader to the politics of COVID-19, its theoretical significant and the theoretical and empirical objectives of this book. As discussed below, this book is written in order to explore the nature of state power as it is revealed by the politics of COVID-19, embracing Weberian and Foucauldian insights into questions of the state and power. Theoretically, the objective is to craft a Weberian-Foucauldian approach to the questions of the state and power. This, I argue, makes it possible to appropriate key insights into the questions of the state and power from these two different literatures, creating a coherent framework for exploring state power. Empirically, this means filling various gaps in the literature on the Norwegian and Swedish cases.