Abstract
Whether it is the plan for a “super police force” in the war against terrorism, the recent concept of community policing, or the rapid growth of both border police and various private police forces, the “police” has recently resurfaced as the crucial referent for societal fantasies of law and order. Equipped with the most recent technologies and linked to all available means of data collection, the modern police, as it cooperates with other disciplines of crime repression, such as, criminology, psychiatry, and penal law, works in the name of law and order as the quintessential agent of social control. The fear of crime alongside recent instances of excessive violence committed by the police has created an ambivalent mixture of repulsion for and appreciation of the police within modern democracies.
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Notes
Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton, eds. (London: Tavistock Publications, 1988).
Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Christopher P. Wilson, Cop Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth-Century America ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 );
Gary T. Marx, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988);
William Ker Muir, Police: Streetcorner Politicians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977);
Jerome H. Skolnick, Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966 ).
Peter Manning, Police Work: The Social Organization of Policing ( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977 ).
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Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (London: Pluto Press, 2000).
See Michael Taussig, “The Injustice of Policing: Prehistory and Rectitude,”in Justince and injustice in Law and Legal Theory, eds. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: university of Michigan press, 1996), 19–34.
See also Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Georg Simmel, Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Lipzig: Dunker & Humblot, 1908), 56. (my translation)
Arnold Gehlen, Anthropologische und sozialpsychologische Untersuchungen, ed. Herber Schnddelbach (Hamburg: Reinbek, 1994), 71. I would like to thank Oliver Simons for pointing this passage in Arnold Gehlen out to me.
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II,1, Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhduser, eds. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 179–203.
Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political ( London and New York: Verso, 1993 ).
David Lyon and Elia Zureik, eds., Computers, Surveillance and Privacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
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© 2007 Klaus Mladek
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Mladek, K. (2007). Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution. In: Mladek, K. (eds) Police Forces. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607477_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607477_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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