ABSTRACT
In the German language the concept 'Polizei' has a history. The word 'Polizei' eventually took on another meaning m the 'Polizeiwissenschaft' of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; this can be distinguished from the usage of the statutes by considering the formation and objective of this scientific domain. 'Polizei existed' when freemen or subjects conducted themselves in an orderly, modest, courteous, and respectable fashion wherever human life was organised communally. In the extensive writings on Polizeiwissenschaft during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 'Polizei' gained its most diverse and uncertain meaning. Since 'Polizei' was concerned with communal order, these writings had of necessity to analyse this condition of order as well as the methods and means deployed for the realisation of this condition. With the development of an institutional and the formation of a formal concept of 'Polizei' the term gained a certain precision, alongside which a more restricted 'practical' conception emerged.
