ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the transition from the practice that regarded policing as the administration of the affairs of the state to the practice of 'high policing' which saw the police as a preventative force functioning as a means to defend the state against internal enemies. The Police Ordinance of Lower Austria in 1542, for example, maintained that vice, frivolity, and wrongdoings of the populace had incurred the wrath of God. The policies of social engineering by the absolutist Habsburg monarchy had contributed to the gradual emergence of distinct 'bourgeois' groups. The chapter argues that this transformation was closely bound up with the growing concern of the state since the middle of the seventeenth century with the surveillance of its population. It points out Sonnenfels's arguments regarding the dissociation of an all-encompassing notion of bonum commune and the narrower concept of internal security could provide the ideological support for these changes.
