ABSTRACT
A few words of caution will be necessary by way of introduction to this work. In order to guide the reader’s expectations and avert misunderstandings that can easily arise, I will briefly comment on the object and method of the investigation we are about to embark on. The idea of public security featured in the title of this work seems to clearly locate the investigation within a specific field of study. And, indeed, if we want to outline the genesis and characteristics of police powers (a major institutional part of the repressive apparatus), we should expect to be working within the tradition in police studies that is broadly criminological and analyzes the history of penal and social-control institutions. But that is only partly true. Certainly, as the title suggests, the investigation is devoted to the police, its institutional evolution, and the nature of its powers. However, I do not take the view that a history and analysis of police powers should be confined strictly within the methodological framework and theoretical constructs of police studies. In fact, it appears to me that much of the literature in this area proceeds from a narrow notion of police that cannot account for the wide range and complexity of functions the police apparatus (what Foucault called dispositif ) has fulfilled over the course of the history of modern Western societies. In the contemporary legal and political lexicon, the term police seems to refer
strictly to the function of ensuring the public order by preventing and punishing crime, and so to the idea of the police as a subservient institution, serving to implement the functions exercised by penal institutions. However, the history and functions of the doctrinal and institutional complex that has developed around the conceptterm police cannot be adequately analyzed exclusively by reference to an apparatus merely entrusted with preventing and punishing crime. This narrow notion of police cannot account for the experience that has unfolded in the shadow of that concept-term in the modern history of Western societies, nor can it account for the full range and complexity of the functions the police apparatus has served in the arc of time that has led to the birth of modern police institutions. Moreover, it can be argued that the narrow notion of police powers just described fits in perfectly with the classic repressive-conservative image of the functions of law and the state typically advanced by the whole of liberal political and legal philosophy, which-by conceiving the police as having no more than a repressive function,
and the institutional experience of the Polizeistaat as one of arbitrary repressionhas wound up misconstruing the real meaning those two notions have had in the social, political, and institutional history of modern Europe (see Schiera 2003, 2004a). Further testifying to the hegemonic force of the liberal legal-philosophical
worldview is the huge influence it has had on its keenest critics, who have found themselves essentially reprising the basic theoretical assumptions of that intellectual tradition. Indeed, much of the literature criticizing the functions of the penal system replicates the timeworn image of law and the state merely as instruments of repression, and in this way it ends up embracing the very conception it sets out to criticize. This is the classic conception of the minimal or night-watchman state that Marx already criticized in his essay “On the Jewish Question”:
Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property.
