ABSTRACT
Sociology’s current ‘grand thinkers’, for example, all highlight the issue of insecurity in their accounts of what is variously described as ‘risk society’, ‘reflexive modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’. Daniel Yergin has argued that the concept of national security ‘postulates the interrelatedness of so many different political, economic, and military factors that developments halfway around the globe are seen to have automatic and direct impact on America’s core interests’. ‘Police’ therefore consists in the ways in which the state fabricates social order and administers civil society in its search for security: security is the police project. The corollary of the focus on security is the perpetual mystification of the processes of social power. Transforming social issues into questions of security plays into the hands of corporate power by turning into consumers of the products of finance capital. The demand for security, then, lends itself to the greater exercise of state power and private property.
