ABSTRACT
Having described in outline the politico-institutional environment that secured the essential historical condition for the development of modern police powers, we can now attempt to trace out their theoretical genealogy. As I have tried to illustrate, it was with the birth of the modern administrative monarchy that a more overtly voluntaristic and absolutistic conception of law could find a concrete institutional embodiment, giving shape to that complex of sovereign powers that, as we saw, concretized into new apparatuses and into the nascent police legislations. It is only natural, then, if in tracing out the theoretical genealogy of the modern notion of police, we should go back to the original matrixes of political absolutism, and in particular to the construct of the modern prince as legislator and administrator, a construct that emerges next to the medieval idea of the king as enforcer of justice, in some respects displacing this latter idea. As mentioned, the term police established itself in the European legal lexicon via
the translation of Aristotle’s Politics, which along with his Nicomachean Ethics and the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics formed the textual basis for the teaching of the practical disciplines in the liberal arts schools of medieval universities. The Aristotelian model long stood as something of a paradigm for political reflection, so much so that, as is known, the division of practical disciplines into ethics, economics, and politics-a tripartition introduced in Latin culture by Boethius-was taken up across the board in medieval Scholasticism, when it became the foundation of university curricula throughout Europe (especially in central Europe: see Maier 1962, 59-116), and for a long time thereafter it retained its basic makeup. It is to this intellectual tradition that we need to trace the semantic development of the modern notion of police. The sense in which the classic authors understood the notion of politeia is well
known. At least since Aristotle, the term designates the overall order of the city (polis), the set of rules and formulas under which everyone can live with everyone else (Mozzarelli 1988, 9). Aristotle’s Politics presents a view of political institutions as natural, in that they respond to principles rooted in the biological order. Like any other natural being, the polis is a compound of elemental components set in a certain balance. These components are the individual members of the polis, and the balance that obtains among them is the outcome of their tendency to associate
in increasingly complex forms of communitarian existence in view of their need to satisfy their primary needs. The polis is thus a natural organism held together by its components’ tendency to seek a sociopolitical balance enabling them not only to live or survive (zen) but to live well (euzen).1 For the classic Latin writers, the concept of political order was instead expressed
by the term res publica, which accordingly upstaged politia in the lexicon of political science. Not so in the Middle Ages, when the fall of the Roman Empire set political philosophy on a quest for a principle of universal order on which basis to refound the political community. And this was precisely the thrust of the reflection that political thinkers developed around the notion of politia when in the Middle Ages they rediscovered Aristotle’s Politics. In the late-medieval translation of that book, the Aristotelian expression politike koinonia, understood as a synonym of polis, was rendered as communicatio civilis sive politica-hence the marked tendency of the time to use politia both as a noun, expressing the idea of a political community, and as a modifier, expressing the idea of a well-ordered political community. The term politia thus became imbued with values that turned the Aristotelian conception into a moral paradigm of life in society, and so also into an ideal frame within which to situate all the concrete forms the social order can take (Mozzarelli 1988, 11). Through the Scholastic filter, the Aristotelian notion of politia thus made its way
into the various vulgate tongues, taking on highly conservative overtones, encapsulating the idea of what it meant for a political community to be in good order. And what this idea pushed into the foreground was the need to maintain a proper balance among the different components of the community, in keeping with the theoretical centrality the notion of order took on throughout medieval thought and culture (Grossi 1995, 81; Duby 1978). In this frame of thought, politia was the activity of protecting the realm’s legal and social order, and in that sense it could hardly be distinguished from the competing notion of iurisdictio. Politia still expressed the broad subjection of politics to law that would not be overturned until the birth of the institutions of political absolutism. Political absolutism made wide use of Aristotelian themes and the Aristotelian
lexicon without making the clean theoretical break with that tradition which would come only with natural law theory.2 Indeed, as Norberto Bobbio (1980, 510) has
commented, it is Hobbes that lays Aristotle’s authority to rest. However, as much as the legal and political thought of monarchical absolutism did draw widely on the themes and lexicon of Aristotelian political thought, it did make two significant changes to that frame of thought, for on the one hand it broke with the tripartition of the practical sciences, and on the other it replaced the medieval emphasis on conservation with a modern, openly voluntaristic emphasis on changing the legal and social order. Particularly significant in this regard, as we will see, is the semantic trajectory of the notion of police, for although this concept will propel a typically Aristotelian notion fully into the modern age, it will at the same time use that notion to definitely eclipse the conception of politics predicated on the supremacy of law and morals, along with idea of the sovereign as guarantor of the natural equilibrium of the political organism. The evolution of the notion of police thus came by way of the key theoretical
innovations of modern political absolutism, especially its revival of themes in public law and the development of the modern arts of government. For a long time, however, legal knowledge and politico-administrative knowledge will exist as a theoretical tangle whose strands it will not be possible to disentangle until a science of public law, on the one hand, and an economic science, on the other, come into their own as independent disciplines. The semantic development of the notion of police aptly captures the intellectual evolution that throughout the modern age unfolded through the mutual feedback between legal sciences, on the one hand-engaged in an effort to rethink the few materials that Roman law devoted directly to the question of sovereignty-and modern political and administrative knowledge, on the other, which on the foundation of legal knowledge built its own theoretical edifice by developing the idea of government. In a nutshell, the police apparatus was created around two fundamental intel-
lectual processes running in parallel to each other. On the one hand was a process of progressive Verwissenscaftlichung (Stolleis 1998a, 83-84) in the study of public law, or ius publicum, which was advancing as a knowledge of the legal relations involving the public person-the more so as the mounting institutionalization of modern political apparatuses increasingly awakened the consciousness of a sovereign public sphere. On the other hand was the theoretical foundation of politicoadministrative knowledge as a guide to sovereign action within the widening spaces that were being opened by the doctrine of ius publicum. This knowledge was largely informed by the themes of political neo-Aristotelianism and by the debate on reason of state and prudentia civilis. The police idea was thus forged from an alloy of prudentia iuris (publici) and
prudentia civilis, or, otherwise stated, of legal knowledge and politico-administrative
knowledge. It came into being and developed within the framework of the reasoning that politico-legal culture was devoting to the two basic notions of sovereignty and government, and in a sense it wound up encapsulating the main advances made in thinking about those two notions. Before we can analyze the semantic and conceptual nuances the concept of police took on in the different cultural traditions, we will need to explore its theoretical roots, however brief that exploration may be.
