ABSTRACT
As we have seen, the development of the state’s administrative machinery in the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern age made it possible to steer and regulate economic life with greater control and accuracy. The effect on civil authority was twofold, at once qualitative and quantitative, for just as the state’s sphere of intervention increased exponentially, an equally transformative process affected the nature of the functions attributed to it. And that is precisely the transformation I have attempted to trace out following modern governmental reason in its constant conflict with legal reason, the conflict between politia and iurisdictio. We have tried to account for this dialectic following the institutional and cultural developments that unfolded between the 16th and 18th centuries in relation to the concept of police. What we need to do now is specify the nature of this police apparatus brought into being by modern governmental reason. We will begin by singling out the areas of police intervention and will then specify what appears to have been the inherent nature of the police apparatus in the modern age. We have looked at the process that slowly but definitively shifted the centre
of political reflection in such a way as to overturn the paradigm of the ancient treatises on sovereign prudence and the governmental arts. The end of governmental activity was no longer to ensure a prudent application of time-honoured orders but to maintain and increase the state’s power or, as Giovanni Botero called it, the state’s possanza (puissance). A new complex entity found its way to the centre of political reflection, an entity made of constituent elements, driven by independent aims, and equipped with an economic, social, and military structure. Police thus emerged as a new and further level of governmental action next to the classic areas of justice, finance, and war: It emerged as a complex formed by different kinds of knowledge and institutional means suited to growing the wealth and resources of the state. In a sense it was an enlightened political aim that the police apparatus set for
itself. Indeed, promoting the prosperity of the state entailed the ability to intervene in, direct, and regulate any human activity that might help toward that objective, even if only indirectly. The state was thus expected to attend to every matter that could advance the overall political objective that Justus Lipsius had summed up in
four key concepts: salus, commoditas, scuritas, and disciplina. This was a principle of interference that went well beyond the simple need to ensure the subjects’ physical survival, taking on responsibility for an entire population’s moral and material life. “So what police thus embraces” in the modern age, Foucault (2004, 421) suggests, “is basically an immense domain that we could say goes from living to more than just living.” Its interest in the life of the population is aimed not simply at securing conditions of security but also at ensuring a happy existence. Police is concerned not only with the population’s mere existence-or “being”—but also with its material and moral wellbeing. As Delamare put it, police was concerned with the soul, body, and fortunes of the population, something that Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi described as the closer consonance between the welfare of the single families and the common good. Indeed, central to the discussion that was developing around the question of police were concepts such as commonwealth, Wohl, and bienêtre-all typical expressions of the eudaemonistic philosophy that inspired the nascent sciences of the state. The political objective of welfare thus justified the authorities in intervening
broadly in the civil life of the nation. To appreciate how broad the range of police intervention could be, we need only take a quick overview of the subject matters that came under the regulation of various police statutes, ordonnances, and Ordnungen and the powers attributed to intendants, lieutenants, justices, and commissaires. These areas of intervention were indeed extraordinarily disparate, spanning across all areas of a nation’s social and economic life. As Delamare commented, police could be “encompassed in its entirety [. . .] within eleven subject areas: religion, the discipline imposed by custom, health, foodstuffs, public security and peace, the liberal arts and sciences, commerce, manufacturing and the mechanical arts, domestic workers, manual labourers, and the poor” (Delamare 1705, 4; my translation). In France, for example, the intendant was responsible for broadly intervening in
all affairs pertaining to the public interest and welfare, that is, in anything having to do with the police du bon ordre, encompassing the security of people and property, public health, and poor relief. The responsibilities ascribed to the intendant additionally included a sort of administrative oversight over municipal bodies, as well as functions pertaining to the regulation of economic activity. The intendant was made into an essential informational and executory tool for the economic dirigisme carried out by the comptroller general of finances, to this end overseeing arts and crafts guilds and manufacturers’ guilds, intervening in labour disputes, ensuring that the city was well supplied, and carrying out grain policy. Also ascribed to the intendant were broad powers to set rural and farm policy, with the task of favouring the development of the agricultural economy, as well as a general power to police ground and river transportation and to make urban-planning decisions (Sueur 2001b, 357; Marion 1969, 293ff.). Similar powers were ascribed to urban police lieutenants in Paris, as can be gathered from a list contained in an edict of 1667 that mentioned the following areas of competence: state prisons and the Bastille, bookstores, theatrical performances, postal oversight, hospitals,
provisioning, the execution of royal orders, and oversight over arts and crafts guilds, as well as manufacturing establishments, commerce, lotteries, Jews, room renters, public security, hygiene, and the cleanliness and upkeep of places. As can be appreciated, these competences ran the whole gamut of subject areas, and they came with regulatory, inspectorial, and sanctionative powers to be exercised by summary procedure (Delamare 1705, 131; Marion 1969, 412). To a greater or lesser degree of accuracy, the picture just outlined can also be
said to describe magistracies in England and in the German area. In England, statutes and proclamations were used to broadly regulate a vast inventory of matters, a process that, as discussed, prompted a parallel evolution involving justices of the peace and their operating modules, for in fulfilling the functions they were insistently being entrusted with by royal provision, the office of the justice took on the traits of the institutions and procedures typically associated with Continental administrative monarchy.1 In the German area, the broad Landraten and Steuerarten powers were aptly summed up in the Instruktion that regulated the Generaldirektorium, the central organ entrusted with overseeing the activity of the commissarial magistracies. The provision was enacted in 1722 and became a manifesto of economic and social policy in 18th-century Prussia, conveying a good idea of the scope of intervention reserved exclusively for the autocratic organs of government (text reprinted in von Schmoller 1894-1935, vol. 3, n. 280, pp. 575-651). The functions of the General Directorate included military administration (Arts. 4, 5, and 6) and the realm’s general defence of internal and external security (Art. 7); the levying of taxes and excises (Arts. 8 and 9); oversight over domestic and foreign trade in agricultural and manufactural goods (Art. 10); general authority over productive, agricultural, and manufactural activities, whose development it was charged with promoting (Arts. 11 and 12); and general authority over the administration of fallow lands and over the construction and administration of new cities (Art. 15). Also, the same Instruktion empowered provincial organs to set grain prices; establish taxes on necessities, bread, and meat; and manage civil security, and fire prevention in particular, by inspecting the upkeep of public places (Art. 16). And, finally, the sovereign would have direct authority over some industries, such as salt-works and breweries, as well as over the management of publicly owned material and natural resources, forestlands, and mines (Arts. 18-27). It is an apparently disorderly and incoherent picture that emerges from this
summary list of subject matters reserved for the different magistracies. Police deals
with disparate matters ranging from foreign trade to sumptuary laws. But if we read between the lines, we will see that three broad areas can be made out, the same ones which we saw crystallizing in the late medieval cities, and which are now being taken up by sovereign policy and applied nationally across the entire territory of the nascent state. These broad police areas are those that cover the territory, the economy, and the population. Let us take them up in turn.
