A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of the Social Order

by Mark Neocleous

Overview

Putting police power into the centre of the picture of capitalism

The ubiquitous nature and political attraction of the concept of order has to be understood in conjunction with the idea of police. Since its first publication, this book has been one of the most powerful and wide-ranging critiques of the police power. Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By situating the police power in relation to both capital and the state and at the heart of the politics of security, the book opens up into an understanding of the ways in which the state administers civil society and fabricates order through law and the ideology of crime. The discretionary violence of the police on the street is thereby connected to the wider administrative powers of the state, and the thud of the truncheon to the dull compulsion of economic relations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788735209
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University London.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Verso Edition: A Power Absolute and Indefeasible 1

Introduction 43

1 'Police Begets Good Order' 53

Mastering the masterless, imposing order 53

Excursus on the 'peculiarities of the English'; or, Aristotle in Britain 66

Mastering the market, imposing work 69

2 Liberalism and the Police of Property 85

From police to political economy? 86

From rule of police to rule of law? 94

The state of liberal order: interest, independence, property 102

Towards security 111

3 Ordering insecurity I: Social Police and the Mechanisms of Prevention 117

'The well ordering and comfort of civil society' 120

Political economy and social police 133

Towards social security 137

4 Ordering Insecurity II: On Social Security 143

The fabrication of wage labour 147

Border patrols: classes, criminals, claimants 166

The metaphysics of the proper: medical police, pigs and social dirt 174

Towards the legal reconstruction of police work 181

5 Law, Order, Political Administration 185

Arrest and police 'illegality' 189

Administration and the rationality of police: discretion 195

'Wonderful and marvellous things': the mythology of law and order 205

Formless power and ghostly presence: the state of the police 217

Index 223

Editorial Reviews

If you want to understand the origins and purpose of police powers, and their relation to law, to the state, and to bourgeois social order, there is no better author than Mark Neocleous and no better book than this.”
—David Correia, author of Police: A Field Guide

“Mark Neocleous’s modern classic has never been more timely. The substantial new Introduction takes this pioneering text into the present with a trenchant discussion of recent events and debates. In its coruscating critique of the failures of a liberal response to police power, it is, again, a provocative and urgent intervention.”
—Stuart Elden

“Neocleous explodes the liberal myth that police exist to to keep us safe or to enforce the law. Instead, they constantly reproduce a social order rooted in race and class exploitation at the heart of racial capitalism.”
—Alex Vitale

From the Publisher