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Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution

  • Book
  • © 2007

Overview

Editors:
  1. Klaus Mladek
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Part of the book series: Studies in European Culture and History (SECH)

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Table of contents (12 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-ix
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  2. Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution

    1. Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution

      • Klaus Mladek
      Pages 1-9

  6. Contemporary Investigations

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 179-179
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    2. Police, Paranoia, and Theater in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

      • Martin Puchner
      Pages 181-197

    3. A Critique of Community Policing

      • William Lyons
      Pages 199-220

    4. Exception Rules: Contemporary Political Theory and the Police

      • Klaus Mladek
      Pages 221-265

  7. Back Matter

    Pages 267-277
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Keywords

About this book

This collection focuses on the cultural history of the police as an institution from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Contrary to most studies on the law and the state, Police Forces demonstrates how profoundly modern democracies are enveloped by more informal and less codified modes of social control. In a time when the rule of law appears to be on the retreat, 'police studies' emerges as a field in its own right. This volume helps stake out this new discipline, including the intricate link between police and the law, 'might' and 'right,' state violence, surveillance technologies, politics and resistance. Police Forces considers the question of law and order from below: alleyways, borders, police stations, law offices, bureaucracies, and the minds of administrators, in which the quotidian workings of the law unfold.

Reviews

'It is unusual for a collection of essays to form such a seamless whole as in the case of Police Forces. Mladek has brought together a superb group of international scholars, whose contributions illuminate, often in startling ways, the history of the 'police' in reality and imagination. One is uncertain whether to praise the book more for the acuteness of its historical analyses or for its urgent contemporary relevance. This is an exemplary and pioneering contribution that will have a major impact on work in cultural studies.' - David E. Wellbery, University of Chicago

'By tracing the history of modern police activity, largely through a German lens, this illuminating volume helps us understand the central and expanding role of policing.More than law or even war-making, policing may be emerging as the primary field for the exercise of power in contemporary society.' - Michael Hardt, Duke University

About the authors

KLAUS MLADEK is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College, USA.

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