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Rethinking the philosophical grounds of police power, Melayna Lamb argues that traditional ideas of sovereignty and the law need to be radically re-evaluated. In placing police at the centre of analysis this book demonstrates the manner in which police power exists in a complex and overlapping relationship with sovereignty and law in a form which is not reducible to implementation. In doing this it argues for the centrality of order in any consideration of police and challenging a common narrative whereby a dynamic, interventionist sovereign power that follows from a belief of order as 'artificial' is replaced by a liberal, limited non-interventionist sovereign power that proceeds from a 'natural' order. Moving through thinkers such as Hobbes, Hegel and Adam Smith the book argues that police power is in fact
an-archic in form, in a manner that makes it impossible to hold accountable through the law.
Lamb adopts an interdisciplinary approach that turns to philosophy to make sense of global events that see police power at their centre. This includes the history of police brutality in the US, the structural injustices made more apparent by COVID-19 and the growing calls to abolish the police.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction Sovereign Police? Oikonomia The end of Oikonomia? The Argument The Structure Prologue: Foucault, Smith and Disappearing PoliceArchaeology and Order Biopolitics, Discipline and Order Order: Physis or Nomos? 1. Sovereignty and Fear: Hobbes and the Production of Order The Political Animal vs. the Wolf (Dis)order, Teleology and the Life of the State Living and Living WellThe Splitting of Power 2. Hegel and Police: On the Relation between Universal and Particular The Hegelian State Hegel's Polizei Fichte's Police Hegel on Fichte's Police Polizei, Police, Police-Power Violence, Nature and Hegel's Emergency3. Law, Sovereignty and the Exception: Benjamin and Modern PoliceSchmitt's SovereignThe Transcendent made Immanent: Benjamin's responseViolence and CritiqueBenjamin's PoliceForce of Law4. The Anarchy of Order: Agamben and the PoliceDivided Power and OikonomiaFate, Government and Collateral EffectsThe Signature of OrderThe An-archic Character of Police PowerPotentiality, Exceptionality, Police5. da Silva: Nature, Necessity and ViolenceThe Racial and the ModernPolice Power and Colonial BoomerangsRevisiting the State of NatureTime and Anti-Black ViolenceConcluding RemarksBibliography
About the author
Melayna Kay Lamb is a Lecturer at the University of Law, UK.
