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The
Dual Penal State
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| What's
this?
It's an
experiment, a project-in-progress page (PiPP), which ...
traces the progress of a scholarly project online. As
papers related to the project appear online (in the usual
places, most notably SSRN),
they are integrated into the PiPP outline. The PiPP, in
other words, is the rug that holds the room together, if
that's possible while the room is still being assembled.Will
it be a book?
Yes
(paperback),
for now. But who knows what academic publishing will look
like a few years from now? Or next year, for that matter?
I don't. Papers (formerly known as "journal articles")
have moved online (as have the "journals"),
so why wouldn't longer works (formerly known as "books")?
"Articles" are being "prepublished" (and "preprinted")
online, so why shouldn't "books"? What's
it about?
For some time,
I've been puzzling over two concepts--"law" and "police."
Let's call them modes of governance. Whatever they're
called, the distinction between law and police seemed to
me to get at some interesting features of how people have
governed, and have thought and talked about governing, for
quite some time: since the days of Ancient Greece or at
least since the Enlightenment, depending on who's
counting. I wrote a book
to see whether this vague sense of significance was based
on anything resembling historical evidence; having
convinced myself, and some others, that it was, I then set
out--with the help of patient colleagues and friends--to
find a place for the distinction between law and police in
the disciplinary landscape of contemporary scholarship
and, eventually, to respond to questions like "but what
does it do?" (or its common variant "but what normative
work does it do?") and, more specifically, "why
don't you work this out in a general theory of criminal
law?" This PiPP records my ongoing attempt to address
these questions, and many others besides. The PiPP, then,
is a work in progress both because answers to existing
questions remain unsettled and because many questions have
yet to be asked. In the end, will there even be a room
that this PiPP could hold together? It's too soon to tell.What's
the point?
There are two
points, really. The obvious point is to lay out a
comprehensive critical analysis of the modern penal state
from the perspectives of law and police. The less obvious
one is to illustrate, using the state's penal power as an
example, a general approach to legal scholarship, which
regards the critical analysis of law (New Legal
Science) as complementing the critical analysis of
police (New Police Science) to
constitute a comprehensive analysis of state power (New
State Science). -- Markus Dubber
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