A critical theory of police power : the fabrication of the social order

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. "Since its first publication twenty years ago, A Critical Theory of Police Power has been one of the most powerful and wide-ranging Marxist analyses of the subject. Unravelling the rise of policing alongside the history of capitalism, Mark Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police power, one that situates the everyday practices of police forces within the wider fabric of the capitalist state. The heart of policing is not the management of surplus populations or criminal classes, but the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By putting police power in the context of capital and the state, and at the heart of the policics of security, Neocleous engages in a sustained critique of the state's policing of class society through 'law and order' and the ideology of crime. This connects the discretionary violence of the police on the street with the wider administrative powers of the state and the thud of the truncheon with the dull compulsion of economic oppression"--Book cover