Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution (Studies in European Culture and History)

Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Introduction: Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution......Page 12 I. Beginnings......Page 22 1 War—A Fortuitous Occasion for Social Disciplining and Political Centralization? The Case of Bavaria under Maximilian I......Page 24 2 “Is It Useful to Deceive the People?”: Secrecy and Deception as Political Resources......Page 36 3 State Desire: On the Epoch of the Police......Page 58 II. Police and Culture......Page 86 4 Nurturing the New Republic: The Contested Feminization of Law Enforcement in Weimar Culture......Page 88 5 A City Tracks a Murderer: Mass Murder and Mass Public in Weimar Germany......Page 108 6 How Fat Detectives Think......Page 134 III. Police and the Media......Page 156 7 “Passer à l’acte”: Policing (in) the Office: Notes on Industry Standards and the Große Polizeiausstellung of 1926......Page 158 8 Hitchcock’s Truth, or: Why The Wrong Man Is Not a Suspense Film......Page 178 IV. Contemporary Investigations......Page 190 9 Police, Paranoia, and Theater in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland......Page 192 10 A Critique of Community Policing......Page 210 11 Exception Rules: Contemporary Political Theory and the Police......Page 232 Contributors......Page 278 C......Page 282 F......Page 283 J......Page 284 O......Page 285 P......Page 286 S......Page 287 Z......Page 288

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.

'Police Forces' is an interdisciplinary study of the representation of police in culture, theory and literature from the 16th to the 20th century. It promotes the emergence of police studies as a field of sustained analysis, unearthing the historical thrust that gave credence to the rise of modern administrative rationality Police Forces is an interdisciplinary study on the representation of police in culture, theory and literature from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.