Definitions in police literature

The literature on government of the past two centuries is rich in definitions of police. But many of these definitions are pompous and simplistic, and none of them tells us about the role the police played in the modern history of Europe. They are useful at best to make us see how the general concept of police has gradually changed during this period. Thus, under the influence of enlightened rationalism Joseph von Sonnenfels, the Austrian political economist, in 1765 called police a “science that teaches us how to create and cater to the domestic security of the state.” His contemporary, the Hanoverian publicist Johann von Justi, while basically of like mind, preferred to stress the benevolent side of royai despotism: “Police in the strict sense refers to everything needed for the maintenance of civil life, thus for discipline and order and well-being among the subjects in the towns, and for the growth of the peasantry.”

Today, these eighteenth–century definitions strike us as implausible because of their ready assumption that man has the intellectual power to devise a harmoniously policed society. (If Adam Smith can postulate an “economic man” to teach us how to increase the wealth of nations, they seem to say, why might not cameralist postulate a “policeable man” to explain the best way to free society from civil disorder?)