The image of the meddler – of the state as prone to interfere in matters that are none of its business and to do so to the detriment of those whose business these matters are – is an apt place to begin our enquiry into the various modes of state scepticism and the cumulative critique of state policing they provide. This is so because the meddling metaphor can be taken as foundational in three distinct though interrelated senses. First, it is foundational in a historical sense. As we shall see, and as is important to our overall argument, the origins of the modern state and its coercive power are inextricably bound up with the origins of critical thinking about the modern state and its coercive power. The development of the modern state is closely linked to the secularization of authority, and in that very process of secularization we see both the intensification of the burden of justification of political rule and the emergence of new forms of such justification. In particular, one important new species of political justification, including the justification of the policing function of the modern state, comprised those normative schemes which saw legitimate rule as conditional upon and limited by the interests of those individuals over whom such rule came to be exercised – and which therefore contained a strong sense of the illegitimate potential of the state form if, where and when it did not respect these individual-centred limits.

Secondly, the meddling metaphor remains sociologically foundational.