This chapter explores the contrast between Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement as a natural experiment in comparative policing. I look at the different roles played by police within the larger historical dynamics of these two events. My goal is to distinguish the democratic qualities of Taiwanese policing from the more authoritarian qualities evident in Hong Kong. I develop a theoretical framework for analyzing this distinction by combining Peter Manning’s idea of police dramaturgy with Victor Turner’s theory of social dramas and Carl von Clausewitz’ approach to violent politics. This perspective, I argue, helps illuminate how the democratic qualities of police action in response to unsettling events can influence the longer historical/structural patterns linking what comes after to what went before.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

Metapragmatic comments, that is, comments that reflect the understandings of speakers or lay observers regarding the ways and aims for which the language is used, are one of the main means of access to native ideas on im/politeness in corpus languages. This chapter analyses the metapragmatic comments on im/politeness that can be identified in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, as a mean to understand the Roman conceptions of im/politeness (that is, the emic perspective of this phenomenon), and the social and moral order underlying those conceptions. This approach facilitates a more detailed and integrated analysis of the speaker’s intentions and/or the interpretation of a particular utterance as polite (or impolite or overpolite) by the addressee, whether or not there are linguistic markers to indicate this intention.

In Jordan, social order has historically emerged as a result of the regime’s laws, policies and institutions, but also as a result of practices established and modified from above and below. This chapter lays the ground for the book’s subsequent examination of how the Public Security Directorate intervenes into citizens’ lives and how citizens have recourse to the police, by tracing the emergence of several hegemonic projects in the Kingdom. These projects are largely grounded in the nature of patron–client alliances forged since the establishment of the modern state between the Hashemites and the East Bank Transjordanian population on the one hand, and Western liberal democracies on the other. Whilst uneven and increasingly amalgamated, these alliances have supported the dissemination of a tribal order, which for several decades enjoyed a large degree of hegemonic consent. and more recently a ‘neoliberal-civic’ order, which is facing an appreciable counter-hegemonic pushback from below and paradoxically fostering an increased reliance on kinship networks.

Scholars of authoritarian resilience are often preoccupied with studying macro-events and institutions to explain regime durability. This book has, however, argued that studying the more mundane practices embodied in police management of common interpersonal disputes and problems can tell us much more about the social order that underscores regime survival, and about challenges to that order. This concluding chapter of the book considers the rise of ‘neoliberal securitised policing’ which has resulted from Jordan’s opening up over recent decades to globalisation and privatisation, and the increased importance the regime has accorded militant (and often Islamist) threats to national security. These trends clearly invite comparative and transnational analysis, but ultimately, it is argued, their iterations in the Jordanian context can be best understood at the micro-level, using a legal anthropology lens. The chapter also reiterates the utility of using a Gramscian framework to understand the construction, and undermining, of social order, in which a variety of strategies are used to arrive at consent.

This introductory chapter outlines the problem of social order and the main argument of the book: that the question of what holds complex and diverse societies together has become – and has remained – a philosophical puzzle in modern political science, a presupposition that has been built into our concepts, theories, and normative commitments. Having outlined the argument, the contents and the structure of the book, the chapter then provides a short background for the problem of social order in political science. The chapter recalls how this problem emerged as such in modern social and political discourse in the evolution of the modern concepts of state, nation, and society and discusses how the relations among these concepts provided nineteenth-century political thought with a solution to the problem of social order predicated on a fusion of nationality and statehood.

In this concluding chapter, I first bring the story up to date by briefly considering influential developments since the 1990s, especially theories of governance and theories of group identity, which variously reiterate the problem of social order. I then argue that instead of positing, again and again, social order as a presupposition for political inquiry, social order should be turned into an object of political inquiry. To that end, I conclude, we may well need other conceptual and theoretical resources than those provided by the tradition of social science that is the subject of this book. Accepting the social ontology of complexity and diversity on which this tradition has been predicated does not compel us to keep relying on concepts and theories marked by the problem of social order.

This chapter uses Adler’s analysis of power to unpack his political and explanatory theory by making two claims. First, Adler’s understanding of power accentuates the agentic components of power – and hence order – and downgrades the role of domination in social order. Whereas his ontology would allow for a wider conception, his communitarian political theory does not. Second, in his explanatory theory, power (as ‘epistemic practical authority’) becomes a central cause for understanding the evolution of social orders. Yet, assuming evolution to be constituted by contingent and contextual processes that remain indeterminate, epistemic practical authority cannot carry this causal weight.

delves more deeply into the role of biopolitics in community formation by studying, via criminal court records, how policy makers in practice connected or associated physical health threats to those to morality and social order. The convergence is particularly clear for three themes: poverty, leprosy and sexuality. These topics convey social groups who were each affected by a vision of a healthy, orderly and prosperous community. Policing the common good through targeting these groups was in many ways the same as performing community: it helped constituting civic conduct and moral leadership. Besides accentuating public health as a factor, the aim of this chapter is to show that the same system of reasoning and perception of community shaped attitudes toward each of these groups or issues. This reasoning was for the most part based on a medical, Galenic worldview, which is best summarised by the notion of dynamic balance. Balance can be understood as a tool in biopolitics, and it worked on two levels: the practical and the metaphorical. Analysing these two levels demonstrates how urban authorities integrated the eradication of sin as a part of their program to protect communal health.

In a number of colourful episodes, Cassius Dio narrates the behaviour and fates of the Roman collective. He treats it as a symbolic entity that serves to illustrate the state of the Roman political community under monarchic rule, from the dynasteiai through the Severans. Inextricably linked to their rulers like limbs to the head, the Roman ‘people’ is the first victim of their vices and the ultimate judge of their character. The Roman collective is portrayed as a sentient organism, ideally solemn and passive but stirred to restless, destructive action by perverse events. All such events ultimately emanate from the emperors, and the people’s behaviour is thus a direct reflection of their character. ‘People’ scenes form part of the biographies of autocrats and represent Dio’s own creative additions. They are not a source to the historical roles and actions of the actual people of Rome, but a literary device used as a means to narrate a larger, moral truth about Rome’s political leadership.

Chapter eight tackles the question of legitimacy and public support. The cases of the Front de Libération de Québec in Canada and the Colombian M-19 demonstrate the detrimental effect of losing public support, especially when the loss is caused by strategic mistakes of the group itself. The Canadian case points to the idea, important for policy and practice in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency, that sometimes group legitimacy is beyond the control of any wilful action but the result of coincidence and (bad) luck. This also forms the first hypothesis on de-escalation.

Justice is the central feature of political ethics in Islamicate contexts. Nearly all of the sultans of India made justice the cornerstone of their political ethics. Justice was highlighted in nearly all forms of courtly literary production. Where did the ethical norms of justice come from? This chapter treats how the example of the pre-Islamic Persian kings served as a principal model of the just king.

This chapter examines the portrayal of Scripture as miraculously transcendent of history, human activity, and material conditions in Francis Bacon’s utopian narrative New Atlantis. It considers how this imagined Bible founds a mode of social organization oriented towards human mastery over created nature. Drawing on Maurice Blondel’s concept of “extrinsicism,” which describes a stark separation of revelation from its human and historical mediations, this chapter analyzes the significance of this transcendent Bible, including the displacement of human agency, history, and culture from its production and transmission. This chapter argues that the social organization oriented to the acquisition and implementation of natural knowledge imagined by Bacon is enabled by the seemingly secularizing boundaries between revelation and reason, and theology and philosophy, which this miraculous Bible establishes. However, the apparently secularizing consequences of a wholly transcendent Bible are disrupted when considered in the larger frame of Baconian philosophy, which in fundamental ways retains a theological conception of nature and of the social organization needed to harness its power.

Winston argues that Lon Fuller’s critique of legal positivism was rather special in focusing on issues that lay beneath the surface of the usual intramural disputes, and thus related only indirectly to what positivists, such as Kelsen and Hart, said explicitly when expounding their views. Winston explains that, as a pragmatist, Fuller largely eschewed conceptual or semantic questions, focusing instead on questions of methodology and governance, in particular the adequacy of a scientific approach to understanding human society and the role played by agency and purpose in ordering civic life. In a phrase, Fuller faulted legal positivists for encouraging the kind of social engineering perspective reflected in bureaucratic/regulatory states. The importance of a pragmatic jurisprudence – and its superiority over other social sciences – lies precisely in the practical experience and concerns which lawyers possess (and other social scientists lack) and which they bring to bear in fashioning the participatory social architecture that is better at protecting human freedom.