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.

Autorentext
KLAUS MLADEK is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College, USA.

Inhalt
Police versus Politics; K.Mladek War-A Fortuitous Occasion for social Disciplining and Political Centralization? The Case of Bavaria under Maximilian I; S.Haude State Desire. On the Epoch of Police; J.Vogl Is it useful to deceive the people? Secrecy and Deception as Political Resources; M.Schweska A City Tracks a Murderer: Mass Murder and Mass Public in Weimar Germany; T.Herzog Nurturing the New Republic; S.Hall How Fat Detectives Think; S.Gilman 'Passer à l'acte': Policing in the Office. Notes on Industry Standards and the Große Polizeiausstellung of 1926; S.Spieker Hitchcock's Truth or Why The Wrong Man is not a Suspense Film; H.von.Herrmann Exception Rules: Contemporary Political Theory and the Police; K.Mladek Police, Paranoia, and Theater in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland; M.Puchner A Critique of Community Policing; W.Lyons