Law and Police as Modes of Governance

Abstract

Part I of Dual Penal State investigated various ways in which criminal law doctrine and scholarship (or “science”) have failed to address the challenge of legitimating penal power in a modern liberal democratic state. Part II explores an alternative approach to criminal law discourse that puts the legitimacy challenge of modern penal law front and center: critical analysis of criminal law in a dual penal state. Dual penal state analysis differentiates between penal law and penal police, two conceptions of penal power, and state power more generally, rooted in autonomy, equality, and interpersonal respect, on one hand, and in heteronomy, hierarchy, and patriarchal power, on the other. Chapter 3 introduces the distinction between law and police as fundamental modes of governance rooted in the beginnings of Western political history, the Greek city-state and its distinctions between (public) agora and (private) oikos, and between (subject) oikonomikos and (object) oikos.