state monopolisation thesis

Security: History, Genealogy, Ideology

• First Online: 23 June 2022

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• Francis Dodsworth 2  

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This chapter explores the temporal and disciplinary boundaries of security. Although the language of ‘security’ only became prominent in criminological work in the last twenty years, the concepts of ‘security’, prevention, and sets of practices associated with ‘taming the future’ in the fields of crime, vice and disorder, nevertheless have a long history. However, the nature of that history and its interpretation are contested, and it has only recently begun to be explored in detail. This chapter introduces important features of the histories of policing, crime prevention and protection, and their transformation over the modern period, but in doing so, it also guides the reader through academic debates about the significance of these developments. Particularly important themes are the relationship between the state and private security; security and protection as forms of power or hegemony; the moral and the technical dimensions of security; and the dynamics of ideology, identity and politics, particularly articulated in relation to (neo)liberalism, capitalism and feminism. These themes are related to particular methodological approaches to, or uses of, the history of security: criminological work inspired by Michel Foucault; neo-Marxist critiques of security; and more historicist approaches based around more conventional historical research as a means of engaging in criminological debate, increasingly being termed ‘historical criminology’.

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Dodsworth, F. (2022). Security: History, Genealogy, Ideology. In: Gill, M. (eds) The Handbook of Security. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91735-7_2

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Rethinking the state monopolisation thesis : the historiography of policing and criminal justice in nineteenth-century England

• D. Churchill
• Published 1 July 2014
• Political Science
• Crime, history and societies

23 Citations

Police et ordre public en france et en angleterre (1750-1850). les perspectives de l’historiographie contemporaine. introduction, narratives of crime and disorder : representations of robbery and burglary in the london press, 1780-1830, against the rising tide of crime: cesare lombroso and control of the “dangerous classes” in italy, 1861-1940, police–public relations in transition in antwerp, 1840s–1914, crime, histoire & sociétés / crime, history & societies, vol. 22, n°2 | 2018, a historical perspective on crime control and private security: a belgian case study, preventing the parade: the party processions acts in ireland and canada, belle epoque in arms armed associations and processes of democratization in pre-1914 europe, institutionalising , c. 1800–1900, history, periodization and the character of contemporary crime control, 105 references, ideologies, structures, and contingencies: writing the history of british criminal justice since 1975, history, criminology and the ‘use’ of the past, state, civil society, and total institutions: a critique of recent social histories of punishment, a poor man's system of justice: the london police courts in the second half of the nineteenth century, inferior politics: social problems and social policies in eighteenth-century britain, the unloved state: twentieth-century politics in the writing of nineteenth-century history, crime, policing and control in leeds, c1830-1890.

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Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies

Accueil Numéros Vol. 18, n°1 Forum Rethinking the state monopolisati...

Rethinking the state monopolisation thesis : the historiography of policing and criminal justice in nineteenth-century England

Cet article examine la manière dont les historiens ont interprété l’évolution de la relation entre la criminalité, l’action de la police et l’État dans l’Angleterre du XIX e siècle. Plus spécifiquement, il retrace l’influence de la thèse de la monopolisation par l’État – l’idée d’une « société policée ». Le poids de ce modèle est évalué en comparant des travaux relatifs à la justice pénale des XVIII e et XIX e siècles, et en pointant les discontinuités frappantes dans la manière dont ils ont traité certaines questions-clés. L’article présente ensuite une critique de la thèse de la monopolisation étatique, avant de dégager les priorités des recherches à venir. Ces orientations nouvelles devraient conduire à une vision plus sophistiquée de la gouvernance de la criminalité dans l’Angleterre moderne, et amener l’histoire pénale du XIX e siècle à étudier l’expérience vécue des gens ordinaires.

This article reviews how historians have interpreted the changing relationship between crime, policing and the state in nineteenth-century England. Specifically, it traces the influence of the state monopolisation thesis – the idea of the ‘policed society’. The impact of this model is assessed by comparing studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century criminal justice, and exposing stark discontinuities in their treatments of key subjects. This article proceeds to critique the state monopolisation thesis, before outlining priorities for further research. These new directions promise to lead to a more sophisticated account of the governance of crime in modern England, and to return nineteenth-century criminal justice history to the study of ordinary people and their lived experiences.

Notes de l’auteur

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the ‘work in progress’ seminar of the International Centre for the History of Crime, Policing and Justice at The Open University on 21 July 2010. I am grateful to the attendees for their reflections on my argument. I would also like to thank those who have discussed these issues with me at greater length, especially my supervisors Paul Lawrence and Ros Crone, as well as Jennifer Davis, Francis Dodsworth, Clive Emsley, Vic Gatrell, Pete King, Chris Williams, and three anonymous readers for this journal.

Texte intégral

Introduction.

1 On modernisation narratives and the nineteenth century, see Price (1999, introduction).

• 2 This essay does not, therefore, provide a comprehensive summary of major work on nineteenth-century (...)

1 The nineteenth century occupies a key conceptual space in the historiography of crime and justice. As in so many fields of social experience, it witnessed manifold changes which, retrospectively, seem to herald the arrival of ‘modern’ arrangements. 1 One might cite, for example, the abolition of public bodily punishments, or the accumulation of criminal statistics. This essay, however, reviews a particular conception of modern law-enforcement, which has long been central to criminal justice history. 2 This is the state monopolisation thesis : the idea that the governance of crime transferred from the people to the police in the nineteenth century. This interpretation found several enthusiastic subscribers amongst pioneering historians of crime, yet moreover, it continues to shape the terms of debate in histories of nineteenth-century crime and justice, most of which as a consequence remain skewed towards state institutions.

2 This article starts by explicating the state monopolisation thesis, through the writings of various theorists who propounded the idea, before exploring how its central claims became integrated into social histories of crime. After reviewing the ambiguous position of this idea in the current historiography, there follows an analysis of certain key subjects in criminal justice history, which demonstrates that similar assumptions about the role of the state in crime control have long structured research on nineteenth-century criminal justice. The subsequent section mounts an extended critique of the state monopolisation thesis, based upon both its inherent deficiencies and its present historiographical incongruity. The remainder of this essay proceeds to chart a few broad directions for future research, which together promise to provide a fresh perspective on the chronology of criminal justice history, and to reorient historical studies of crime in modern England in stimulating and profitable ways.

The state monopolisation thesis

3 From the 1960s onwards, there emerged a collection of abstract, theoretical accounts of the transformation of criminal justice in modern times, which advanced a consistent narrative of historical change. The contributors were social scientists who, adapting well established modernisation narratives, emphasised the state’s assumption of unprecedented dominion over crime control in the transition to industrial capitalism. Each of these studies approached the problem in its own distinctive fashion, and characterised the development in unique terms. They all, however, presented a common narrative : as part of the modernisation process, power to determine the response to crime was removed from the hands of the civilian public, and entrusted exclusively to state agencies and the formal criminal justice system. These theorists were all, therefore, proponents of a particular interpretation of modern crime control – the state monopolisation thesis. This section explores some prominent statements of this position, before demonstrating how several social historians came to interpret the course of crime history in precisely the same fashion.

3 Silver (1967, p. 8)

4 Ibid. , pp. 9-12.

4 The version of the state monopolisation thesis most familiar to historians is probably Allan Silver’s account of the ‘policed society’. In a trailblazing essay much cited by early social historians of crime, Silver argued that a key role of the modern police was to relieve ‘ordinary respectable citizens of the obligation or necessity to discharge police functions’. 3 Before the nineteenth century, members of the elite were personally responsible for the administration of policing and the criminal law, which exposed the social order to acute strain in times of riot. By the early 1800s, the ruling class had grown increasingly demoralised under this burden – the emerging commercial and industrial elite especially so – and so threw their weight behind a ‘bureaucratic police system’. This led in turn to the imposition of a quite novel, impersonal regime of discipline : in place of elite personal authority, which had secured communal order in the pre-modern era, came direct rule by professional police forces, which ensured social stability in the industrial age. 4

5 Spitzer, Scull (1977, pp. 276-283).

6 Ibid. , p. 281.

5 While Silver was chiefly concerned with the state’s enlarged claims to maintain public order, others focused centrally on the response to crime itself. Ten years later, Steven Spitzer and Andrew Scull similarly argued that the formation of capitalist market relations in the early nineteenth century swept away the communal social relations which had sustained eighteenth-century criminal justice, and called forth heightened demands for public order and preventative policing. 5 This led in turn to the socialisation of crime control : over the course of the nineteenth century, ‘the management of crime was rationalised and transformed into a responsibility of the state.’ 6 Spitzer later explicated the consequences of this seismic transition at somewhat greater length :

7 Spitzer (1979, p. 200). Under the spur of the rationalization process, proprietary, hereditary, and other pre-bureaucratic forms of indirect rule were gradually replaced by hierarchically organized “public” organizations. These organizations, which came to include what we know today as the criminal justice system, were specially designed to achieve a more thorough and effective penetration of subject populations and to remain more responsive to the dictates of central authority. 7

8 Christie (1977, pp. 1-5).

6 Although he framed the issue in rather less conventional terms, criminologist Nils Christie made the same essential argument. He asserted that, during industrialisation, western states and an army of lawyers stole criminal ‘conflicts’ from their citizens, thereby relegating the victim of crime to the margins of the criminal justice process. 8 This formed part of his more general view, that the rise of industrial capitalism had sapped ordinary people of the capacity to participate in the governance of social life and to shape their own futures :

9 Ibid. , p. 7, original emphasis. [h]ighly industrialised societies face major problems in organising their members in ways such that a decent quota take part in any activity at all…In this perspective, it will easily be seen that [criminal] conflicts represent a potential for activity, for participation . Modern criminal control systems represent one of the many cases of lost opportunities for involving citizens in tasks that are of immediate importance to them. Ours is a society of task-monopolists. 9

Christie’s essay is best remembered as a foundational document in the restorative justice movement : it issued a call to return criminal conflicts to the people, and so to bring the victim centre stage in the judicial process. For present purposes, however, it was but one formulation of a familiar narrative of policing and crime control during the birth of the modern state.

10 Lenman, Parker (1980, pp. 34-38).

11 Ibid . , p. 44.

7 Pioneering historians of crime rapidly imbibed this common narrative of modernisation, rationalisation and monopolisation. The idea that the modern state progressively assumed control over the response to crime – to the exclusion of the people – formed part of the discipline’s early common sense. Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker thus plotted the transition from ‘community’ to ‘state’ law in Europe, driven by urbanisation, the erosion of ‘face-to-face’ communities, and the growing gulf between rich and poor. 10 This process came to fruition, they argued, with the expansion of state authority after the French Revolution : through sweeping reforms in policing and punishment, ‘the state’s control over the everyday lives of its subjects…grew ever closer’. 11 Dealing specifically with England, Douglas Hay and Francis Snyder agreed that the arrival of the new police, and their supposed assumption of the power to prosecute, nurtured an increasingly intrusive nineteenth-century state :

12 Hay, Snyder (1989, p. 51). [t]he broad purposes of Peel and Chadwick were ultimately realised, and it is incontestable that they advocated a new kind of state power : rationally planned, publicly funded, bureaucratically controlled, centrally directed, and reaching into every neighbourhood which might secrete crime and disorder…Control of prosecution means in large measure control of the power embodied in the criminal law. The police came largely to control prosecution : the issue henceforth was to be who controlled the police. 12

13 Gatrell (1990, pp. 257-260).

Finally, Vic Gatrell charted the formation of a nineteenth-century police bureaucracy – the ‘policeman-state’ – which assumed an ever-increasing capacity to identify and target new objects of power. 13 In the process, it vanquished private and communal alternatives to its own supremacy :

14 Gatrell (1980, p.  244). as the [nineteenth] century wore on the English judicial system came very near to as total a regulation of even petty – let alone serious – deviance as has ever been achieved. A professional police and in some urban centres a professional magistracy were diminishing the opportunities for informal justice and extra-judicial settlement of the kind so common in earlier eras. 14

• 15 Philips (1977, pp. 59-61) ; Field (1981, pp. 47-50) ; Emsley (1983, pp. 71-73). For similar work on (...)

16 Ignatieff (1983a, p. 190).

8 Of course, few historians would nowadays assent to such sweeping statements. Since the 1980s, scholars have become increasingly sceptical as to whether the early nineteenth-century criminal justice reforms marked a radical departure from previous arrangements. In particular, studies of the new police forces repeatedly highlighted their continuities with the supposedly corrupt and inefficient bodies which they replaced. 15 In this respect, researchers implicitly questioned those confident theories of state monopolisation, by demonstrating that the new police were unlikely agents of disruptive modernisation in crime control. More directly, several scholars challenged the state monopolisation thesis on a more abstract level. Michael Ignatieff argued that pioneering historians had been lured into an almost exclusive focus on the state by its mythical monopoly over punitive practice. He understood that histories of punishment – like those of police – were locked into a simplistic dichotomy between the pre-modern and the modern, the ‘customary’ and the ‘bureaucratic’. 16 In response, he urged researchers to look beyond state institutions :

17 Ignatieff (1983a, pp. 205-206 ; 1979, pp. 444-445 ; 1983b, pp. 170-171). [w]e have always known that prisons and the courts handled only a tiny fraction of delinquency known to the police – now we must begin, if we can, to uncover the network which handled the ‘dark figure’[,] which recovered stolen goods, visited retribution on known villains, demarcated the respectable and hid the innocent and delivered up the guilty. 17

18 Sugarman (1983, pp. 224-230).

19 Sharpe (1988, p. 132) ; Knafla (1996, pp. 37-39).

20 Zedner (2006, pp. 81-82).

David Sugarman’s contemporaneous analysis of private law made parallel criticisms, 18 and in due course other leading scholars came to bemoan the paucity of research on informal, non-state criminal justice in the nineteenth century. 19 Most recently, Lucia Zedner has asserted that the new police’s monopoly over crime control was only ever ‘symbolic’. 20 At least amongst historians, the state monopolisation thesis clearly no longer enjoys its former status as the master narrative of modern criminal justice history.

• 21 However, two unpublished studies address this question more directly than most : Davis (1984a) ; Ba (...)

9 Yet if historians have long understood that the state monopolisation thesis is a flawed narrative, they have done little to challenge its claims directly. Surprisingly, no researcher has yet set out to evaluate empirically the extent to which the nineteenth-century state assumed control over the governance of crime. 21 One is therefore left primarily to infer the deficiencies of the ‘policeman-state’ argument from work on the shortcomings of the new police. However, just because the new police did not mark a clear break from previous forms of police organisation, it does not necessarily follow that they were an inadequate means of establishing substantive state control over the response to crime. In other words, in the absence of dedicated research on how crime was dealt with in practice, there remains no adequate challenge to the notion of the ‘policed society’.

• 22 Emsley (1996a, p.  259). Others to repeat the same basic argument in recent times include D.J.V. Jon (...)

10 Furthermore, although historians are rightly suspicious of the state monopolisation thesis, they have yet to formulate a satisfactory alternative. Perhaps for this reason, despite all the criticism it has attracted, the essential claims of monopolisation theory have been repeated by several scholars, including those usually critical of the likes of Hay and Gatrell. Thus, for Clive Emsley too, ‘[t]he development of bureaucratic, professional policing in the century and a half following 1829 also saw a marked decline in public vigilance and participation in the pursuit of offenders…the detection and prevention of crime had become their [the police’s] job as the professionals.’ 22 This model remains the default position of some historians because recent work has tended to sidestep such broad issues as the relationship between crime control and the modern state. Persuaded by the critiques of Ignatieff and others, most historians have instead eschewed such grand questions altogether. In so doing, they have perhaps forgotten that Ignatieff’s piece was not just a critique, but also a call for further research, and for a change of direction in criminal justice history. Therefore, by avoiding the challenge presented by the state monopolisation thesis, historians have missed an opportunity to probe more deeply the issues it raises, and to situate their work in a broader perspective.

11 Perhaps more surprisingly, there remain ways in which the state monopolisation thesis, for all the criticism it has attracted, continues to structure research into modern criminal justice history. While a few scholars have stood by the basic narrative of state monopolisation, its most enduring legacy is more subtle, in informing the shape of the literature as a whole. Specifically, most studies of nineteenth-century criminal justice focus overwhelmingly on state institutions of policing and punishment, and thereby neglect the role of civil society and private individuals in determining the response to crime. This structural imbalance in the historiography means that although most historians no longer subscribe to the state monopolisation thesis as such, they nonetheless remain preoccupied by those aspects of the criminal justice process which monopolisation theorists sought to privilege. In order to demonstrate the consequences of this emphasis on the state for our understanding of particular issues, the following section contrasts the treatment of key subjects in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century criminal justice history. In their studies of criminal statistics, discretion and attitudes towards criminal justice, historians of these two periods are guided by rather different assumptions about the nature of law-enforcement in the past, and the extent to which it was driven by the priorities of the state or of ordinary people.

From ‘golden age’ to ‘policed society’

• 23 Beattie (1986, pp.   199-202). For his earlier reflections upon potential distortions in the data, se (...)

24 Beattie (1986, chapter five).

25 Hay (1982, pp.   150-52).

26 King (2000, pp.   130-34).

27 Ibid. , chapter five.

28 Including juvenile offenders : see King ( 2006a, pp. 106-110).

12 In the study of criminal statistics, analysts are usually tasked with discerning ‘real’ trends in law-breaking from the autonomous ‘control’ effect of law-enforcement. For historians of the eighteenth century, the central ‘control’ variable is the propensity of victims of crime to prosecute. John Beattie, who offered the first extensive analysis of crime rates in this period, recognised that indictment rates were the product of complex negotiations between criminals and victims, and so were vulnerable to distortion by variations in prosecutorial practice. 23 He resolved, however, that long-term studies could nonetheless uncover the deep structural factors which influenced criminal offending, including the impact of war, economic performance and the urban environment. 24 Hay went a little further, arguing that the absence of professional police forces safeguarded eighteenth-century statistics against gross misrepresentation by ‘control’ factors or political manipulation. 25 Others, however, were more troubled by the impact of prosecutorial decision-making upon the statistical record. King argued that the ‘dark figure’ of unrecorded crime was so large that even small changes in victims’ willingness to prosecute would leave a telling impression upon the statistical record. 26 On this basis, he disputed any straightforward connection between dearth and theft in this period, 27 and even used indictment rates to chart changing public attitudes towards particular classes of criminal (rather than ‘real’ levels of offending). 28 Historians of the eighteenth century thus divide over the extent to which fluctuations in criminal statistics reflect changes in law-breaking or prosecutorial response.

• 29 Though note that some scholars have used the statistics to rather different ends : see for example (...)

30 Gatrell (1980, pp. 243, 247-249).

31 Gatrell, Hadden (1972, pp. 355-357) ; Philips (1977, pp. 133-135).

32 Tobias (1972, pp. 298-302).

33 H. Taylor (1998).

34 Morris (2001, p. 113).

35 Ibid. (pp. 119-123).

13 While students of nineteenth-century crime rates have grappled with similar issues, 29 they have for the most part been preoccupied by a quite different ‘control’ effect – the impact of formal policing. This is not to say that, in principle, they have been ignorant of other ‘control’ factors : historians have always understood that public attitudes shaped the statistics, 30 and have pointed to the impact of changes in criminal justice administration upon crime rates. 31 However, debate about possible distortions in nineteenth-century statistics has otherwise centred predominantly on the effects of changes in police policy. John Tobias, for example, essentially reduced the explanation of local fluctuations in indictable crime rates to changes in police leadership. 32 More recently, the dispute over police manipulation of criminal returns has contributed to a perception of nineteenth-century law-enforcement as a game in which the police hold all the cards. Howard Taylor thus asserted that crime rates were rationed by a cost-sensitive Exchequer, and by police chiefs concerned to present impressive ‘clear-up’ rates. 33 While his analysis has been rejected by several scholars, it is remarkable that none have explicitly objected to the assumption that the power to criminalise rests near-exclusively with the police. Although Robert Morris noted in passing that there was ‘no state monopoly of prosecution’, 34 he largely concerned himself with the lack of direct evidence to support Taylor’s thesis. 35 Such work gives the impression that priorities in nineteenth-century criminal justice were dictated from ‘above’ (by the police), rather than delivered from ‘below’ (by the people). This is directly opposite to the impression one gains from eighteenth-century scholarship. As a consequence, the victim of crime goes from being a key character in eighteenth-century studies to all but disappearing from view in the age of the new police.

• 36 King (1984 , pp. 29-34 ; 2000, pp. 35-39) ; Beattie (1986, pp. 8-10, 193-196) ; King (2004, pp.   144- (...)

37 See Hay (1989 , pp. 354-360).

38 Beattie (1986, pp.   39-40) ; King (2000, pp.   22-27).

39 King (2000, p.   17).

14 Underlying these divergent views of the ‘control’ factor are contrary assessments of discretion in the criminal justice process. Scholars of the eighteenth century have long emphasised the importance of decision-making by various parties, especially the private prosecutor. Prosecutors came from almost all ranks of eighteenth-century society : while the middling sorts made most extensive use of the criminal law, studies of the summary courts indicate that the labouring poor acted as prosecutors much more often than previously thought. 36 With the discretion to prosecute came power, and historians have long been attentive to how the poor could, in certain circumstances, use the law against their betters. 37 In an age of private prosecution, victims were afforded impressive control over the resolution of criminal encounters. Instead of going to law, they frequently resorted to various alternative sanctions. 38 Prosecution was thus the exception rather than the norm ; according to one historian, ‘the victim had immense freedom of manoeuvre’ in settling criminal matters outside of court. 39 Many have thus concluded that the eighteenth century hosted a highly participatory and discretionary process of law-enforcement.

40 See especially Inwood (1990) ; Davies, (1991, pp.   90-99) ; Petrow (1994, chapters 5-10).

• 41 Steedman (1984) ; Emsley (1996a, chapters 9-10) ; Lawrence (2000) ; Shpayer-Makov (2002) ; Clapson, (...)

15 Discretion also features in accounts of nineteenth-century crime control, yet it is usually confined to the ranks of the new police. While a few pioneering scholars risked reducing policemen almost to slavish automatons of their employers, the subsequent generation of historians has characterised the ordinary constable as discretionary law-enforcer. They have uncovered substantial evidence of beat-level compromises, which often subverted the intentions of legislators and police chiefs. 40 Furthermore, the realisation that the character of policing depended upon the attitudes of the rank-and-file has fuelled a wave of scholarship on the social history of policemen themselves. Considerable attention has thus been devoted to their outlook and occupational culture, as well as their terms of employment, working conditions and so forth. 41 This is now a specialist field in its own right, attracting scholars interested as much in labour relations as policing itself. Nevertheless, much scholarship on the beat constable remains underpinned by the assumption that discretion in the criminal justice process was effectively transferred from victim to policeman in the early nineteenth century.

42 Hay (1975a)  ; Linebaugh (1975) ; Thompson (1977).

43 Brewer, Styles (1980, pp. 15-18). See also Thompson (1977, pp. 262-66).

• 44 Langbein (1983, pp. 101-105) ; King (1984, pp. 29-34, 52-56). See also Philips (1977, pp. 127-29, 2 (...)

45 King (2000, pp. 365-367).

16 Lastly, visions of the nineteenth-century transformation in law-enforcement are embedded in research on popular reactions and responses to criminal justice. Scholars of the eighteenth century take as their subject attitudes towards the criminal law. Early research into the Game Laws and hanging rituals highlighted points of conflict between the labouring poor and elite administrators of justice. 42 Subsequent critics, however, took issue with this apparent fixation on ‘protest’ crime and class injustice : they argued that popular indignation commonly centred not on the law per se , but on the failure of elite figures to respect legal restrictions to their personal authority. 43 Meanwhile, the discovery that labouring people made substantial use of the law led some to argue that popular hostility was more moderate than first thought. 44 Indeed, over the years, historians became increasingly cautious about making broad statements on this subject, recognising that attitudes towards the law were volatile and complex ; if anything, cynicism rather than hostility was the most common sentiment. 45

46 Storch (1975 , 1976, pp. 502-508).

47 Gatrell (1990, pp. 282-87).

48 Steedman (1984, pp. 67-68).

49 Emsley (1983, pp. 151-160 ; 1996a, pp. 78-84).

50 D. Taylor (1997, chapter four, p. 138).

17 Studies of popular responses to law-enforcement in the nineteenth century, by contrast, dwell overwhelmingly on attitudes towards the police. Again, much early scholarship pointed up antagonism and conflict. Robert Storch uncovered radical political opposition to the new forces, anti-police riots, and the prevalence of assaults on police officers. 46 Gatrell maintained this decided focus upon hatred and hostility, reading the late-nineteenth-century decline of assaults on policemen as reflecting the triumph of repression rather than the flowering of consent. 47 Others, however, objected that police-public relations were far more complex than this. Carolyn Steedman argued that vicious antagonism between police and public was actually fairly muted ; instead, contempt pervaded working-class attitudes towards the police. 48 More decisively, Emsley argued that attitudes must have been contingent and contradictory, given the diversity of police duties. 49 Mindful of police discretion and operational restraint, some have even asserted that ‘policing by consent’ was in large measure achieved by the late nineteenth century. 50 In broad terms, this intellectual progression mirrors the increasingly nuanced interpretations of popular attitudes towards the eighteenth-century criminal law ; the key difference is that the police, rather than the law itself, is the subject of debate.

• 51 Miles Taylor has noticed this contrast (1997, pp. 165-166), though his analysis of its roots diverg (...)

52 See also Innes, Styles (1986, pp. 403-406).

53 Hay (1975b, p.  18).

54 Beattie (1986, pp. 35-38) ; King (2000, pp. 20-22).

55 D.J.V. Jones (1992, p. 202).

56 King (2000, p. 1).

18 We are thus faced with two distinct bodies of scholarship. While there are parallels in interpretation, the objects of interpretation are profoundly different. 51 The above studies present the eighteenth century as an age of participatory, discretionary justice, in the absence of professional police forces. 52 Classically, this accounted for the centrality of the bloody code as a means of maintaining order : ‘[i]n place of police…propertied Englishmen had a fat and swelling sheaf of laws which threatened thieves with death.’ 53 The business of law-enforcement – prosecution, but also identifying suspects and tracing stolen goods – was delegated substantively to victims of crime themselves. 54 Before the new police, as one historian has put it, ‘the victim of crime was his or her own “policeman”’. 55 Eighteenth-century criminal justice historiography thus separates law-enforcement from police activity, thrusting the victim to the heart of the analysis. The result is a view of the period as ‘the golden age of discretionary justice’. 56 Yet this settlement mutates as we approach the nineteenth century. Processes of law-enforcement are no longer the object of attention, but instead a particular state institution – the new police – dominates the historiographical landscape. The historiography of nineteenth-century criminal justice is thus in a curious position : it remains to a considerable extent skewed towards the priorities of an overarching modernisation narrative which historians have long recognised is inadequate and misleading.

A flawed narrative

• 57 A leading expert’s best guess is that there are today eleven crimes committed for every one reporte (...)

58 Gatrell (1980, pp. 250-251, original emphasis).

• 59 For an analysis of nineteenth-century crime which highlights the depth of the dark figure, see Davi (...)

19 Although few scholars now repeat the confident narrative of state monopolisation which was once commonplace, the idea of the ‘policed society’ retains a subtle influence within criminal justice history. The specific interpretation has now gone out of fashion, yet it continues to inform the kinds of questions which historians ask about crime and justice in the nineteenth century, and the way they go about answering them. It is therefore necessary to return briefly to the chief deficiencies of the monopolisation thesis itself. Firstly, there is the problem of the ‘dark figure’ of unrecorded crime, which stands as testament to innumerable independent refusals to grant the authorities jurisdiction over particular offences (and so offenders) for a variety of reasons. 57 Perhaps for this reason, Gatrell ventured to argue that the dark figure gradually receded from the mid-nineteenth century : ‘in the long term the gap between recorded and actual indictable crime narrowed , and narrowed at an acceptably constant rate…we may assert it as a principle…that the rate of recorded crime crept ever closer to the rate of actual crime.’ 58 Whatever one’s view of criminal statistics, the erosion of the dark figure is a necessary consequence of the state taking a greater effective role in responding to crime. It is therefore worth stressing that Gatrell’s assertion is pure speculation. It holds water only in that it accords with his broader view of the dramatic extension of police authority over crime control (it is in fact inferred from that more general claim). The moment we question the core monopolisation narrative, however, the dark figure returns to haunt the analysis ; in reality, of course, it never went away. 59

60 Hay, Snyder (1989, pp. 43-47).

• 61 Historians have repeatedly called for further research in this area : see Hay (1984, p. 9) ; Emsley (...)
• 62 See Davis (1989a) ; Emsley, Storch (1993, pp. 48-49, 57) ; Mellearts (2000, pp. 21-29) ; B. Godfrey (...)

20 More concretely, there is a substantial empirical hole at the heart of the state monopolisation thesis, concerning the supposed transition from private to police prosecution. The divergent priorities of crime historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rest upon the notion that the new police quickly assumed the task of law-enforcement, which depends in turn upon substantive police control over the criminal prosecution. For Hay in particular, the coming of police prosecution was crucial in dividing Victorian criminal justice from the preceding era. 60 Unfortunately, the timing and consequences of this process remain relatively poorly understood. 61 However, existing research suggests that the police directed most theft prosecutions only by the 1880s, and that charges of common assault were still routinely handled by private individuals by this point. In other words, police prosecution developed piecemeal, and there remained a significant role for victims of crime in bringing cases before magistrates. 62 Such a chequered path to police control reveals the flimsy empirical basis for the abrupt shift in the terms of historiographical reference which divides eighteenth- and nineteenth-century criminal justice history.

63 Two key early contributions in this field were Styles (1983) and Paley (1989).

64 Reynolds (1998) ; Beattie (2001) ; Harris (2004) .

65 Shoemaker (2004, chapter two) ; Smith (2006, 2007b).

66 Lemmings (2011).

67 For a critique of Smith’s thesis on these grounds, see Landau (2005).

21 Besides these specific weaknesses, the notion of a monopolistic nineteenth-century criminal justice state stands awkwardly alongside research on adjacent periods. In particular, recent reappraisals of policing before the new police challenge the conventional chronology. In recent years, several scholars have uncovered improvements in eighteenth-century policing in unprecedented detail. 63 Research on London suggests that efficient and sophisticated police organisations preceded the Metropolitan Police, 64 prompting some to backdate the narrative of police monopolisation : Robert Shoemaker argued that the apprehension of thieves became primarily a police responsibility in the final quarter of the eighteenth century, while Bruce Smith asserted that police officers had assumed control over most prosecutions by the early nineteenth century. 65 From a provincial perspective, David Lemmings has reinterpreted the long eighteenth century as an era of declining popular participation in the legal process ; by 1800, he contends, systems of governance and law-enforcement were in large measure controlled by professionals, and informed increasingly by parliamentary statute rather than common law traditions. 66 There are good grounds for disputing such broad claims, especially as most of this work (Lemmings’s aside) is based exclusively on particular parts of London. 67 Nonetheless, these revisions to the ‘classic’ view of eighteenth-century law-enforcement outlined above throw the significance of nineteenth-century police reforms into question.

68 Garland (1996). See further Garland (2001).

69 See also Reiner (1992) ; Bayley, Shearing (1996) ; Crawford (2003).

70 T. Jones, Newburn (2002).

71 See for example T. Jones (2007).

22 Meanwhile, students of contemporary policing have further complicated the conventional story of state monopolisation by charting the pluralisation of crime control responsibilities in the later twentieth century. Since the 1970s, according to David Garland, the state has progressively withdrawn from its privileged position in the provision of police protection, and sought increasingly to co-ordinate the activities of commercial security providers, community organisations and private individuals. 68 Garland’s work, which sets the reconfiguration of policing in the context of escalating crime rates and the state’s growing appreciation of its own limitations, is but the most widely read statement of a broadly accepted narrative. 69 By tracing similar developments back to the 1950s, others have trampled more substantively on the conventional view of police history. 70 This recent ‘pluralisation’ of police authorities has even led some scholars to retreat from the concept of ‘policing’ itself, in an attempt to escape the traditional state-centrism of criminology. 71 While these authors rarely question the narrative of state monopolisation under the new police, they have nevertheless further undermined the idea that direct state control over the governance of crime is the natural telos of historical development.

• 72 Martin Wiener fails to appreciate this in his analysis of the shifting priorities of modern social (...)
• 73 For helpful overviews, see Thane (1990, pp. 1-2, 34-37, 45-47) ; Mandler (2006, pp. 9-13, 18-21) ; (...)

74 Crowther (1982) ; Ross (1983) ; Vincent (1991, pp. 5-22) ; Kidd (1999).

75 Kidd (2002, pp. 328, 339-340) . See also Finlayson (1990).

23 Because most historians remain preoccupied by the police and the criminal justice system, their work rarely engages with alternative approaches to the nineteenth-century state. 72 These approaches, which are now widely discussed in other fields of social history, focus on the extensive role of voluntary institutions and private individuals in responding to social problems. 73 For instance, research on the history of welfare explores how state-sponsored relief (via the poor law) was supplemented by a whole ‘economy of makeshifts’, comprising personal savings, family assistance, charitable provision and mutual support. 74 This kind of work allows a more nuanced account of changes in welfare provision – including the enlargement and specialisation of state provision from the late nineteenth century onwards – which does not rely on the teleological props of ‘whiggish’ histories. Reviewing this productive area of scholarship, Alan Kidd thus interprets the modern evolution of relief systems as shifts within a ‘mixed economy of welfare’, rather than as the gradual rise of the welfare state. 75

76 See especially Philips, Storch (1999) ; King (2006b).

• 77 Most strikingly in Frank Prochaska’s essay on charity (1990), which stood in place of a study of th (...)

78 Gatrell (1990).

24 By contrast, histories of crime in the nineteenth century are dominated by state systems of policing and punishment. Recent studies have foregrounded local initiative in criminal justice reform, helpfully complicating the familiar legislative narrative, 76 yet the story of how crime was dealt with in practice remains largely a tale of policemen, magistrates, judges and gaolers. The consequent disparity with other branches of social history was already visible by 1990, in the Cambridge social history of Britain . While many essays in this collection rejected state-centred approaches, 77 Gatrell’s treatment of crime remained fixated with the state apparatus of surveillance and control. 78 Although Gatrell advanced his own distinctive interpretation, his overriding focus on state institutions in itself reflected a structural imbalance in criminal justice history. Of course, the governance of crime may operate according to a unique logic, and there is no reason why criminal justice historians should necessarily adopt the same perspective as their colleagues working in other areas. However, their reluctance to approach crime and justice in a wider perspective means that we are probably missing instructive parallels between (say) criminal justice and welfare, and that we remain uncertain as to precisely what distinguished criminal justice from other spheres of experience and authority in the nineteenth century.

Putting the people back in : directions for further research

• 79 This may in part account for the excessive focus upon state agencies by historians of the nineteent (...)

25 Although several scholars have outlined the limits of the state monopolisation thesis in theory, there has been no sustained attempt to construct a viable alternative, based on detailed historical research. What remains, therefore, is to outline an empirical strategy for producing a more balanced account of crime and control in the nineteenth century. Naturally, this is a challenging enterprise : unlike scholars interested in criminal justice institutions, those exploring lay responses to crime have no dedicated pool of source material to exploit. 79 There are, however, disparate collections of valuable records, which shed light on popular participation and discretion in the governance of crime. What follows outlines a few key themes which require particular scholarly attention, rather than providing a comprehensive assessment of research priorities in this area.

• 80 Philips (1977, pp. 127-129) ; Davis (1984b, pp. 318-320) ; Rudé (1985, chapter four) ; D.J.V. Jones (...)
• 81 Though, for helpful outline guides to prosecution processes, see Hay, Snyder (1989, pp. 38-39) ; Em (...)

82 On this point, see Emsley, Storch (1993, pp. 50-51) ; Mellearts (2000, pp. 24-26).

83 See Hay, Snyder (1989, p. 38, n.119). The exemplary study here is Davis (1989a).

84 See Philips (1989) ; Stevenson (2004).

26 Firstly, more research is needed on prosecution. While the social profile of prosecutors is fairly well-established, 80 their exact role in the legal process remains unclear. 81 Specifically, we need to know who actually conducted proceedings in court, whether policemen were able to bring criminal charges without the victim’s support, 82 and what discretion victims retained, including as witnesses in police-led prosecutions. Work in this area must therefore go beyond identifying ‘prosecutors’ as recorded in the court recognisances, to examine carefully the process of bringing individual cases to court, through depositions and newspaper reports. 83 There is also scope for further work on the role of voluntary associations in prosecuting offenders, and the relationships they established with the police and magistrates in particular localities. 84

85 Though see Davis (1989a).

86 Barrett (1996, chapter four).

87 See especially Styles (1989).

88 See most recently Shpayer-Makov (2011).

27 More broadly, there is a lack of dedicated research on popular participation in law-enforcement. In particular, police occurrence books preserve evidence of victims reporting crimes to the police ; although this is a critical stage of the modern criminal justice process, historians have yet to study it in any detail. 85 Similarly, the civilian role in pursuing and detaining suspects warrants due consideration. The only substantial study of civilian apprehension is Andrew Barrett’s doctoral thesis, which demonstrated that the new police did not rapidly assume sole responsibility for catching felons in Cheshire. 86 Lastly, while eighteenth-century historians have shown that victims and the press were active in criminal investigation, 87 the few studies of detection available for the nineteenth century focus exclusively on the police. 88 Research from the records of individual criminal cases would give us a better indication of how civilian systems of investigation meshed with those of the police in particular contexts. Taken together, such alternative approaches to the study of law-enforcement would lead to a more sophisticated understanding of how particular criminals were brought to court, and therefore the extent to which the priorities of nineteenth-century criminal justice were determined by the public rather than the police.

89 In addition to what follows, see Emsley (2010, pp. 188-192) ; D.J.V. Jones (1992, pp. 4-12).

90 Davis (1989a, p. 425).

91 Davis (1989a) ; Locker (2005).

• 92 Thompson (1993) ; Conley (1991, pp. 22-28) ; Hammerton (1992, pp. 18-22) ; Woods (1985, pp. 175-177 (...)

93 On the latter, see the excellent recent study by Moss (2011).

94 See Churchill (2012a).

28 Finally, we must supplement existing studies of how ordinary people confronted crime outside of the criminal justice system. 89 As Jennifer Davis observed many years ago, ‘prosecutions did not replace informal sanctions against perceived wrongdoing, but were used in addition to them.’ 90 Victims of theft drew upon the law selectively, often preferring to secure the return of stolen goods, financial compensation, or elicit an apology from the offender. Employers also took advantage of such private settlements, dealing with individual employees on a case-by-case basis. 91 There also remains scope for further work on violent and shaming punishments. Despite rapid and highly disruptive urbanisation, key rituals of norm-enforcement and ‘self-policing’ – including ‘rough music’ and the ‘fair fight’ – remained accessible in particular urban and rural communities late into the nineteenth century. 92 Although a few historians have discussed these subjects, other fields of enquiry remain almost untouched, despite decades of research in criminal justice history. In particular, scholars have neglected to investigate autonomous civilian efforts to prevent crime. There is, however, no shortage of source material on this subject : the nineteenth century was a period of considerable innovation in the provision of security commodities (including locks, safes and, eventually, burglary insurance), 93 while the police and the press were instrumental in encouraging ordinary people to safeguard their property themselves, rather than relying solely on police protection. 94

95 This is the approach adopted by Churchill (2012b).

29 None of this, of course, involves abandoning the traditional subject matter of criminal justice history. A history of crime and policing with the police left out would obviously present a grossly skewed account of the nineteenth-century experience. Instead, we must work towards a holistic portrayal of policing and crime control in this period, which combines research on the new police with work on autonomous, popular responses to crime. 95 Pursued effectively, this kind of research has the potential to reinvigorate nineteenth-century crime history, breathe new life into old debates, and shed light on aspects of social experience which have for too long remained shrouded in obscurity.

30 Reorienting criminal justice history in this way promises to reveal how far the response to crime was shared between civil society and the state. Research on the contribution of the press, private companies and ordinary people to criminal justice and crime control will demonstrate that dealing with crime was not simply the job of the new police. It will also be important to evaluate whether these disparate tactics of crime control were integrated into a coherent overall strategy (and, if so, by what means), or if in fact the response to crime was more a site of conflict between the various interested parties. This kind of approach will allow historians to compare the governance of crime with responses to the other great social problems of this period, and therefore to reassess the apparent exceptionalism of the criminal justice state in Victorian England.

31 These new perspectives will, in turn, prepare historians to construct a more nuanced chronology of policing and criminal justice in the modern era. The crutch of the ‘policed society’ and cognate theories is clearly no longer an adequate means of organising research on crime and control. Recent attempts to backdate the process of state monopolisation to the eighteenth century have helped to undercut existing grand narratives, yet they are plainly inadequate as attempts to explicate the evolving relationship between crime control and the modern state. An alternative approach is therefore needed, which can capture the novelty of criminal justice arrangements in each period, rather than struggling to pinpoint a single, discrete moment of transition from communal to state governance of crime. Hence, we must move beyond the idea of the ‘policed society’, to develop a new model which can synthesise the tangled history of crime, state and society from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. However, only once we have re-evaluated the complex nature of crime control and resolution in the age of the new police can we reconceptualise the evolving relationship between crime and the state over a longer period.

96 See for example Innes, Styles (1986, pp. 434-435).

97 See the work cited by Devereaux (2009) and Innes (2009).

• 98 What Peter Linebaugh memorably, if rather uncharitably, described as the ‘stones and bones’ of crim (...)

99 See for example essays in B.S. Godfrey, Emsley, Dunstall (2003).

100 See especially Lawrence (2012).

32 Finally, a close, empirical interrogation of the state monopolisation thesis offers the opportunity to resist the increasingly institutional focus of much research in our field. As an infant discipline, modern crime history largely (though never entirely) mutated from the study of people and their conflicts into the study of the criminal justice system. While the rich realm of social experience remains visible at the margins, the structure of state institutions and the behaviour of particular administrators tend to take pride of place. Many practitioners who foregrounded such issues did so because they wanted to reassess the history of the English state, 96 and they have certainly made a valuable contribution to this enterprise. 97 Of course, ‘criminal justice history’ – a term which itself betrays the legacy of this shift – remains a broad church : some scholars are interested in administrative processes, 98 others in comparative histories, 99 still others in connecting the history of crime with contemporary criminology. 100 Therefore, it only remains to emphasise that the research programme outlined above will allow crime historians to return decisively to the study of ordinary people and their experience of negotiating authority, rather than fleshing out in ever more minute detail the structure and characteristics of particular institutions and agencies. Such work will underscore that crime – and the response to it – were core constituents of everyday life in the past, and contribute substantially to the study of that mass of human experience lost to passage of time.

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2 This essay does not, therefore, provide a comprehensive summary of major work on nineteenth-century crime, policing and justice : additional recent reviews include Emsley (2005) ; Smith (2007a) ; Williams (2008).

7 Spitzer (1979, p. 200).

9 Ibid. , p. 7, original emphasis.

12 Hay, Snyder (1989, p. 51).

14 Gatrell (1980, p.  244).

15 Philips (1977, pp. 59-61) ; Field (1981, pp. 47-50) ; Emsley (1983, pp. 71-73). For similar work on penal reform, see DeLacy (1981).

17 Ignatieff (1983a, pp. 205-206 ; 1979, pp. 444-445 ; 1983b, pp. 170-171).

21 However, two unpublished studies address this question more directly than most : Davis (1984a) ; Barrett (1996).

22 Emsley (1996a, p.  259). Others to repeat the same basic argument in recent times include D.J.V. Jones (1992, p.   29) and Shpayer-Makov (2002, p.   119).

23 Beattie (1986, pp.   199-202). For his earlier reflections upon potential distortions in the data, see Beattie (1974, pp.   53-57).

29 Though note that some scholars have used the statistics to rather different ends : see for example Williams (2000).

36 King (1984 , pp. 29-34 ; 2000, pp. 35-39) ; Beattie (1986, pp. 8-10, 193-196) ; King (2004, pp.   144-146).

41 Steedman (1984) ; Emsley (1996a, chapters 9-10) ; Lawrence (2000) ; Shpayer-Makov (2002) ; Clapson, Emsley (2002) ; Lawrence (2003) ; Klein (2010) ; Shpayer-Makov (2011).

44 Langbein (1983, pp. 101-105) ; King (1984, pp. 29-34, 52-56). See also Philips (1977, pp. 127-29, 285-86).

51 Miles Taylor has noticed this contrast (1997, pp. 165-166), though his analysis of its roots diverges from mine.

57 A leading expert’s best guess is that there are today eleven crimes committed for every one reported to the authorities : Maguire (2007, pp. 272-273).

59 For an analysis of nineteenth-century crime which highlights the depth of the dark figure, see Davis (1984a, chapters 2-3).

61 Historians have repeatedly called for further research in this area : see Hay (1984, p. 9) ; Emsley (1996b, p. 76) ; Smith (2007a, p. 621).

62 See Davis (1989a) ; Emsley, Storch (1993, pp. 48-49, 57) ; Mellearts (2000, pp. 21-29) ; B. Godfrey (2008, pp. 172-175).

72 Martin Wiener fails to appreciate this in his analysis of the shifting priorities of modern social history (1994, pp. 297-304).

73 For helpful overviews, see Thane (1990, pp. 1-2, 34-37, 45-47) ; Mandler (2006, pp. 9-13, 18-21) ; Devereaux (2009, pp. 749-751). Some work in this area engages directly with Michel Foucault’s theory of ‘governmentality’, which invites an analysis of civil society and the state working as a unit rather than in isolation : see Baldwin (2006, pp. 52-54, 66).

77 Most strikingly in Frank Prochaska’s essay on charity (1990), which stood in place of a study of the poor law and state welfare. See further Wiener (1994, pp. 304-307) ; Koditschek (1993, pp. 78-80).

79 This may in part account for the excessive focus upon state agencies by historians of the nineteenth century, yet, as the works cited below indicate, there has always been scope for constructing an alternative interpretation using familiar and accessible sources.

80 Philips (1977, pp. 127-129) ; Davis (1984b, pp. 318-320) ; Rudé (1985, chapter four) ; D.J.V. Jones (1992, p. 21).

81 Though, for helpful outline guides to prosecution processes, see Hay, Snyder (1989, pp. 38-39) ; Emsley, Storch (1993).

92 Thompson (1993) ; Conley (1991, pp. 22-28) ; Hammerton (1992, pp. 18-22) ; Woods (1985, pp. 175-177) ; Davis (1989b, pp. 71-72) ; Wood (2003, 2004, chapters three and four).

98 What Peter Linebaugh memorably, if rather uncharitably, described as the ‘stones and bones’ of crime history (1985, pp. 215-216).

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David C. Churchill , «  Rethinking the state monopolisation thesis : the historiography of policing and criminal justice in nineteenth-century England  » ,  Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies , Vol. 18, n°1 | 2014, 131-152.

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David C. Churchill , «  Rethinking the state monopolisation thesis : the historiography of policing and criminal justice in nineteenth-century England  » ,  Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies [En ligne], Vol. 18, n°1 | 2014, mis en ligne le 01 juillet 2017 , consulté le 01 juillet 2024 . URL  : http://journals.openedition.org/chs/1471 ; DOI  : https://doi.org/10.4000/chs.1471

David C. Churchill

David Churchill is Economic History Society Anniversary Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research / Birkbeck, University of London. He recently completed his doctoral thesis, ‘Crime, policing and control in Leeds, c.1830-1890’, at The Open University. He also works on leisure and popular culture, and is author of ‘Living in a leisure town : residential reactions to the growth of popular tourism in Southend, 1870-1890’, Urban History , forthcoming, 2014, 41, 1.

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Rethinking the state monopolisation thesis: the historiography of policing and criminal justice in nineteenth-century England

--> Churchill, D (2014) Rethinking the state monopolisation thesis: the historiography of policing and criminal justice in nineteenth-century England. Crime, Histoire et Societes/Crime, History and Societies, 18 (1). 131 - 152. ISSN 1422-0857

Cet article examine la manière dont les historiens ont interprété l’évolution de la relation entre la criminalité, l’action de la police et l’État dans l’Angleterre du XIXe siècle. Plus spécifiquement, il retrace l’influence de la thèse de la monopolisation par l’État – l’idée d’une « société policée ». Le poids de ce modèle est évalué en comparant des travaux relatifs à la justice pénale des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, et en pointant les discontinuités frappantes dans la manière dont ils ont traité certaines questions-clés. L’article présente ensuite une critique de la thèse de la monopolisation étatique, avant de dégager les priorités des recherches à venir. Ces orientations nouvelles devraient conduire à une vision plus sophistiquée de la gouvernance de la criminalité dans l’Angleterre moderne, et amener l’histoire pénale du XIXe siècle à étudier l’expérience vécue des gens ordinaires. This article reviews how historians have interpreted the changing relationship between crime, policing and the state in nineteenth-century England. Specifically, it traces the influence of the state monopolisation thesis – the idea of the ‘policed society’. The impact of this model is assessed by comparing studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century criminal justice, and exposing stark discontinuities in their treatments of key subjects. This article proceeds to critique the state monopolisation thesis, before outlining priorities for further research. These new directions promise to lead to a more sophisticated account of the governance of crime in modern England, and to return nineteenth-century criminal justice history to the study of ordinary people and their lived experiences.

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Bourdieu on the state: An Eliasian Critique

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Abstract: This paper analyses Bourdieu’s theory of the state which remained largely implicit in much of his writing until the recent publication of his lectures On the State in 2014. It argues that although there are many parallels in their work, including, for example, a shared conceptual nomenclature of habitus and field, this can sometimes blind us to their theoretical and substantive divergences. Such differences are especially evident in their respective analyses of the state. In this regard I reflect upon Bourdieu’s theory of the state, which critically draws upon Elias’s work, and assess its theoretical and empirical relevance from an Eliasian perspective.

Keywords: Bourdieu, Elias, state, bureaucratic field, state-formation

Pierre Bourdieu, along with Norbert Elias, is rightly regarded as one of the foremost modern sociologists of the modern era. It has been long recognised that there are parallels in their work. Both use a similar terminology of habitus and field, both subscribe to Cassirer’s relational form of analysis, both have a strong Durkheimian social morphology underpinning their approach, and both share a similar political world-view – Republican socialism and radical social democrat respectively. Nevertheless, there are also differences in terms of their philosophical anthropology, the nature of the long-term analysis, the different contexts within which their work emerged – Algeria and the First and Second World Wars – and the divergent nature of the substantive sociological problems they engage with. As Elias notes in his correspondence with Bourdieu:

I so much regret there is little opportunity for us to sit together and so discuss peacefully and leisurely the problems that arise from our common resolve to develop sociological theory in constant cross-fertilization with empirical research. We both, if I understand it rightly, are at one in our conviction that for sociological theory to come into its own one has to break with the whole tradition of the egocentric philosophical transcendentalism though perhaps I am a bit more unrelenting [...] I have great hopes of a further advance of your theoretical work through the development of the field concept. How stimulating it could be to sit together and to compare your and my habitus concept. Both have a front directed against ideas and idealism. There are similarities and differences. Alas, I know we have so little time. (Elias,1987).

Whether one chooses to highlight their similarities or differences is itself a sociological question tied to the interests and agenda of the researcher, and a matter often discussed in the sociology of science in terms of ‘similarity relations’ (see Kuhn 1977; Barnes 1982: 16-40). This can be for sociological or extra-sociological reasons. In terms of the latter, for example, some writers may emphasize their similarities particularly given the prestigious position Bourdieu’s work currently holds within the academy, whilst others may foreground their differences as part of a distinction strategy. This paper examines Bourdieu’s analysis of the state and its continuities and discontinuities with the approach of Elias, not in order to attempt to determine who is the superior thinker – a fatuous enterprise – but to ascertain its power to generate substantive, empirical analyses of the state.

Elias is of course justly famous for his discussion of state formation. As Mennell incisively summarises it, it combines an earlier analysis of state formation with a less discussed and later analysis of nation-building:

Yet while there is no doubt that the formation of we–identities in the course of nation-building is an important facet of state formation processes, it is subsidiary to the central feature of the formation of a state in the sense in which Weber defined it: “an organization which successfully upholds a claim to binding rule making over a territory, by virtue of commanding a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence.” Establishing such a monopoly involves, on the one hand, securing and extending the boundaries of a territory, to a considerable extent by means of the use of violence against external opponents; and on the other, it involves the internal pacification of the territory. Elias’s thesis (to quote it again) is that internal pacification also, in the long term comes to be embodied in a more pacific habitus: “if in this or that region, the power of central authority grows, if over a larger or smaller area the people are forced to leave at peace with each other, the moulding of effects and the standards of emotion management are very gradually changed as well” (Mennell 2007: 158-9).

Although the state began to play a more central role in much of his later thinking, Bourdieu never provided a unified theory of the state in his work, with the exception of a few articles and chapters in various books written in the mid-1990s. [1] However, the recent the publication of his lectures given over three academic years in the College de France between January 1990 and December 1991 in ‘ On the State ’ goes some way to fill this gap. This book demonstrates that the theory of the state, plays a fundamental role in understanding his entire sociological oeuvre , especially with regard to the centrality accorded to the concepts of symbolic capital, symbolic power and symbolic violence, concepts he first systematically discussed in the mid-1970s. [2]

In order to understand Bourdieu’s theory of the state it needs to be situated in relation to both the classical theories – Marx, Weber and Durkheim and some modern theories of the state including that of Elias, Tilly, and Corrigan and Sayer. [3] In On the State , Bourdieu reviews, appraises and criticises all these theories with the exception of Durkheim, which is surprising, given that it is Durkheim’s theory of the state that his own theory has the strongest affinities with. Obviously limitations of space do not allow us to review these theories here other than to mention a few of their underpinnings in a cursory fashion. The classical sociological theorists all provided penetrating, though selective, insights into the state. For Durkheim, the state was above all an ‘organ of social thought’ elaborating definite representations for the collectivity: ‘the special organ whose responsibility it is to work out certain representations which hold good for the collectivity’ (Durkheim, 1992: 56). It both partially constituted society’s sentiments and ideals, the moral order, and reflected the universal interests of those over whom it governed by promoting moral individualism. Marxists have been more concerned with the economic functions of the state as a relation of production, distinguishing between its ideological appearance as serving the general interests of society as a whole, and its essential relations that function to promote the specific needs of the bourgeoisie. Its repressive aspects geared towards the maintenance of social order and property have also been acknowledged. For Weber the state was able to claim a monopoly of legitimate violence with the aid of a regularised administrative staff as well as a paid army over a delimited territorial area. As he added: ‘the modern state is a compulsory association which organises domination’ (Weber, 1978:54). .

These three classic sociological conceptions of the state point to a central dilemma. The state remains recalcitrant to any tightly constructed conceptual or functional definition. Modern Western democratic capitalist states carry out a multiplicity of tasks in addition to their political function of governing and the production of legislation, and these include binding rule-making, maintaining security, sustaining international relations (including warfare), and the regulation of the market and labour power. Weber recognised this diversity in state functions when he noted that that there were no activities that the state had not been involved in ‘from the provision of subsistence to the patronage of the arts’ (Weber, 1978:58).

The state as a monopoly of physical and symbolic violence.

It is in this theoretical context that Bourdieu defines the state. The state, Bourdieu tells us, is the sector of the field of power, or bureaucratic field, that is defined by a possession of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence: ‘the state is an X (to be determined) which successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical and symbolic violence over a definite territory and over the totality of the corresponding population’ (Bourdieu 1998a: 3). Weber is clearly present in this definition but it is actually from Durkheim (and to a lesser extent, Cassirer) that his theory draws its force.

At one level, it could be argued, Bourdieu reinterprets Weber’s definition of the state through a Durkheimian optic. Although Bourdieu talks about a monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, it is the latter that is prioritised in his work and the former, force and violence, remains largely absent or secondary in his discussion. Hence he argues that the monopolisation of symbolic violence is a condition for the exercise of a monopoly of physical violence. His definition of the state therefore underlies Weber’s focus on physical force. By contrast to ‘physicalist’ approaches – which in addition to Weber also include Marx, Elias and Tilly – that correlate domination largely to material or military forces, including the army or police force, Bourdieu argues following Pascal (and paradoxically other aspects of the work of Weber concerned with legitimation) [4] that no power can be exercised only as naked power:

Force acts directly, by physical constraint, but also through the representation that those subject to it have of this force; the most brutal and violent force obtains a form of recognition that goes beyond mere submission to its physical effect [...] there is no physical effect in the social world that is not accompanied by a symbolic effect [...] the strange logic of human action means that brute force is never only brute force: it exerts a form of seduction, persuasion, which bears on the fact that it manages to obtain a certain form of recognition (Bourdieu 2014:192).

Here two points are stressed. First all physical violence also contains a symbolic dimension. The material/ physical and ideal and symbolic aspects of force cannot be separated, and in fact the latter has priority. Second, the two processes of violence only make sense when they are recognised by a collectivity of agents with specific dispositions or a specific habitus. By contrast, physicalist theories, lack an explanation of how the social order is constituted in the first place and why the dominated submit so easily to state domination. They neglect the fact that systems of domination based simply on force are fragile and easy to overthrow. It is in this context that symbolic forms need to be recognised for the central role that they play in state domination. The central questions, for Bourdieu, then turn on state legitimation in the maintenance of social order, authority, and acquiring consent.

The cognitive structures individuals internalise and apply to the social world, which are both descriptive and evaluative, are constituted by the state and, operate ‘through belief and the pre-agreement of the body and the mind with the world’ Wacquant, & Bourdieu, 1993a:34).

This increased emphasis on symbolic forms and culture in maintaining and reproducing the social order does not, Bourdieu believes, mean relapsing into an idealism, rather it entails what he calls an, ‘expanded materialism’, or a ‘materialist theory of the symbolic’, where symbolic and material forms of domination co-exist. As he notes elsewhere, relations of communication are not wholly dissimilar from relations of force. [5] In modern societies, it is the state, particularly through the school system, which is an ‘immense rite of institution’, that creates and inscribes national social divisions and hierarchies in people’s mental structures creating a consensus and societal common sense. And it is for this reason that Bourdieu has written so extensively over the years on the role of the school system. [6] Although the school may be seen as an institution of integration, providing all with the instruments of citizenship and economic access, something Bourdieu tended to only stress in his later writings, it is simultaneously, if not primarily, the part of the state that by inscribing in individuals evaluative binary categories produces principles of hierarchisation as well as ‘national’ forms of culture, through an imposition of a cultural arbitrary.

The state exists within us.

The state, for Bourdieu is not a monolithic, abstract, detached entity engaged in large-scale substantial acts as is commonly assumed – passing legislation, governing, or producing legitimising discourses to serve dominant class interests. Rather more prosaically and simultaneously more profoundly, the state operates in and through us, state thinking penetrates the minutest aspects of our everyday lives from filling in a bureaucratic form, carrying an identity card, signing a birth certificate, to shaping our thinking and thought: it is the public at the heart of what we consider the private: ‘the state structures the social order itself – timetables, budget periods, calendars, our whole social life is structured by the state – and, by the same token, so is our thought’ (Bourdieu 2014: 183). The state, then, is everywhere exercising an unconscious effect of symbolic imposition: objectively in things, the division in disciplines, age-groups, official statistics, census categories, the curriculum, in national borders; and in mental structures, with the dispositions to classify and act in certain ways:

To endeavour to think the state is to take the risk of thinking over (or being taken over by) a thought of the state, i.e. of applying to the state categories of thought produced and guaranteed by the state and hence to misrecognise its most profound truth (Bourdieu 1991a: 1).

According to Bourdieu, the state is not akin to an object, it is not a bloc but a field of forces, a sector of the field of power which may be called the ‘administrative’ field, ‘bureaucratic field’ or ‘field of public office’. The state is not a thing or something you lay your hands on, but a reality that exists in its effects and the collective beliefs which underpin these effects. The state exists differently to how people believe it exists: it is not an entity but an administrative or bureaucratic field, part of the field of power, a space structured according to oppositions linked to specific forms of capital tied to different social interests. In addition to claiming the state has a monopoly over the legitimate physical and symbolic violence and regarding the state as a ‘bureaucratic’ or ‘administrative field’, Bourdieu argues that it is the ‘central bank of symbolic capital’, the place where a monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence has been established.

State Formation

An analysis of what the state consists of and what it does presupposes an historical analysis of its emergence. How did the state acquire the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence? In addition to examining ‘state acts’, for Bourdieu, a genetic structuralist methodology (2014: 87) can break through state doxa allowing for the re-emergence of the ‘arbitrariness of beginnings’. This does not mean establishing a straightforward historical or comparative analysis but, rather, constructing a theoretical model of the state that allows statements about the state to be open to systematic verification. Here, France and to a lesser extent, England and Japan, function as privileged examples of possible cases of more universal state processes, countries that also served in reality as models for the development of subsequent modern states. Bourdieu attempts to show how an autonomous bureaucratic field with its own logic and capital or raison d’état emerged. According to Bourdieu, whose analysis draws primarily on secondary analysis of state-formation starting from the twelfth century, modern states, which did not emerge until after the seventeenth century differ fundamentally from earlier states, including city-states and empires, and dynastic or patrimonial states.

In his discussion on the emergence of the state Bourdieu outlines a model based on four stages of state formation that are both logical and chronological (2014: 213–214). The stage first concerns the process of concentration of each type of capital – military, informational (cultural) and economic – which are part of the process of the monopolisation of symbolic capital.

The establishment of the state as a unified national-social space, a space of spaces or field of fields, holding a meta or state capital occurs co-extensively with the emergence and establishment of differentiated and relatively autonomous social fields such as the economic and cultural field or market initially during the twelfth century. This process also includes the concentration and monopolisation of physical capital. Two inter-related processes here are central: the external need to wage war abroad to acquire more land and territory, and the internal requirement to oppose competing lords, and those from the lower classes, which leads to the development of centralised military and police forces respectively: Bourdieu concurs with Elias’s argument that the concentration of public physical force was accompanied by a reduction and control of day-to-day violence. Again such processes presuppose the prior accumulation of symbolic capital – for example the concentration of physical violence into a specialised body with symbolic uniforms – the police – since mobilisation that can only occur if the state has some prior legitimacy.

The concentration of the means of violence is accompanied by a monopolisation of taxation and eventually the construction and centralisation of economic capital. In the last decade of the twelfth century an impersonal tax paid by all subjects required for territorial defence increasingly became used as a justification for imposing public tax levies. A system of tax collection was instituted where mandates in the form of uniformed and qualified liveries for representatives of the state were authorised to collect taxes. The authoritative, legitimated, and official nature of taxation also became bound up with the rise of a form of patriotism or nationalism. [7]

This process of unification, centralisation, and monopolisation in terms of military and economic forces was also one of standardisation and homogenisation through the creation of an autonomous and centralised cultural market. The unification of culture, in parallel with the development of an economic market, entailed the creation of a legitimate national culture, containing standardised and generalised knowledge including: educational qualifications, weights and measurements, common writing and spelling practices. Cultural capital constitutes one dimension of a more generic form of informational capital. The state begins to measure, assess, investigate and concentrate information, regulating its distribution, instigating the birth of maps, drawing up genealogies, and unifying theories.

Finally, the concentration physical/military, economic and cultural and capital takes place in parallel with the concentration of. juridical capital. Diverse, mutually exclusive bodies of law become increasingly unified from the twelfth century onwards. Correspondingly judges and jurors of the feudal courts become gradually replaced by provosts, bailiffs, impersonal professional lawyers, and their decisions increasingly become referred to the king. The result is the creation of a separate legal field with its own laws that reflect the advancement of formally universal institutions respecting laws and protecting universal rights.

The second phase of state-formation takes place conjointly with the concentration and monopolisation of symbolic capital. This entails an analysis of the dynastic-patrimonial state, in which the government, and all major possessions within a territory are perceived as the personal property of the king. The state here is identified with the ‘king’s house’, which also includes the broader royal family household. Reproduction strategies centred on succession and family wars around patrimony, royal blood, and lineage constitute the central dynamic in dynastic states. The king’s position of power is reinforced by the fact that he places himself strategically at the ‘centre’ as feudal chieftain, and becomes the only means through which all other nobles can communicate to one another – what Elias calls the ‘royal mechanism’ (Elias 2000). Within a ‘division of labour of domination’, and especially the growing inter-dynastic political struggles including rivalries between the king and his brothers and second sons for power, the king becomes increasingly dependent on bureaucrats who, as members possessing competence, base their position on the legal language of Roman law, to guarantee his reproduction as heir. This then leads to a tri-partite struggle for power:

One encounters thus, almost universally, a tripartite division of power, with alongside the king , the king’s brothers (in the broad sense), dynastic rivals whose authority rests on the dynastic principle of the house, and the king’s ministers , typically homines novi , “new men” recruited for their competency. One can say, at the cost of some simplification, that the king needs the ministers to limit and control the power of his brothers and that, conversely, he can use his brothers to limit and control the power of ministers (Elias 2000: 37).

In addition to employing officials dependent him, the king attempts to reproduce his position and household and resolve some of the inter-dynastic conflicts by providing apanages as land, often acquired through war or marriages, to give to his sons.

Bureaucratic functionaries or oblates are often chosen by the king on the basis that they are unable to reproduce themselves or have few ties of interest in opposition to the king. They frequently come from marginalised groups as Weber (1978) noted– clerics vowed to celibacy, eunuchs, pariahs of low birth. Bureaucrats represent the antithesis of the king’s brothers in that they are wholly dependent on the king and give him everything, including their loyalty, and aim to serve the state.

The contradictions between the king, his brothers, and the king’s ministers – bureaucrats – ushers in the emergence of a new ‘statist’ third phase that Bourdieu characterises as a move ‘from the king’s house to raison d’etat ’ (see Bourdieu 2005). Here the personal power of the king becomes increasingly diffused and differentiated eventually leading to the emergence of the impersonal power of the modern state. This is a transitional phase characterised by the conflict between two opposing groups and their correlative principles. On the one hand, there exists bearers of the old social model of reproduction deriving from the dynastic state where reproduction continues to be centred on lineage, blood, hereditary, and biology, and where the king rules in a personal manner as an extension of the household. On the other hand, there emerges a new model, partly as the result of the development of an autonomous legal field, based on acquired competence and merit, in which individuals – specifically lawyers and bureaucrats – have accrued powers independent of the king, and who rule on an impersonal basis with impersonal powers.

The role of the judiciary mentioned earlier is a central vector in this transitional process. As the field of power differentiates, rising groups of bureaucrats and lawyers, argue for universal principles of rule based on law and reason appealing to universal legal principles. This pursuit of the universal within the legal field suits and furthers their own particular interests, and begins to undermine previously held notions of legitimacy based on biology and nobility through blood. This represents the emergence of a new state nobility – the noblesse de robe – based on competence, who gradually displaces the old blood nobility – the noblesse d’épée. The state nobility, initially as the noblesse de robe , was the ‘self-made’ product of correlative and complementary inventions tied to its historical development. It was a body that constituted itself and simultaneously the state.

Hence, although the two models of reproduction based on blood and merit initially operate alongside each other, through a long and imperceptible process of defeudalisation, the new state nobility, within an increasingly autonomous bureaucratic field, come to supplant and denegate personal rule with a form of formal rule independent of politics, and autonomous from economics – through disinterestedness as a specific reason of state. The outcome – the development of an autonomous bureaucratic or administrative field where the distinction between function and functionary, public and private interests, and disinterestedness, become central aspects of the civil servants’ habitus and characterise the operation of bureaucratic logic. With Elias, the lengthening of chains of interdependency are crucial for this transition to the reason of state:

One could say, for the sake of a pleasing formula, that the (impersonal state) is the small change of absolutism, as if the king had been dissolved into the impersonal network of a long chain of mandated plenipotentiaries who are answerable to a superior from whom they receive their authority and their power, but also, to some extent, for him and for the orders they receive from him (2005: 48).

The lengthening of chains of interdependency and legitimation does not, however, eliminate the potentiality for corruption but rather increases it as ‘centralised patrimonialism’ coexists together with a local form of patrimonialism. Nevertheless, it also increases the possibility of increasing the public and universal interests of citizens generally: as power grows more complex and more diverse, and relatively autonomous fields with peculiar forms of capital and logic emerge as well as the institutionalisation of formal law. The modern state, as we now conceive it, only really comes to being in the seventeenth century in France and England.

In a fourth stage of state formation Bourdieu, briefly alludes to a shift from a bureaucratic state to a ‘welfare state’, indicating a shift from struggles over the construction of the state to struggles over acquiring primarily its symbolic capital, but also other capitals associated with the state. This phase brings to the fore questions concerning the state, social space and social classes.

According to Bourdieu, the genesis of the state was a recursive phenomenon following the concentration of various capitals – physical, economic, and cultural around the king, and the development of a number of autonomous social fields, including the cultural, economic and juridical field. But this concentration presupposed and depended upon the prior primitive accumulation of symbolic capital. Within the context of a dynastic state certain agents of the state, specifically lawyers, made themselves into a state nobility, by instituting the state through a performative discourse regarding what the state was and should be. The vested particular interest of this group, in a weakly autonomous legal field, was to create a discourse based on serving the general interests, providing public service, and enforcing universal interests, through the law rather than through personal avarice. Such a mission transcended the interests of agents within the state, including the king. This process eventually led to the creation of a republic and a nation, independent of the dynastic state in which they were embedded:

I would like to propose [...] that there are a certain number of social agents including lawyers – who played an eminent role, in particular those possessing that capital in terms of organisational resources that was Roman law. These agents gradually built up this thing that we call the state, that is a set of specific resources that authorizes its possessor to say what is good for the social world as a whole, to proclaim the official and to pronounce words that are in fact orders, because they are backed by the force of the official. The constitution of this instance was accompanied by the construction of the state in the sense of population contained within frontiers (Bourdieu 2014:32).

Bourdieu’s criticisms of Elias

Bourdieu criticises Elias in three major respects. [8] Firstly, he argues that Elias simply provides a Weberian ‘physicalist theory’ of the state that ignores the symbolic dimension necessary for maintaining state legitimacy and power. [9] Secondly, he argues that Elias’s definition of the monopoly mechanism is tautological since it ignores the means or assets available to a king which lead to his triumph in the competition with its rivals: ‘what he [Norbert Elias] calls the “law of monopoly”, a solution that I shall not discuss in detail here but which seems to me to be essentially verbal and almost tautological’ (Bourdieu 2005: 33). Thirdly, Elias, like Weber, ignores the fact that a small group of individuals – the state nobility – secures a monopoly over the monopoly. Counterbalancing these criticisms, Bourdieu adds:

Where I do see Elias as truly innovative, and I will draw on this to develop the genetic theory of the state, is in the elements of the analysis he makes of the transition from a private monopoly (what I call the dynastic state) to the public monopoly of the state’ (Bourdieu 2014: 128)

Although he explicitly acknowledges using Elias’s genetic theory of the state and his transition from the dynastic state to the bureaucratic state, it is clear that he draws on much more: i) Elias’s view that the state ‘is a legitimate protection racket’ (2014: 129); ii) that the state was Janus-faced, so that together with monopolisation of the means of violence and taxation there comes increasing peace, even for the most disadvantaged groups; iii) processes of differentiation, lengthening chains of dependence and interdependence lead to relations of asymmetrical dependency and legitimation; iv) that the king operates a policy of divide and conquer through what Elias calls the ‘royal mechanism’; v) the more power becomes concentrated, the more difficult it becomes for the ruler to control it, and his dependency on others increases; vi); that taxes are bound up in a reciprocal virtuous cycle with warfare. [10]

Bourdieu’s criticisms of are of a mixed nature. The argument that Elias ignores the ‘monopoly of monopoly’ held by small groups, is correct to the extent that Elias jumps too quickly at looking at the process of ‘functional democratisation’ where the distribution of power becomes increasingly dispersed over the social figuration as a whole. But this, for Elias, needs to be understood within the context of a very-long historical time-frame. By contrast, his argument that Elias’s theory of the monopoly mechanism is ultimately tautological is misjudged. Elias spends considerable time providing a rich empirical description of the dynamics and assets underpinning monopolisation, in term of questions of land, military campaigns and money resources. As Mennell notes:

It was not inevitable that there would be a single country corresponding to France in its present boundaries: it was not preordained nor in any sense planned that the kings whose principle seat was Paris would extend their territories until they reached the boundaries of the hexagon, and then stop. For much of the Middle Ages the Paris Kings were locked in combat with other French-speaking Kings whose principle city was London, but who often controlled more of what is now France than did the Paris Kings. Even towards the end of the medieval period, there was a resurgence of centrifugal forces when members of the royal family, assigned regions as apanages to govern on behalf of the king, used them to reassert their autonomy (Mennell 2007:14).

Hence, it was by no means inevitable that the Capetian monarchy eventually became dominant in France. Instead, the monopoly mechanism, which draws on Marx’s discussion of monopoly in Capital (1976 [1867]), attempts to outline the high probabilities and ‘compellingness’ or compulsions inherent in the social formation which underpinned this.

In addition, Bourdieu is right to argue that Elias does not examine the symbolic forms or ideological factors underpinning state legitimation, not in The Civilizing Process (2000) at least. Rather his focus is on how state formation is compelled by the structure of the social relationships, by the compelling dynamics of social figurations, and their degree of differentiation. These are most forcefully discussed in his game models (Elias 1978). As Mennell again astutely notes:

Elias like Marx himself, is always looking for the immanent dynamic of real social relations between people –relations including unequal, exploitative interdependence, and the internal tensions which cause change – and why development went one way rather than another’ (Mennell 1992: 66).

Elias does discuss, albeit unsystematically, the monopolisation of the means of orientation that certain dominant class groupings hold in steering the state. And in other essays, especially those collected in the book The Germans (1996) he provides an analysis of inter-state and intra-state relations responsible for shaping the model setting classes and the contradictory duality of normative codes that inhere and blend differently in nation-states:

a moral code descended from that of ruling section of the tiers état , egalitarian in character, and whose highest value is “man” – the human individual as such; and a nationalist code descended from the Machiavellian code of princes and ruling aristocracies, inegalitarian in character, and whose highest value is a collectivity – the state, the country, the nation to which an individual belongs (Elias 1996:155).

Elias over Bourdieu?

But there are several respects in which Elias’s account of state and state formation remains ahead of Bourdieu’s own account and could usefully supplement it. Firstly, Elias is more cautious about applying terms such as political, economic or ideological (symbolic) in a causal sense, not only since these terms cannot be applied to feudal undifferentiated social relations, as Bourdieu recognises, but also because they are abstractions which look at the same nexus of social relations from different points of view. An economic sphere or field has a symbolic and political aspect as Elias recognises. By contrast, Bourdieu’s discussion of economic, cultural, political fields etc. can sometimes map onto what Elias calls ‘spherical thinking’ (see Elias 1978). Second, Elias tends to be more reflexive than Bourdieu in terms of his use of ‘processual concepts’ that take account of, and try to capture, various social balances and power ratios pertaining to figurations. [11] Elias rarely talks about monopolisation per se but rather high degrees of monopolisation of violence and taxation. The emphasis is on shifts in power balances between groups, not on absolutes. Although Bourdieu, at one point for example, uses the term ‘statization’, or acknowledges the existence of ‘relatively’ public monopolies (2014: 130), his discussion of the move from the personal rule of dynastic kings to the impersonal rule of the bureaucratic state, or public to private he predominantly uses hard-edged contrasts and binaries, deriving ultimately from structuralism. Binaries are of course useful in creating contrasts within social forms, and they are the stock in trade of sociology – gemeinschaft-gesellschaft, status-contract, military-industrial, feudalism-capitalism etc. But they are less effective, however, in capturing empirical continuities and contradictory multi-polar tendencies and ambivalences. Third, Elias’s approach is in some ways more systematic and methodologically comparative in respect of looking at France, Germany and England. Bourdieu, also looks at these countries as well as Japan and China, in his lectures contained in On the State , but more impressionistically, and with less comparative rigour. Bourdieu’s primary scientific methodological heuristic is the ‘model’ which has strong affinities with Weber’s ideal types. And though Bourdieu continually reminds us to avoid confusing the ‘reality of the model’ with the model of reality, the use of models also suffers from the same drawbacks as Weber’s ideal types – when empirical processes do not correspond the model is nevertheless retained and rationalised as an ideal type. Fourth, Elias gives greater importance to the international or the geo-political context within which the national state is enmeshed, and attempts through his concept of figurations, to look simultaneously at how changes in these processes reciprocally impact upon changes in national-state processes. The international dimension of state formation, however, is largely absent in Bourdieu’s discussion. The international realm in which states are socialised but in turn shape the international context is mentioned largely by acknowledging Elias’s work, but it gets barely more than two pages of discussion. Instead it is hidden under a discussion of the importance of symbolic capital accumulation. As a result Bourdieu’s discussion of state formation is almost wholly ‘internalist’ – examining the inner logic and conflicts within a country centred on strategies of reproduction and their concomitant mechanisms. It takes place in a vacuum so to speak. The geo-political context of nation-states within which European states, such as France, were situated both in terms of establishing international treaties with other states, broader economic flows and commerce, and war – for example the Thirty Years War and its financial and political implications – are thereby rendered invisible. Shorn of these determinations his model remains too abstract. The focus on the international dimension cannot just be an add-on to a discussion about symbolic capital. International states relations are not only of competition and conflict, but characterised by relations of rule that hold them together and bind them into a state system. It is in this context that we can understand the struggle for national prestige, which Weber foregrounded (see Collins 1986), the power ratios, and the ambivalence of interests between states, as is the case of social groups and classes, states can be enemies in one context and allies in another. This higher level of synthesis, in which interdependent inter-state actions have unplanned consequences for intra-state actions, is missing in Bourdieu’s account. This points to a fifth connected virtue of Elias’s work in comparison with Bourdieu’s – his commitment to understanding the role of the organisation of war and violence in state formation. Bourdieu of course talks about the state as having a monopoly of physical and symbolic violence and he briefly mentions the emergence of a military and police force in the formation of military capita in On the State . Again, however, compared to symbolic processes, these are peripheral concerns. For Elias, by contrast, war plays a fundamentally central role in state-formation. Focusing on how increasing internal pacification within a territory was connected with increasing and bigger wars abroad, especially against neighbouring territories, helps us to see that European state formation consisted of a realm of warring states who had to adapt to this competition by centralising political power and collecting taxes to fund wars.

As Hobson, discussing Elias, notes:

Important here is that the costs of military technology under conditions of inter-feudal war increased at the same time that new forms of warfare – especially the rise of the mercenary army and later the professional standing army – shifted the opportunity structure for successful state-centralisation [...] the ontological primacy of international anarchy recalibrates the ontological status of state-society relations into that of an intervening variable. Moreover, in this vision the state becomes reconfigured around its capacity to be adaptive to the logic of international anarchy (2012).

States therefore needed to constantly modernise their economies and develop their military power bases in order to prevent invasion, subsumption, or military defeat. This meant they had to ensure revenue base from particular social interest groups, including aristocrats, challenging their interests and opposition and attempting to win autonomy from them, in order to survive as states. That war is a central component of state formation is not peculiar to Elias, but has also of course a central theme in Hinzte and Weber’s and neo Weberian accounts of state formation. For Hinzte: ‘All state organisation was originally military organisation for war’ (Hintze 1989: 181).

A further aspect in which Elias’s theory of state formation supersedes Bourdieu’s is in terms of another contextual variable – Elias’s stronger focus on class. Elias’s book The Civilizing Process is subtited: ‘ Changes in the Behaviour of the Secular Upper-Class in the West’ and is centrally concerned with the conflict and contestation between the descending nobility and rising bourgeoisie. These groups, within a system of multi-polar tensions, are dependent on the central authority of the king, who plays them off one another to maintain his position of power, often by giving positions of power to individuals from the rising bourgeoisie, a new elite of magistrates and officials, who constituted the noblesse de robe , at the expense of the declining nobility. Elias was conscious of class fractions, for example the division in the bourgeoisie between administrators who generally supported the ancien regime and wished to acquire the rights and entitlements of the nobility, and the enterprising merchant part of the bourgeoisie who were more in favour of challenging the social formation. But he was also aware of the ambivalence of interests between many of these conflictual groupings challenging the monarch also sometimes meant challenging the whole social order and therefore one’s intermediary position within it. In such an explanation, Elias does not need to revert to concepts such as acquiring consent or symbolic violence in order to account for why groups acted as they did in relation to a powerful king. It is the overall structure of the configuration and the interests of the groups within it that compels them to act in certain ways. This is neither a question of the nobility being free or forced but a question of the degrees of compulsion operating upon them in a given conjuncture of interdependencies.

In addition, Elias is also conscious of the relativity of the content of his concepts that is sometimes absent in Bourdieu’s discussion. The emerging bourgeoisie in the earlier period of the fifteenth century for example was not the same as that of a later period in the eighteenth nor was the nobility, despite sharing the same conceptual nomenclature (see Loyal 2004). This polymorphous and ambiguous analysis of conflict is for the most part absent from Bourdieu’s analysis which focuses largely on a binary or tripartite conflict between the dominant, dominated fractions of the dominant, and dominated, or conflicts between the king, his brothers and the bureaucracy.

Rather surprisingly Bourdieu rarely mentions the role of class in his analysis of state formation. Class reproduction is of course something he foregrounds in relation to modern states, schools and social reproduction. He is not obliged to do so, and Bourdieu is rightly wary of applying concepts only applicable to modern societies to estates that exist in the feudal order, hence the noblesse de robe are seen as a status group rather than a class. And their major function is seen in terms of their universalising role, albeit for their own particular interests as a status group. [12] But one can recognise the fundamental difference between classes in modern capitalist social orders and those in feudal society as Marx did yet acknowledge class nevertheless plays a role in earlier formations. This is especially true for the class conflict between lords and peasants during the feudal era, within which much of Bourdieu’s discussion of the dynastic state takes place. For Elias, in an era where land was the primary resource and in order to maintain their distinct, luxurious, lifestyles the court needed to squeeze the peasantry for greater resources, eventually leading to a fundamental divide between the two groups who saw themselves as races apart (see Elias 1983).

In discussing the role of the state and violence it may be useful also to look at the work of Gramsci. Gramsci examines how ideologies do not need to be opposed in their totality but can be transformed by preserving and rearranging their most durable elements. He also examines a problem that is central to Bourdieu, the relation between force and consent in a more informed and explanatorily fruitful way. Bourdieu, as we noted had blurred the boundaries of this binary to an extent, by examining communication as a form of force and violence, while still retaining the notion of physical force, or what he calls ‘raw power’ (1998b: 383) which is always accompanied by a symbolic effect. But although this can be acknowledged at one level, this downplays the significance of physical violence as an autonomous force in social life, albeit symbolically accompanied and mediated. Bourdieu tends to see symbolic violence as a more important form of ‘violence’ characterising modern societies. Unlike Bourdieu, who tends to focus almost exclusively on symbolic violence despite his definition of the state, for Gramsci, the acquisition of consent is usually only a possibility when the use of physical force to back it up is also present, and the latter is usually employed ‘when it appears to be based on the consent of the majority’ (1973: 80). In addition, Bourdieu’s use of the term ‘violence’ not only pushes our ordinary understanding of violence to its limit, but again, an Eliasian account of tilts and balances would be more useful here. Hence, it may be more helpful, both explanatorily and empirically, to retain a marked distinction between force and consent and examine shifts in their balance. Gramsci of course, does this through the concept of hegemony, Elias had similarly used a parallel distinction between shifting balances between external constraints ( Fremdwange ) and self-constraints ( Selbstzwange ) in his writings (2000: 365, 378).

Having made these criticism, I will now make what appears to be a volte face . I believe there are more problems with his thinking on the state than in his general sociological theory, which although informed by it, remains one of the most important contributions to sociology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bourdieu’s theory of the state, however, is, and remains, incomplete. The discussions on the state show the direction in which his thinking on the state was developing but they by no means provide an overall, coherent, or systematic theory. Yet, despite its flaws, and he provides a dynamic and creative theory of the state, offering a needed corrective to standard views which neglect the role of cultural forms and social classifications and their role in maintaining and reproducing forms of power and domination. Bourdieu’s concepts have been fashioned from empirical work and their usefulness is tied to their power of generating insightful substantive analyses. Once we account for what can be termed ‘bending the stick too far in the cultural direction’, Bourdieu’s reflexive genetic approach, when married with other more ‘materialist’ approaches, provides a basis for examining the development of state administrative systems centred on authority, the role of performatives and the self-referring nature of knowledge tied to state legitimation. The emphasis on the state’s power of nomination, classification, and official validation, in constructing both groups and modes of identification, sanctioning and defining social practices, and the cleavages that exists in the state itself, as a field of power operating in terms of ‘antagonistic co-operation’ between a left and the right hand, are all fundamental concepts for understanding the modern state. Thus, what Bourdieu’s theory provides in contrast to a number of Marxist and Weberian inspired analyses of the state – which remain abstract and general – is a concrete research programme.

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Steven Loyal is an Associate Professor in sociology at University College Dublin. His research interests include: migration, ethno-racial domination, social stratification, sociological theory, historical sociology, and the sociology of knowledge. His forthcoming book is entitled: Bourdieu's theory of the state: a critical introduction , New York: Palgrave.

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Land use changes in the environs of Moscow

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Police reform: a study of the dover new police (1830-1860).

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King, Paul Anthony (2020). Police reform: A study of the Dover New Police (1830-1860). Student dissertation for The Open University module A826 MA History part 2.

This dissertation looks specifically at how reform affected the Dover New Police from 1830 to 1860. In particular, it looks at the complexity of national policy and centralisation in conjunction with local government priorities and how these affected the New Police in their activities and their relationship with the inhabitants of Dover. Further, it evaluates the ‘state monopolisation thesis’ and David Churchill’s calls for a reassessment of this era, questioning if the state ever assumed control over the governance of crime. Sources from Watch Committee minutes, Municipal records, parliamentary prison and judicial reports, Constabulary Inspector reports and local newspapers articles are used to gauge an in depth understanding of these issues. The New Police’s arrival coincided with fears of rising crime but also anxieties concerning social stability and hierarchy. The study finds that reform did not equate to an efficient police force suppressing crime. Dover’s police-public relations were complex and are not defined by periodization. The lower classes felt targeted, yet, hostility was minimal. Dover police found their authority in policing by consent based on restraint, morals and common sense. Dover’s inhabitants, particularly the middle class, accepted and used the police as the apparatus of justice. Dover’s police were used for town ‘improvement’ which in turn secured order and hierarchy for the elite. Concurrently, unrealistic expectations of police leading to numerous premature departures inhibited any ability to enforce a policeman-state or be Dover’s ‘domestic missionary’. However, further State reform pushing for centralisation to create a nationalised efficient force, encroached on propertied men fiscally and on local autonomy. Centralisation efforts were denied by Dover’s municipal authorities, until the County and Boroughs Act 1856. A combination of increasing population, crime and monetary incentives from the Home Office secured Dover’s cooperation in 1860. Dover’s Corporation maintained autonomy over the police, however, the state’s monetary and inspectorate influence laid the foundations for further centralisation later and created a quasi-professional police force. Further, upon re-evaluating the ‘state monopolisation thesis’, it was recognised that the New Police became the main policing agency in Dover. However, a security market supplying locks and safes to employment of watchmen were incorporated by the public. The detection of crime, tracing suspects and recovering property was often initiated by the victim rather than the police. Yet, the public refrained from confrontations and arrests leaving these engagements to police. Primarily though, police expansion through reform had occurred without side-lining public participation. Further, police pluracy through church and social institutions such as the workhouse, schools and relief committees contributed to a mixed economy in policing. Such examples of policing pluracy, unsettles established narratives of total monopolization of the justice system by the police and exposes a more nuisanced reality of policing governance.

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