Police state

A police state is a state in which the government maintains strict political or social control over the population without adhering to the rule of law. It is the antithesis of the Rechtsstaat.

The term usually only refers to a regime which claims that the exercise of political power by the state is not subject to law, although regimes which disregard the law in practice may nevertheless constitute police states as a matter of fact, regardless of whether or not they claim to abide by the rule of law.

In contemporary popular usage, "police state" is often considered to be synonymous with "dictatorship". As it has become a term of opprobrium, the formerly narrowly defined and technical definition of the police state has been expanded in recent decades to sometimes include regimes which do not respect individual rights and freedoms, whether or not these rights and freedoms are enshrined in law. At other times the term may sometimes conveys nothing more than disapproval of the policies of a certain government.

Modern police states usually employ some sort of secret police or similar apparatus, although these elements are not considere essential to the definition. The best-known literary treatment of this sort of police state is George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which describes a totalitarian régime that uses the threat of constant war as a pretext for subjecting the people to continuous mass surveillance in all aspects of their lives.

History

Etymologically, the term police comes from the Greek word polis, meaning city or city-state. Since the Middle Ages, it refered to the entire public administrative apparatus: to have good Policey was to have good administration.

This meaning was carried over into the political model of enlightened despotism, in which the ruler was to regard himself as the "highest servant of the state." The ruler was to exercise the absolute power that he enjoyed within the state in order to provide for the general welfare. All of the police powers of the state (i.e., all the powers relating to policy) were to be directed toward this end; to limit the ruler by insisting that he do so only according to law was 'bad policy'. This view was supported by such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes and Voltaire.

The theory of enlightened despotism never enjoyed much support in England, where liberalism triumphed too quickly to allow it to develop as a monarchist alternative to the divine right of kings. Consequently, the intellectual history of continental Europe is more important for understanding the concept of the police state.

Following the social upheavals of the French Revolution and the Reaction manifest in the Congress of Vienna, the police state became increasingly repressive. Because the enlightened despot was charged with the public weal (that is, everyone else was supposed to do whatever he thought necessary), opposition to government policy was an offense against his authority, and thus against the state itself and all that it represented: the concept of loyal opposition was inconceivable within this political framework. Good policy required the use of secret police to ferret out such seditious elements.

Liberalism, democracy, socialism, and numerous other movements thus felt the brunt of the police state's anger; consequently, it came to represent everything about the old regime against which they were struggling. Liberal democracy, with its emphasis on the rule of law, focused on the fact that the police state was unrestrained by law. Robert von Mohl, who first introduced the rule of law into German jurisprudence, for example, contrasted the Rechtsstaat ("legal" or "constitutional" state) with the aristocratic Polizeistaat ("police state").

From a liberal perspective, therefore, all non-liberal states were police states. From a socialist perspective, on the other hand, all non-socialist states were police states. Thus, "police state" became a general term of opprobrium. As a result, the United States could decry the Soviet Union as a police state for its injurious disregard of civil rights, while the latter could impugn the former as a police state precisely for legally enforcing those same rights and liberties against the desires of the proletariat (as articulated by the Soviet Union).

Contemporary status

The status of the term "police state" is therefore contested at the present time. Its historical provenance supports both a narrow and broad definition. Political scientists tend to prefer a more narrow definition of "police state," limiting it to those regimes which:

• are centralized enough to be considered a state;
• employ the power of the state without the restraint of law; and
• employ the power of the state to repress political dissent within society (although the importance of this element is sometimes disputed).

Colloquially, the term may be used metaphorically as a "political bogeyman" to upbraid whatever regime the speaker finds overly statist. In this context the term is often used in relation to major liberal democracies, where changes in law and policies are sometimes interpreted as facilitating the creation of a police state.

See also

• A. E. van Vogt
• corporate police state
• George Orwell
• martial law
• mass surveillance
• military rule
• national security
• open society
• political repression
• Rechtsstaat
• surveillance abuse
• thought police
• totalitarianism