I had the opportunity to respond to Jacques Lezra's book Defective Institutions: A Protocol for the Republic at SPEP's virtual conference this year. There is much to talk about in the book, but I decided to focus on his discussion of the police, partly because it allowed me to stitch together some thoughts about the police in the current political moment. My remarks are below.
There is a consensus of sorts about the police that is all the more striking in that it can be found across different and divergent theoretical perspectives. This view is that the police only appear are only necessary when the generally established rule or order is in crisis. The very appearance of the police is in some sense a failure of authority, consensus, or hegemony. In using these different terms, authority, consensus, or hegemony, I have drawn from very different political traditions and ideas on how political order functions and what it is, is it by definition legitimate, a consensus of individuals, or is it to some extent a distortion or manipulation, as in the case of hegemony. To focus on the two examples cited by Jacques Lezra, in Defective Institutions, examples which have very little in common in terms of their politics, philosophies, or ontologies, Hannah Arendt and Louis Althusser. Hannah Arendt argues that violence must be distinguished from authority, that violence, that of the police or otherwise is itself a crisis in authority. Althusser, in his famous essay on Ideology makes a similar point. As Althusser writes, “the subjects 'work', they 'work by themselves' in the vast majority of cases, with the exception of the 'bad subjects' who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (Repressive) State Apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right 'all by themselves', i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses).” This does not mean to suggest that Arendt and Althusser agree on anything more than this point. There is a world of difference between authority and ideology as different figures of noncoercive rule. The first is to some extent legitimate, or at least can be, there is such a thing as just authority, while ideology is an imaginary relation, a kind of constitutive illusion. Nonetheless these are to some extent both ways of posing a distinction, perhaps the oldest distinction in political thought between violence and what is the other of violence, what other form of rule exists. These are differences in terms of what is considered to be opposed to violence, but they are both clear that something else, some other way of constituting subjects is what is in effect for most of the time. Violence, the police only come into play in those moments of crisis, or for those bad subjects who exist outside of the interpellation of ideology.
I am leaving aside for the moment that when it comes to the latter, to Althusser’s essay, the police function as one particular example of both the Repressive State Apparatus, listed along with the military and other forms of organized violence, and as the example of ideological interpellation. Anyone who has read the essay remembers the example of the police and their call “hey you!” which as Althusser reminds us, always reaches the right person. That the police are on both sides of the division, as both violence and ideology, perhaps indicates to what extent this division has always been tenuous, and increasingly so. There are different figures to draw from when it comes to this distinction between force and violence, Althusser draws from. In Machiavelli the split underlying violence and reason is framed almost mythically between animal and man. A ruler must know how to rule as a human, through reason and laws, and as an animal. The animal, however, is split into two, between the fox and the lion. Both qualities are necessary, “…for the lion does not know how to avoid traps and the fox is easily overpowered by wolves. So you must be like a fox when it comes to suspecting a trap, and a lion when it comes to making the wolves turn tail.” In Althusser’s schema the lion becomes the Repressive State Apparatus and the fox becomes the Ideological State Apparatus, although for Althusser the latter is less about avoiding traps than in creating one, in constituting ideology. Althusser connects the fox, the deception, with one of the major points of Machiavelli’s advice for any future prince, that one must appear to be religious, appear to be of the people, governed by the same norms and values as they are. As Althusser writes, “The prince must take the reality of popular ideology into account, and inscribe therein his own representation, which is the public face of the state.” Ideology is not the ideas of the ruling class, but is a reflection back to the ruled of their own spontaneous philosophy. At the time of Machiavelli’s writing this popular ideology was religion, was the Catholic church, but as Althusser argues, the modern school offers an ideology of individuality that is no less pervasive.
The question that I would like to raise, along with, or in relation to Lezra’s book, or at least the chapter titled “All Cops Are Bastards” is to what extent it is necessary to think not so much the opposition between violence and hegemony, but violence itself, or, at least the capacity and right to do violence as a kind of hegemony. It seems that at this point we can begin to wonder if there is any distinction between ideology and force, between fox and lions, maybe the cleverest thing the fox can do, to retain the structure of the fable, is to appear to be a lion, or at least a wolf, to appear to have force is itself a kind of force. If one wanted a quick and easy image what I am getting at, at least in terms of contemporary politics, one could think of the image of the US flag, often in black and white, with a single solitary blue line. The police are not situated on the borders of the flag, outside of the image of sovereignty, but are integral to it. It is worth remembering the role the flag plays not just as a symbol of the nation, but as an integral part of so many rituals of ideology, from the pledge of allegiance to the national anthem, and it is these rituals, these practices, and not supposed ideas, that define ideology according to Althusser. The Blues Live Matter flag is not just an attempt to recognize the police, to appreciate their role, but to fundamentally blur any division between authority and violence, ideological state apparatuses and repressive state apparatuses. If one wanted to continue this study of the iconography of bumper stickers, one could cite another common image, that of combination of the blue lives matter flag with the skull logo of the Marvel comics vigilante The Punisher. This combines the nation, violence, authority, and somehow rebellion at the same time, the idea that the true law is outside the law, and with it the idea that the true community, is one that is not recognized by the state, but exceeds it. The police then become the embodiment not of government, not of an institution, but of the society. As Lezra writes,
Hence the police—the institution that the modern state charges, whether explicitly or implicitly, with regulating consensus and with rendering sovereignty indisputable; hence the efforts modern states make to invest the police with authority; to make of them an institution commonly understood to be founded in what is “common to all”: commonly understood to be founded in a normative, presocial idea of the “common” good or common weal. The police is authoritative and authorized, when it is not understood as an institution-device compounded of devices for producing, normalizing, and administering the experience of commonality, and of determining not just what may or may not, but what can and what cannot be experienced as common. (Lezra, 151)
How does the police, a particular institution, with particular means and methods, come to be understood as the institution of the common? Given that this is a question not just of the common, of the democratic basis for politics, but also of the relationship of sovereignty and violence, it is perhaps fitting that Hobbes’ Leviathan offers one of the first articulations of the modern relation of police and common life. After making his famous argument about the state of nature as being “nasty, brutish, and short” Hobbes gives a second argument for the need of a coercive force, one based on the common elements of life. As Hobbes writes,
It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that Nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this Inference, made from the Passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by Experience. Let him therefore consider with himself, when taking a journey, he arms himself, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be Laws, and public Officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinion he has of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow Citizens, when he locks his door; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? But neither of us accuse man’s nature in it. The Desires, and other Passions of man, are in themselves no Sin. No more are the Actions, that proceed from those Passions, till they know a Law that forbids them; which till Laws be made they cannot know: nor can any Law be made, till they have agreed upon the Person that shall make it.
Hobbes formulation is one that is cited again and again in arguments for the police—often without being cited and without naming him. It is an argument in which the failures of the police to provide security can only become arguments for more police. It is also one in which these failures, these threats to the security of common life, are seen as remnants of the state of nature, like weeds breaking through the asphalt. Any other causal explanation, that they may be produced by the very society and social relations of seventeenth century English society, that they might have something to do with its own social relations, such as the immense inequality of such a society, is not even entertained. They are not products of society, but of nature. Testaments to the partial and incomplete status of any social order over its natural basis. The sovereign is never sovereign enough, the Leviathan can always be more monstrous. In other words, and this is the way that the argument functions to this day, failures of policing, the existence of crime or danger, in contemporary society, can only call for more policing. Finally, it is also worth noting that Hobbes argument is predicated not on the actual reality of such crimes, but their perception. It is the fact that one locks up their trunks or carries weapons that is offered as evidence, not that one is actually robbed or assaulted. To once again put it in the parlance of our times, it is a matter of feelings not facts. We could say, in following Althusser’s idea of symptomatic reading, that what we see he is an inversion of causes and effects: effects, the distrust of one’s own servants and children, and fear of one’s neighbors, is taken as being equivalent to disorder itself, and its actual causes.
Lest this reading of Hobbes seems like a departure from the questions at hand, that of violence and hegemony, it seems to return to two questions central to Lezra’s book: first, and most generally there is the question of the relationship between institutions and their general form and function and their initial causes or impetus. In other words, What particular idea or sentiment is the general structure of the institution a response to? Hobbes’ answer would seem to be that the police are a response to the fear that common life, that our existence with and among each other is constantly under threat. If this the basis of police than it is hard to see how it can be restricted or contained. This is a recurring theme in the philosophical discourse on the police. Hegel in Elements of the Philosophy of Right argues that since the police are there to protect the police against potential harm there is no limit to their jurisdiction. As Hegel writes,
There is admittedly only a possibility that harm may be done. But the fact that no harm is done is, as a contingency, likewise no more than that. This is the aspect of wrong which is inherent in such actions, and which is consequently the ultimate reason for penal justice as implemented by the police.
Hegel’s concept of the police is, according to the use of the term at its time in Prussia, a broader notion than contemporary law enforcement, encompassing the sorts of things affecting public safety, such as the quality of products and the conditions of public roads, that are now relegated to different institutions, such as the Food and Drug Administration or Department of Transportation. What remains constant beyond such institutional divisions and transformations, however, is this idea that every activity encompasses the possibility of harm or danger. Thus “policing,” protecting people from potential harm or violence is a necessarily expansive and unlimited concept. As Hegel goes on to write, “When reflection is highly developed, the police may tend to draw everything it can into its sphere of influence, for it is possible to discover some potentially harmful aspect in everything.” This idea of an expansive nature of the police appears again in Walter Benjamin’s essay on the “Critique of Violence.” What Benjamin stresses, focusing on the more contemporary sense of the term, is that the police are neither an instance of law creating violence, founding a new order and authority, or law preserving violence. Their particular area of influence is the gray zone between existing and new laws, often being called upon to preserve the peace, or monitor suspicious activity, with no real limits on what these activities entail. As Benjamin writes:
“Therefore the police intervene "for security reasons" in countless cases where no clear legal situation exists, when they are not merely, without the slightest relation to legal ends, accompanying the citizen as a brutal encumbrance through a life regulated by ordinances, or simply supervising him. Unlike law, which acknowledges in the "decision" determined by place and time a metaphysical category that gives it a claim to critical evaluation, a consideration of the police institution encounters nothing essential at all. Its power is formless, like its nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states.”
As an institution the police have a particular defect that they are without limitations and restrictions. This brings us to the second question from Lezra, the one that immediately follows the discussion of the police, is there an alternative? What would it take construct a common life without the police? Or, as Lezra argues, this question could be framed in terms of its corollary, what would it mean to think of abolition, not just as a demand, but as a practice? I have attempted to frame this question against the backdrop of the overdetermined figure of the police. The way the police appear not just as the monopoly of violence, necessary to enforce the state, but also as the image of very authority of the state, and as the necessary condition of common life and existence. Lastly, it is worth noting the affective dimension of the police, as Hobbes makes it clear, the police appear whenever there is fear of possible harm or wrong, that is what gives them their ghostly presence. The police are not just out there, but our in us as well in our desires for security, safety, and comfort. As the old slogan from May 68 goes, there is a cop in our heads. As Lezra writes, “How then do we abolish these objects we have stored away that inhabit us and act on us like the sense, the ambiance, offered by familiar, familial, forgotten things? That have become, today, the shape of instinct?”(170) This is the question of abolitionism. It seems to me that the answer, or at least the beginning of an answer can be framed by returning to Althusser’s use of Machiavelli. Both ideology, the fox, and violence, the lion, are parts of the animal aspect of humanity, they are both set apart the human aspect, that which obeys rules, or is reasonable. To jump then from Machiavelli to Spinoza, following a path that Althusser traced multiple times, Spinoza argues we, human beings agree, insofar as we are guided by reason. The alternative to the police, to a commonality predicated on fear and threats, is one in which we grasp that elusive object of our common humanity. Perhaps that is what is at stake in abolition. The question then, to put it more directly, is the following: is it possible to institute our common capacity to reason? Or does such a common always escape or evade institution? Such that we always institute a particular idea of society, a particular fear of its dissolution?
Presented at SPEP October 25, 2025
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