Böcker av Mark Neocleous

Putting police power into the centre of the picture of capitalism

Examines the way that the state is imagined in terms traditionally associated with human subjectivity: body, mind, personality and home. Around these themes, this book attempts to weave a set of arguments concerning the three icons of the political imagination - the political collective, the sovereign agency and the enemy figure.

Anyone who considers questions of power cannot help but be struck by the ubiquitous nature, emotional force and political pull of the concept of order. In this book, Mark Neocleous examines the role of the police in the construction of this order.*BR**BR*After an initial exploration of the original relationship between police, state power and the question of order, he focuses on the ways in which eighteenth century liberalism refined and narrowed the concept of the police, a process which masked the power of capital and broader issues of social control. In doing so he challenges the way liberalism came to define policing solely in terms of the question of crime and the rule of law. This liberal definition created a limited and fundamentally misleading understanding of policing which remains in use today. *BR**BR*In contrast, Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, adequate to the expansive set of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance or reproduction of order, but with its fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order based on wage labour. This project, he argues, should be understood as the project of social security. Grasping this point allows a fuller understanding of the ways in which the state polices and secures civil society, and how order is fabricated through law and administration.

Why is liberalism so obsessed with waste? Is there a drone above you now? Are you living in a no-fly zone? What is the role of masculinity in the 'war on terror'? And why do so many liberals profess a love of peace while finding new ways to justify slaughter in the name of 'peace and security'? In this, the first book to deal with the concepts of war power and police power together, Mark Neocleous deals with these questions and many more by radically rethinking the relationship between war power and police power.

This book brings together a range of diverse discussions about security in order to sustain a genuine critique of the subject. It is unique in its examination of the historical and political links between social security and national security and in its assessment of the way that emergency powers (as the most intense realisation of the rhetoric of 'national security') have been synthesised with 'normal' law.Among other ideas and concepts, Mark Neocleous discusses the place of security in the liberal tradition of political theory. Building on insights from Foucault and Marx, he argues that liberalism's central category is not liberty, but security. He also deals with the role of security in justifying the introduction and continuation of emergency powers through a historical excavation of the state of emergency, a political reading of the way emergency powers are only tangentially concerned with warfare, and a theoretical reading of the debate between Schmitt and Benjamin.

Examines the use of metaphors of monstrosity and the place of the dead in political theory, specifically in relation to conservatism, Marxism and fascism.