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Theoretical Criminology
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Social Surveillance and the Rise of the `Police Machine'

JOHN L. McMULLAN

Saint Mary's University, Canada

In this paper, I explore the development of police as part of a modernist power/knowledge nexus, an essential feature of which is an ordered totality: designed, predictable and controllable. I argue that police was connected to a form of power, originally extraneous to the State, but which, in the eighteenth century, was eventually absorbed into a set of state techniques, that may best be termed pastoral. I examine how `police intellectuals' refined, reshaped and added to the meaning of police by transforming it from a condition of government into a techne of social order, a `police machine', if you will, charged with the effective and efficient administration of the general ensemble of a population. I concentrate on the writings of Patrick Colquhoun because he was a chief strategist of police in the transition to a liberal police in a modern world. A critical approach to the understanding of police and its relation to classical liberalism, I conclude, warns against accepting fast theoretical divides and contrasts between pre-modern and modern forms of power and government.

Key Words: Colquhoun • crime control • pastoral power • police and policing • social surveillance

Theoretical Criminology, Vol. 2, No. 1, 93-117 (1998)
DOI: 10.1177/1362480698002001005
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