The Dual Penal State: The Crisis of Criminal Law in Comparative-Historical Perspective
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| Anteprima |
This
book addresses one of today's most pressing social and political
issues: the rampant, at best haphazard, and ever-expanding use of penal
power by states ostensibly committed to the enlightenment-based
legal-political project of Western liberal democracy. Penal regimes in
these states operate in a wide field of ill-considered and barely
constrained violence where radical and prolonged interference with
citizens, upon whose autonomy the legitimacy of state power supposedly
rests, has been utterly normalized. At its heart, the crisis of modern
penality is a crisis of the liberal project itself and the penal paradox
is the sharpest formulation of the general paradox of power in a
liberal state: the legitimacy of state sovereignty in the name of
personal autonomy. To capture the depth and range of the crisis of
contemporary penality in ostensibly liberal states, The Dual Penal State
adopts a fresh approach. It uses historical and comparative analysis to
reveal the fundamental distinction between the two conceptions of penal
power-penal law and penal police-that runs through Western
legal-political history: one rooted in autonomy, equality, and
interpersonal respect, and the other in heteronomy, hierarchy, and
patriarchal power. This analysis of the dual penal state illuminates how
the law/police distinction manifests itself in various penal systems,
from the American war on crime to the ahistorical methods of German
criminal law science.
