The Security Principle by Frederic Gros

Author:Frederic Gros
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Police Security

The Protection of Goods and Persons

The police dimension of security is perhaps the most immediate and obvious one. Here, we move from security as a guarantee of an individual’s natural faculties – through a Rechtsstaat that elaborates laws conforming to the general interest and through an independent justice system that ensures that they are respected – to security as the conservation of goods and persons and the maintenance of public order. Moreover, as we have seen, the philosophers of the contract took good care to distinguish between two meanings of security, which could be taken either in a narrow or a broad sense. In the broad sense, security for individuals is their guaranteed capacity to articulate their political faculties to the full. In the narrow sense, it essentially means to be protected against the loss of one’s assets or one’s life: the conservation of property and individuals.

Across its long history in Europe,60 police forces have been responsible for two main functions: the conservation of goods and persons (police as a public force that prevents and combats theft and crime); and the maintenance of public order against any attempt at destabilization (combatting subversive movements, revolutionary circles, and enemies of the state, but also imposing limits and controls on any demonstration or gathering that could represent a threat to the established government or the public calm). There is also a radical version of this political police, when its task is not only to protect state institutions but to ensure the victory of a Movement that declares itself to be realizing a mission set by History itself: this is the totalitarian police whose functioning Hannah Arendt aptly described in the chapter in The Origins of Totalitarianism devoted to ‘secret police’.61 This totalitarian security made its mark through names that remain imbued with horror even today: the Gestapo,62 the Stasi,63 the KGB and indeed the Romanian Securitate.

Here, for the sake of convenience, we will speak first of general policing (for the conservation of goods and persons) then political policing (for the maintenance of public order) and then of the totalitarian policing pursued by the Movement. That said, there is indeed a fourth determining characteristic of policing that Foucault established in his ‘Sécurité, territoire, population’ course at the Collège de France,64 when he studied the first great treatises on policing like those written by Delamare65 and Von Justi.66 Here, we have the police in its function of controlling and regulating the different forms of circulation – of commodities, of people, of the air (the problem of food, of supplies, of hygiene, of blocked passageways, of the fluidity of crowds). This police is urban in inspiration. Security, in this sense, stems from the city itself. The city is these dark alleys where one risks being mugged or murdered: the space of crimes and attacks. In the city, we also find the residences of Ministers and Princes. This is where we find the sites of power that angry masses rail against and here, too, are the avenues where revolts rumble.

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