Rethinking the philosophical grounds of police power, Melayna Lamb argues that traditional ideas of sovereignty and the law need to be radically re-evaluated. In placing police at the centre of analysis this book demonstrates the manner in which police power exists in a complex and overlapping relationship with sovereignty and law in a form which is not reducible to implementation. In doing this it argues for the centrality of order in any consideration of police and challenging a common narrative whereby a dynamic, interventionist sovereign power that follows from a belief of order as ‘artificial’ is replaced by a liberal, limited non-interventionist sovereign power that proceeds from a ‘natural’ order. Moving through thinkers such as Hobbes, Hegel and Adam Smith the book argues that police power is in fact an-archic in form, in a manner that makes it impossible to hold accountable through the law.
Lamb adopts an interdisciplinary approach that turns to philosophy to make sense of global events that see police power at their centre. This includes the history of police brutality in the US, the structural injustices made more apparent by COVID-19 and the growing calls to abolish the police.
By:
Dr Melayna Kay Lamb (University of Law UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 232mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 16mm
Weight: 360g
ISBN: 9781350204089
ISBN 10: 1350204080
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 18 September 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgements Introduction Sovereign Police? Oikonomia The end of Oikonomia? The Argument The Structure Prologue: Foucault, Smith and Disappearing Police Archaeology and Order Biopolitics, Discipline and Order Order: Physis or Nomos? 1. Sovereignty and Fear: Hobbes and the Production of Order The Political Animal vs. the Wolf (Dis)order, Teleology and the Life of the State Living and Living Well The Splitting of Power 2. Hegel and Police: On the Relation between Universal and Particular The Hegelian State Hegel’s Polizei Fichte’s Police Hegel on Fichte’s Police Polizei, Police, Police-Power Violence, Nature and Hegel’s Emergency 3. Law, Sovereignty and the Exception: Benjamin and Modern Police Schmitt’s Sovereign The Transcendent made Immanent: Benjamin’s response Violence and Critique Benjamin’s Police Force of Law 4. The Anarchy of Order: Agamben and the Police Divided Power and Oikonomia Fate, Government and Collateral Effects The Signature of Order The An-archic Character of Police Power Potentiality, Exceptionality, Police 5. da Silva: Nature, Necessity and Violence The Racial and the Modern Police Power and Colonial Boomerangs Revisiting the State of Nature Time and Anti-Black Violence Concluding Remarks Bibliography
Melayna Kay Lamb is a Lecturer at the University of Law, London, UK.
Reviews for A Philosophical History of Police Power
Lamb’s A Philosophical History of Police Power goes a long way toward opening our eyes to what the police really are, and leaves for us as readers (and potentially abolitionists) to wrestle with what kind of anarchy we may imagine instead after extinguishing modern police order. * Crime Media Culture * Melayna’s Lamb’s groundbreaking work demonstrates that the police are never about justice but rather straddle the gap between what the law purports to be and the requirement to control various populations. Far from being a supplement to sovereign power, Lamb shows that the police are the foundation of that power. * James Martel, Professor, San Francisco State University, USA * A striking new voice in the field, Melayna Lamb develops an extraordinary theorisation of the formlessness and an-archic nature of police power. * Illan rua Wall, Professor of Law, University of Warwick, UK * In this must-read book, Lamb brings much needed philosophical precision to recent scholarship on policing. Patiently unpicking the prevalent view that police reproduce specific forms of order, Lamb charts a way past dead-end theories like the colonial boomerang to contend with the an-archy that is characteristic of police power itself. * James Trafford, Reader in Philosophy & Design, University of the Creative Arts, UK * We have seen a rush to caricature attempts to understand policing through political ontology—particularly those under the (seemingly capacious) banner of Afro-pessimism. It is important to read A Philosophical History of Police Power as providing a corrective to this anxiously prophylactic critique. * Contemporary Political Theory * [A] truly beautiful book … The rigor and care of Lamb’s argument is what makes this book so successful in naming something that is so ubiquitous but disguised by the seemingly shocking notion that the police are an-archic. * Critical Legal Thinking *
