Abstract
Using the Bohemian example, the book tries to show that the establishment of police headquarters in the capitals of the Habsburg provinces (Prague, Brno, Opava, Pressburg, Buda) in 1785 amounted to more than just their centralisation and subjection to Vienna, manifested by regular and formalised reporting. The police, especially the public police, is seen as an integral part of administrative theory and practice whose aim was to check, regulate, quantify, and unify, but also to some degree create and stimulate desirable behaviour by the subjects, citizens, producers, consumers, and travellers.
The police had a more visible presence in the daily lives of city dwellers than did many other administrative organs, while unlike the justice system, it had to apply the principles which ruled its actions flexibly and with due consideration of particular situations. The first, fairly extensive, chapter of the book is dedicated to the police as one of the new state institutions.
It traces not only the spread of a particular police model in Central Europe and the Habsburg Monarchy in the 1770s and 1780s, but also the formation of the 'police gaze', that is, of a specific way of recording and communicating social reality. The following chapter deals with the identification of individuals and also efforts to control the social space and to make it more transparent.
Despite the focus on the public role of the police in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, we also cannot overlook the role it played in maintaining state security. Yet even the chapter dedicated to this issue tends to focus on how the individual officials, from local police chiefs all the way up to the heads of provincial governments, supervised public peace and order, tried to detect and 'reveal' potential threats, and launched police operations.
Throughout the book, we follow a constructivist approach and adopt a productive, rather than repressive, view of the police. The leitmotif in the background, meanwhile, is the question of whether these police and administrative practices did not, paradoxically, contribute to the creation of emancipated citizens, who were potentially equal in the eyes of the state.
In the mid-eighteenth century, some police and administrative measures were introduced with an explicit comment that they should apply to all persons regardless of their status ('ohne Unterschied des Standes'). Thus in theory, after 1801 all travellers crossing the Austrian border were supposed to be subjected to the same passport and identification procedures and all rules pertaining to registration were to apply to all persons staying temporarily in cities.
Nevertheless, the right to equal administrative treatment remained on the level of declaration of intent. Police officers were often at a loss when it came to treatment of high-born or well-known persons caught engaging in banned activities.
At other times, persons of a higher status were not subjected to the passport and identification procedures at all, and if this did happen, it was viewed as surprising. Nobles in public functions were on the one hand supposed to serve as examples of adherence to the norms, but on the other hand, one can also detect a sense of apprehension that to punish them might undermine respect for the authorities and social order.
But even if we admit that administrative reforms, including police reforms, at least hypothetically or discursively opened up a 'procedural way' to a new society of equal citizens, one might still ask whether the paternalist system of the estates was not merely replaced by the 'tyranny of the impersonal state', market, and administrative licence, as many critics of modernism claim. Even if we do not view them in hindsight, through the prism of all their (alleged) consequences, the evaluation of enlightened reforms is controversial and difficult.
Especially in the Habsburg Monarchy they were implemented from above and often rather insensitively. On the other hand, the people who complained were frequently those whose privileges, stemming from their status or estate, were being threatened or taken away.
These reforms were inspired by a desire to increase the military and economic potential of the country. In effect, though, the resulting biopolicy also led to improvements in the living conditions of the populace at large, so that for instance while the explicit aim of compulsory school attendance was to educate obedient citizens, soldiers, producers, and consumers, literacy and the attendant development of the media and public space in general also led to emancipation.
The same holds of the actual implementation of "police science" ('Polizeiwissenschaft'), which refers not only to policing but state administration in the widest possible sense. Although it respected and perpetuated the property- and status-based stratification of society, alongside the protection of property and honour the highest value guiding administrative practice was the preservation and protection of life and health.
This led not only to the development of first aid and fire safety but also for instance to the saving of persons attempting suicide, i.e. to actions which one could view as state-driven interference with autonomous human decision. Numerous studies show that administrative practices such as a personal identification system have the effect of constituting objects of the state, in other words citizens, and enabling the coordination and organisation of large societies.
By having an identity that is recognised and confirmed by the state, citizens of these societies acquire not only protection and the right to be helped, but also an opportunity to meaningfully act and influence the society they live in.