Law and Order Leviathan
America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment
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- 27,99 €
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- 27,99 €
Publisher Description
How American-style capitalism creates a coercive state unlike any other
How could America, that storied land of liberty, be home to mass incarceration, police killings, and racialized criminal justice? In Law and Order Leviathan, David Garland explains how America’s racialized political economy gives rise to this extraordinary outcome.
The United States has long been an international outlier, with a powerful business class, a weak social state, and an exceptional gun culture. Garland shows how, after the 1960s, American-style capitalism disrupted poor communities and depleted social controls, giving rise to violence and social problems at levels altogether unknown in other affluent nations. Aggressive policing and punishment became the default response.
Marshalling a wealth of evidence, Garland shows that America lags behind comparable nations in protections for working people. He identifies the structural sources of America’s penal state and the community-level processes through which political economy impacts crime and policing. He argues that there is nothing paradoxical in America’s reliance on coercive state controls; the nation’s vaunted liberalism is largely an economic liberalism devoted to free markets and corporate power rather than to individual dignity and flourishing. Fear of violent crime and distrust of others ensure public support for this coercive Leviathan; racism enables indifference to its harms.
America’s carceral regime will remain an outlier until America’s economy is structurally transformed. And yet, Garland argues, there is a path to reduced violence and significant penal reform even in the absence of structural change. Law and Order Leviathan sets out a powerful theory of the relation between political economy and crime control and a realistic framework for pursuing progressive change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intriguing study, political economist Garland (The Peculiar Institution) tries to reconcile why it is that though American crime rates have steadily decreased since the 1980s, the public demand for "law and order" has made a resurgence in the past few years. Garland takes as a starting point the peculiarity of America's response to Covid-19—he notes that among developed nations, only the U.S. experienced increased rates of accidents and spikes in violent crime during the pandemic. He also notes that despite the popular support of the George Floyd protests, a pro-police backlash and crime scare followed in subsequent years. These factors lead Garland toward a structural explanation of a unique American system of economic racism. In his view, the economic structure, with its limited opportunities for the poor, is arranged such that, relative to the rest of the developed world, "extraordinary levels of lethal violence" and criminality are indeed "a feature of life" for people of color. (Something leftists would do well not to deny, he argues.) One example of how this structure is maintained is the country's unrivaled access to firearms. Through comparative examples to France, Canada, and other countries, he persuasively makes his case for America's violent exceptionalism. The result is a striking challenge to both conservative and liberal perspectives on crime and policing.
