Abstract

The article examines various aspects of a “police state” — a historically unique phenomenon which originally appeared in German absolutist states of the XVIII century. Such states were characterized by a developed discourse of state administration coupled with intensive state interference into social and economic life of its citizens by means of police control. First, brief introduction into the problematics of a police state is given. We point out the inadequate contemporary reading of a “police state”, exclusively viewed in the light of latter bourgeois law-based states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The heuristic value of such social order analysis for general modern theory and particular theories of political power is also considered. The paper continues with a brief digression into the case history of the term “the police”. The main semantic changes of the term are traced, beginning from its appearance in ancient Greece, and concluding with the absolutist epoch. The main part of the paper deals with the traditional police state as a historical phenomenon representing an attempt to implement an intentional utopia as an administrative practice and as a frame mercantilist concept of public good developed in cameralistics. Then, “police science” of the eighteenth century is examined as the police state’s own political discourse. The problematics of “police state” are applied to the Russian administrative experience in the conclusion