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Kimmel, Shawn. "Freedom's Police: The Constitution of the Liberal Police State in the Early Republic's Theater of Civil Society ," American Culture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, February 2007. Advisor: Carroll Smith Rosenberg
Freedom’s Police deploys the eighteenth-century concept of police to reframe the history of how intersecting practices of self-government and rule over others within the associational sphere of civil society constituted the institutional theater of the early U.S. liberal state. Anchored in archival research on struggles for African-American civil and political rights, radical democratic constitutional reform, female moral reform, and poor law reform in the Early Republic, Freedom’s Police examines how philanthropic practices were deployed to re-form the poor, laborers, women, children, and “colored” citizens in the name of an often imperial pursuit of “freedom for all.” This project thereby examines how liberal practices of freedom within civil society shaped regimes of police that governed the ways elite and middle-class white citizens taught each other the politesse of ruling themselves and others. This project also explores how these “other” citizens developed alternative forms of association, such as the antebellum Colored Citizens’ Conventions, into movements of democratic police that challenged liberal modes of governmentality.
Building on Foucault’s concept of governmentality—understood as a lens for analyzing the strategic intersection between practices of self and practices of rule over others—this project develops a critical framework for understanding how particular historical struggles within the Early Republic transformed the character of sensibilities, modes of association, and regimes of policymaking in order to both constitute and contain democratic mentalities of governance. Freedom’s Police also explores how particular struggles over representation, sensibility, and policy within civil society shaped the Early Republic’s institutional political space as a panoptic theater in which democratic representations of freedom became the panoptic veil of power for the liberal police state. This project thereby yields new perspectives on the transition from democratic republican to liberal regimes of governance in the Early Republic.
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