Police State

The concept of a police state has its roots in 18th-century Prussia, although its contemporary usage is derived primarily from the organization of the National Socialist state in Germany during the 1930s. A police state is generally one in which the police come to assume many of the functions traditionally held by other social institutions. Police states are also typically antithetical to liberal ideas concerning the separation of powers that oversee and regulate police functions. Police states are best characterized as possessing a decidedly unbalanced institutional arrangement of power such that police are able to act in an unchecked fashion. This entry summarizes the historical development of the term police state within the context of the transition from the Weimar Republic to National Socialism in Germany.

The term police state is a translation of the German term polizeistaat, and was one of three [Page 485]phrases used in the 18th century to jurisprudentially characterize nation-states. The term was used again within the Weimar Republic to describe a system of administration thought necessary for the maintenance of state stability. The power of the state in relation to its neighbors was seen as necessary to the complementary interests of maintaining order and guaranteeing political stability to citizens. Consequently, the system of administration was marked by a bureaucracy responsive to the demands of state leaders in regulating economic and political expansion. The interests of the state were also promoted as superior to the individual interests of citizens, because individual interest was contingent upon order and stability.

While the early conceptualization of a police state could not be considered liberal, neither was it characterized by the excessive dominance of police institutions that would eventually typify more contemporary conceptualizations. Early references to the polizeistaat emphasized its promotion of an orderly and predictable government through economic self-sufficiency and political might. The term was devoid of reference to abusive and oppressive police institutions or the arbitrary enforcement of rules and regulations that often coexist.

After National Socialism became the dominant state ethos in Germany in 1933, the general concept of what defines a police state changed to reflect the historical realities of Nazism. In short, the administrative organization of Weimar Germany was dismantled in favor of more centralized system of governance. The police were granted power without the restrictions of external oversight or control such that no other state entity could challenge the institutional legitimacy or authority of the police.

The evolution of German governmental administration into a form whereby the police came to dominate all other social institutions can be traced through a series of policy enactments. In the mid-1920s, private police entities worked at the behest of the National Socialist party, where they were charged with enforcing order at party meetings and rallies. They also protected the party from its many enemies, both real and imagined, within the party itself and in the Weimar Republic. When the National Socialist party assumed power in 1933, along with the abolition of traditional liberal-democratic institutions the private party police transformed itself into the German state police. This occurred in the midst of menacing threats from party leaders against those opposing the ideologically charged positions of the new regime. Furthermore, the new institutional arrangement had dire implications, as the new state police had no inclination toward the type of administrative rationality that characterized the police under Weimar.

...