Freedom's police: The constitution of the liberal police state in the Early Republic's theater of civil society.

Abstract

Based on the recovery of the value of the eighteenth-century concept of <italic>police</italic> for understanding the early American republic, this dissertation develops a critical framework for analyzing how practices of self-government and rule over others within the associational sphere of civil society constituted the institutional theater of the nineteenth-century liberal state. Anchored in archival research on struggles for African-American civil and political rights, democratic constitutional reform, female moral reform, and poor law reform in the Early Republic, <italic>Freedom's Police </italic> explores how philanthropic practices were deployed to <italic>re-form </italic> the poor, laborers, women, children, and colored citizens in the name of an imperial pursuit of freedom for all. This project examines how liberal practices of civil association shaped regimes of sentimental police that governed the ways middle-class white citizens taught each other the <italic> politesse</italic> of ruling themselves and others. But it also explores how these other citizens developed alternative forms of association, such as the antebellum Colored Citizens' Conventions, into movements of democratic police to challenge dominant modes of rule. Grounded in Foucault's concept of <italic>governmentality</italic>---understood as a framework for analyzing the strategic intersections between practices of self and practices of rule over others---this project develops a critical framework for analyzing how particular historical struggles transformed the character of sensibilities, modes of association, and regimes of policymaking in order to constitute new governmentalities. <italic>Freedom's Police</italic> thereby analyzes how particular struggles over representation, sensibility, and policy within civil society shaped institutions of power that constituted the Early Republic's political space as a panoptic theater of freedom. I argue that by working to shield the exercise of power from the observation or influence of the ruled, <italic>representations</italic> of freedom constituted the panoptic veil of the liberal police state. This interpretive framework yields new perspectives for understanding the transition from democratic republican to liberal regimes of governance and policymaking during the nineteenth century, and reveals how this transition was facilitated by the invention of techniques of sentimental police that attenuated the force and potential of democratic movements and transformation in the Early Republic.