Abstract
Chances are, if you were to ask an average Westerner about their thoughts regarding ‘The State’, you would eventually end up in a conversation about the police, brutality, systematic racism, and criminal justice. At the very least, global protests would surely be mentioned. The evening news is famously a parade of negative updates about crime, the State, politics, and so on.
Command and Persuade is compellingly framed with the question – why do we feel more ‘beleaguered’ by crime even when we ‘objectively have the least to fear’? And although Baldwin does not directly answer this question, he offers three conclusions that collectively seem to suggest one. These conclusions also form the core of this book.
First, Baldwin argues the State only slowly and hesitantly assumed its modern role as the regulator of crime. Second, he argues that the State moderated punishment as it gained finesse and no longer depended on penal showmanship. At this point, he seems to largely track with Foucault, albeit with a much longer time frame (Foucault, 1995). At the risk of oversimplifying, Baldwin suggests this happened through a series of factors: the State gained mastery of information, civil society began regulating itself independently of the State, and individuals increasingly internalized more stringent behavioral standards according to Norbert Elias’ (2000) civilizing process.
This collectively leads to Baldwin’s (2021) ultimate conclusion:
At the same time as we have become more civilized, the state has extended its formal reach, multiplying law and punishing us for transgressions . . . the more we discipline ourselves, the more law the state trains on us. (p. 10)
Baldwin, a University of California Los Angeles–based historian, is, as his website puts it, broadly interested in the ‘development of the modern state’. His work is largely focused on the European state and covers everything from the Holocaust to AIDS and welfare.
This breadth is reflected in Command and Persuade. The book is essentially a literature review of a vast array of secondary sources covering a wide range of countries throughout virtually all human history. It has a limited number of modern primary sources (such as FBI statistics), some classical secondary sources (such as Max Weber), and quotes from various scriptures. But overall, the actual research conducted is largely a focused on reviewing and organizing recent secondary academic work. It is noteworthy that the scope is limited in one important way – Baldwin’s focus is essentially on Europe, the United States, and China.
Command and Persuade is organized thematically. The book opens with a meditation on the simple reality of the State’s tardiness to the task of crime enforcement and the various motives behind such a delay. It transitions into an exploration of what I would describe as the more cultural underpinnings behind why and how the State evolved to control crime: the evolution of the separation between sin and crime, the development of the concept of social harm, and the shift in how cultures understood the nature of treason, the first true state crime.
Baldwin then turns to more practical questions of the source and nature of crime control. He first examines the parallel growth of power of civil society. Second, Baldwin examines the raison d’etre behind the State’s control of crime – essentially the maintenance of order. Third, Baldwin examines the evolution of punishment techniques and eventually the State’s self-moderation of punishment.
This leads into Baldwin’s core focus: the paradoxical correspondence of the State’s self-moderation and its increasing intrusiveness. Most generally, the State became gradually invested in goodness as a legitimate outcome of State regulation (i.e. the State’s concern with morality) and the focus of criminal justice shifted from retribution to prevention. He finally traces the gradual development of policing before offering a range of thought-provoking conclusions and reflections.
Given this overview, it is not surprising that the book’s greatest strength is its impressive scope and broad context. Command and Persuade offers a truly longue durée perspective to the issue of crime as a State responsibility. In doing so, Baldwin gives substantial context to criminological perspectives that are often lacking in the literature. Modern criminology – like the social sciences in general – is often guilty of ignoring the world before the Enlightenment. Baldwin’s work will help remedy that. It also brings substantial precision to an often admittedly vague discourse about State power and social control. This is a nuanced picture of multiple government apparatuses gradually developing in response to many impulses and outside stimuli. At a basic level, it is also certainly true that Baldwin provides a vast array of case studies and illustrations from a wide view of history. Virtually anyone tangentially related to criminology can find a puzzle worth pondering here.
That said, Command and Persuade is held back by some weaknesses. Perhaps the most substantial one is a lack of clear theoretical perspective or insight. He seems to dismiss abstract and theoretical approaches to the study of the State in favor of empirical evidence (Baldwin, 2021: 316). This sits uncomfortably alongside the author’s regular theoretical claims that he himself does not appear to substantiate empirically, such as his claim that social control theorists lack empiricism. Also given his subject matter, Baldwin’s list of criminological theorists and scholarship he engages is out-of-date. He critiques many classical theorists – Weber, Durkheim, Lombroso – but never engages with the scholarship built on the works of those thinkers. For instance, given his focus on discipline and how individuals came to be independently regulated, Philip Gorski’s (2003) work The Disciplinary Revolution seems so relevant its absence is almost a critique unto itself.
In addition, Baldwin regularly relies on the concept of civil society, but never actually defines the term or engages with the robust subfield focused on civil society. He seems to assume that civil society is truly separate from the government and treats civil society’s role in self-discipline as evidence that the State has relinquished some power. Yet much of civil sphere theory paints a more interdependent picture (Alexander, 2012). If anything, it seems just as easy to conclude from Baldwin’s presentation that the State’s desires shaped the contours of civil society in a more effective way than direct policing. Finally, Baldwin seems to often oversimplify or misunderstand other areas of expertise in a way that can be misleading. For example, Baldwin (202) draws a distinction between ‘sin’ and ‘immorality’ that is presented as a fact even though such a position is most certainly not a universal belief and likely does not reflect how the average believer thinks about morality (p. 178).
Each of these points could be elaborated more fully – and no doubt debated. But all of them revolve around a lack of theoretical focus. The unique argument of the book centers around the somewhat paradoxical reality that the State has become more refined and ‘civilized’ in its punishment techniques and more intrusive into individuals’ lives at the same time. Given the evolution of disciplinary technology has been thoroughly studied already, it seems the true focus should be on the increasing intrusion and control the State exercises. But in terms of sheer volume of content, this is far from true. In other words, the central thesis behind this book is often hard to observe. A stronger theoretical vision would likely help alleviate the four theoretical issues identified above.
In conclusion, I find it necessary to point out an omission in Baldwin’s history. Baldwin rhetorically questions the idea of prisons as a form of social control as follows:
Conversely, if social control actually did what was claimed on its behalf, why so ineffectually? If modern prisons were supposed to keep a reserve labor force off the streets when unemployment was high, why should incarceration cost more than the dole? If state schools were intended to train the rising generation of worker bees, why not do so more effectively? Who were these Machiavellians covertly running things? If they were so clever, why did they usually fail? (Baldwin, 2021: 339)
But it is well documented that the evolution of the prison system – and State power more generally – was embedded in a much more specific phenomenon: race and imperial power. There is a well-established connection between racial politics in the United States, the collapse of slavery and Jim Crow laws, and the ‘War on Drugs’ (Alexander, 2021). There is also a similarly documented connection between colonial power and the State’s development of new disciplinary technologies (Steinmetz, 2007). In other words, there is a critical connection between race and the ‘other’ at virtually every key moment of State development in modernity. Frankly, given recent global calls for police reform, a failure to engage with the issue of structural racism and criminal justice even briefly is shocking. This perhaps is partially reflective of Baldwin’s focus on Europe, the United States, and China.
Ultimately, Command and Persuade is a stimulating book rich with content and a wide scope. Virtually any scholar of criminology and the State is likely to find at least one chapter thought-provoking. And Baldwin’s conclusion – that the State has in fact paradoxically increased its regulatory control over our daily lives despite the simultaneously occurring self-discipline of citizens – is well taken, but it gets lost in a thicket of semi-relevant details. In doing so, however, he fails to speak to the most immediately pressing issue of our time – police brutality and systematic racism in criminal justice. In other words, a reader seeking a general history of the State and crime, or useful references will be pleased. A reader seeking insight into contemporary issues will likely be unsatisfied.
This is, unfortunately, reflected in the overall framing of his book. Baldwin opens by telling the reader that ‘we’ objectively have the least to fear from crime. But who is the ‘we’? Based on contemporary statistics, surely it is not racial minority or transgender Americans but Whites alone. And more generally, I’m not sure whether he really gives a clear answer to his question (although I think he gestures toward some).
Why do we feel more beleaguered by crime if we now have the least to fear?