Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment

How American-style capitalism creates a coercive state unlike any other

How could America, that storied land of liberty, be home to mass incarceration, police killings, and racialized criminal justice? In Law and Order Leviathan, David Garland explains how America’s racialized political economy gives rise to this extraordinary outcome.

The United States has long been an international outlier, with a powerful business class, a weak social state, and an exceptional gun culture. Garland shows how, after the 1960s, American-style capitalism disrupted poor communities and depleted social controls, giving rise to violence and social problems at levels altogether unknown in other affluent nations. Aggressive policing and punishment became the default response.

Marshalling a wealth of evidence, Garland shows that America lags behind comparable nations in protections for working people. He identifies the structural sources of America’s penal state and the community-level processes through which political economy impacts crime and policing. He argues that there is nothing paradoxical in America’s reliance on coercive state controls; the nation’s vaunted liberalism is largely an economic liberalism devoted to free markets and corporate power rather than to individual dignity and flourishing. Fear of violent crime and distrust of others ensure public support for this coercive Leviathan; racism enables indifference to its harms.

America’s carceral regime will remain an outlier until America’s economy is structurally transformed. And yet, Garland argues, there is a path to reduced violence and significant penal reform even in the absence of structural change. Law and Order Leviathan sets out a powerful theory of the relation between political economy and crime control and a realistic framework for pursuing progressive change.

David Garland is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University and an Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Culture of Control, Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, The Welfare State: A Very Brief Introduction, and other books.