Police State
A police state is a political system where those in power use naked force by
police, secret police, the military and even private armies to control and
dominate the population. Essentially a police state is identified by its contempt
for ordinary notions of therule of law, as well as by totally ignoring any idea of
civil liberties. It is the immediate power of the executive, or whomever
controls the repressive forces, to inflict punishment, even death, on particular
individuals or groups, without having to show them guilty of breaking
formally constituted law, that characterizes such a state. As an inevitable
consequence of such political behaviour, the police themselves come to wield
unchecked power on their own behalf, as well as on behalf of their political
masters, with consequential corruption and an even wider spreading of
terror.
The two best known and most fully developed police states in modern times
have been Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin, where the
Gestapo and the NKVD (later known as the KGB), respectively, exercised
direct power over anyone even suspected of opposing or even disapproving of
the political system. Often in these examples the external forms of judicial
process were held to, but using courts which would not have dared to do
anything but support the police. Equally, however, often not even a sham of
legal respectability was made. The whole concept of a police state refers, of
course, to a technique of ruling, and neither to the structure of a state nor its
justifying political ideology. It is not impossible that a majoritarian democracy
could operate, at least against some unpopular minority, by police-state tactics,
and both the United Kingdom in its governing of Northern Ireland and some
southern states of the USA on questions of racial politics have been accused of
such behaviour. In general, though, only a dictatorship of some form will be
likely to be a thorough-going police state. The converse is not, of course,
true—dictatorships, totalitarian systems and so on do not have to be police
states.
Polis
Polis is a concept central to classical political theory, and is vital for under-
standing the politics of that period. It provides the etymological root for
politics and related words. Usually inadequately translated into English as ‘city
state’, a ‘polis’ was the basic unit of political organization throughout the
Graeco-Roman world, but was especially important in Greece from the Dark
Ages until the Hellenistic period at least. For the leading Greek political
theorists likePlatoandAristotle, living in a polis was a constituent of being
human, hence Aristotle’s famous definition of man as a ‘political animal’,
where political actually meant the inhabitant of a polis. The polis was a
Police State