Command and persuade: crime, law, and the state across history P. Baldwin, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. 2021. 480pp. $34.95 (hbk); $24.95 (pbk) ISBN: 9780262045629; 9780262546027

Abstract

Forty years ago, when Daniel Boorstin (1983) published his now classic volume of popular history, The discoverers, a sceptical reviewer in Time magazine said that the book read like the work of a man whose suitcase full of looseleaf notes had burst open while he was running to catch a bus. A not dissimilar feeling sometimes came over me while reading Peter Baldwin's extraordinarily ambitious new survey of crime, law, punishment and policing across recorded human history. There is much here both to enjoy and admire, not least the astonishing scale and range of the secondary referencing: nearly 1,800 notes covering the last 78 pages of the book. Baldwin has certainly consulted a lot of scholarship.

The broad assertions of this book will not strike any reasonably well-informed historian of criminal justice as overly surprising. Over several millennia, Baldwin tells us, sin and crime – once seen as essentially indistinguishable – have come to be defined, far more rigorously, as distinctive categories of human behaviour. Much of the reason for this involves the advent of state power. Where once human beings relied upon divine intervention for the enforcement of moral and social norms, increasingly that task has fallen to the state. Early regimes, which were authoritarian in character, relied upon occasional examples of extreme penal severity – breaking on the wheel, decapitation, hangings on a sometimes enormous scale, and so forth – to deter potential wrongdoers. As states grew more democratic and humane, so too did the formal character of their penal sanctions. The advent of non-lethal punishments, notably banishment, fines, and finally large-scale imprisonment, enabled the state to relinquish its early reliance upon execution and other modes of bodily torment. Indeed, since the early 19th century, professionalised policing – now critically abetted by the extraordinary surveillance capacities afforded by modern technologies, and by the substantial abandonment of paper currency and coin – has enabled states to pursue more and more rigorous and effective means of preventing crimes from occurring in the first place. In many parts of the developed world, a person can go their whole life without being robbed or burgled.

If the general trend of all this sounds broadly and reassuringly humane, however, there is also an authoritarian paradox at work. Even as the capacity of modern societies to inspire wider and deeper adherence to social norms has taken hold, so too has the sheer volume of criminal offences as the compulsory capacities of the state have reached unprecedented levels. The US federal penal code, only eight pages long in 1875, now runs to almost 900 (p.22). About 40% of the new enactments were made in only a quarter century after 1970 (p.348), a dismal testimony to the cultural shocks of the 1960s and the prevailing sense – especially in America – that society was on the brink of collapse, a conviction sustained by the contemporary world's all-pervasive electronic media. Where once states, for lack of capacity, punished only a few crimes, more than 80% of criminals in the Western world are punished in some way or another (p.265). The more civilised human beings have become, the more comprehensively they appear to expect established authorities to regulate and repress infractions. Any brutalities that may ensue are generally tolerated because the vast majority of people are inherently law-abiding and seldom encounter the police in any context other than the occasional traffic infraction. The sharpest edges of state power are now felt by only that small proportion of the population that finds itself most comprehensively marginalised: socially, economically, often even geographically.

The scope of Baldwin's storytelling is remarkable, and he is a dab hand at supplying both vivid examples and striking generalisations. The professional historian in me, however, sometimes wondered about the finer details of explanation and analysis, particularly chronology and geographical variation. Baldwin often ranges freely back and forth, in the space of only one or two pages, among the ancient world, the medieval and early modern eras, and the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, as well as across any number of national and cultural boundaries. The breadth of the notetaking, and the ambition with which the notes are marshalled in supporting general assertions, is sometimes awesome. Causal connections, however, are often hard to discern, much less the ways in which specific developments must have varied from one time and place to another – and why they did so. Books like this are often admired for providing ‘comparative’ perspectives across time and space. Baldwin's style more often seems cumulative rather than genuinely comparative in character. Not everyone will find such an approach problematic. The proverbial ‘intelligent but uninformed reader’ will encounter a wide range of interesting and suggestive information.

It is only in the last chapter that Baldwin lays his analytical cards on the table. Classical historical and sociological perspectives, most notably Norbert Elias's (2000) ‘civilizing process’, date the evolution of social behaviour and state regulation alike from only the later Middle Ages, while Michel Foucault concentrates on the ‘Enlightenment’ and its contradictions during the years since the mid-18th century. Baldwin's temporal and geographical ambit is vastly larger. For him, the processes of socialisation – the central glue of modern societies – began as soon as hunter-gatherers started to form stable and sedentary communities. The state per se was a latecomer to all of this. This is a striking and suggestive conceptual framework, though conventionally trained historians may join the present reviewer in instinctively resisting generalisations whose evidentiary bases lie far beyond the conventional scope and practices of evidence and analysis. This is a book to revisit and with which to argue. Baldwin's vast secondary referencing generously provides the material with which to sustain the discussion he has begun in this remarkable book.