Pastoral Power as a Government Paradigm: towards the Origins of the Idea of the Police State

The article presents a historical and philosophical analysis of the ideological foundations that led to the emergence of the European police state (ger. der Polizeistaat) as a comprehensive and unified project in the 17th and 18th centuries. This project aimed to secure safety, expand state power, and promote the well-being and prosperity of the population through extensive administrative regulation of social life. The contemporary relevance of revisiting the conceptual roots of the police state is linked, among other factors, to the current “conservative turn” occurring both in Russia and in liberal Western societies. This shift involves a renewed emphasis on the necessity and effectiveness of a strong paternalistic state, characterized by large-scale intervention in public affairs. Michel Foucault famously connects the rise of the police state at the dawn of Western biopolitics to the concept of pastoral power. While Foucault’s insights are certainly valuable, his analysis seems to oversimplify the complex transformation of pastoral care into a model of administration. Building on Giorgio Agamben’s paradigmatic ontology, which combines historical, hermeneutic and philosophical archaeology approaches, this article argues that the idea of a police state, whose development parallels the history of the state itself since antiquity, originates at the intersection of two evolving forms of Western governance. One draws from the ancient Greek model of biopolitical pastoral care, while the other is rooted in the pastoral ministry of institutional Christianity. The emergence of refined political rationality centered on the concept of state interest (lat. ratio status) in the late 16th and early 17th centuries marked the beginning of a process in which these two pastoral rationalities (lat. ratio pastoralis) became closely intertwined. This fusion ultimately gave rise, during the 17th and 18th centuries to police and bio-power as secular manifestations of the pastoral power exercised by the modern state.

Keywords: police state; police; public administration; biopolitics; pastoral power; pastorate; population