Police State Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Police state signifies a highly centralized form of government, with the state pervading virtually all components of society. Political dissent and opposition are aggressively suppressed, and the populace’s fear of and intimidation by the government are a constant. For police states, governmental authorities’ control over society is at a premium and any means available to do so are used with no regard for individual civil liberties or fundamental human rights—including unconstrained mass surveillance, no free press, meaningless elections, detention without trial, and the use of state terror on its own people. Governmental power is extraordinarily concentrated, state propaganda is at its most cultivated, and ruthless repression is essential. Police state is generally considered as a disparaging synonym for totalitarianism.

Political scientists Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski promulgated the now classic and widely accepted definition of the police state, or totalitarian, pattern in their seminal 1956 work Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Their totalitarian criteria consist of the following primary elements: an official, dominant state ideology with the purpose of bringing about an improved and ultimately perfected set of conditions for society; a dictator who commands a single ruling political party; an all-powerful secret police whose methods include terror; government monopolization of the mass media; government monopolization of the possession of arms; and complete state control of the national economy.

Leading examples of police states include both fascist and communist dictatorships, such as Italy under Benito Mussolini, from 1922 to 1945; Germany under Adolph Hitler, from 1933 to 1945; the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin, from 1930s until 1953; Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu, from 1974 to 1989; and North Korea under Kim Il-Sung and followed by his son Kim Jong-Il, from 1948 until the present. Leaders in these police states commonly attempt to take on a heroic, almost divine, aura around them as they symbolize, personify, and represent the incarnation of the state. Brutal repression and silencing of any political opposition is a given in this type of statist regime.

As adduced, a police state or totalitarian regime has a specific and technical political science definition. In more common parlance and daily political discourse, the term is more readily bandied about when a critic wishes to denounce actions taken by a government that are interpreted to intrude upon individual liberties or political expression. There is no strict tipping point or threshold that directly determines whether a nation can be considered as a police state per se; that is, there are degrees of being a police state depending on the governance dimension under examination, but the historical examples are clear manifestations of a police state in operation. A country possessing police state attributes in some aspects does not necessarily fall into this category—the totality of the governance structure and regime orientation must be assessed before the political science categorization can be accurately applied.

Political activists, in their rhetorical choices as part of their own country’s or international political debates, are much less constrained when using this term, such as accusations that the United States is becoming a police state in its use of warrantless mass surveillance in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, or its use of indefinite detention without trial or habeas corpus of suspected terrorists. Invoking the term police state with the past specters of Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union shadowing such rhetoric is intrinsically incendiary and emotively powerful. Recipients of such political expression or analysis must evaluate the speaker’s accuracy or relevance of such categorizing pronouncements.

Bibliography:

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951.
Friedrich, Carl, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. New York: Praeger, 1956.
Gleason, Abbott. Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Hague, Rod, and Martin Harrop. Political Science: A Comparative Introduction. 5th ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Halberstam, Michael. Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

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