‘A Benevolent Institution for the Suppression of Evil’: Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and the Limits of Policing
| Date | 01 September 2003 |
| Published date | 01 September 2003 |
| Author | Stephen Skinner |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00264 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 3, SEPTEMBER 2003
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 420±40
`A Benevolent Institution for the Suppression of Evil':
Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and the Limits of Policing
Stephen Skinner*
The study of law in literature stimulates critical reflection about law
and the limits of its institutions by expanding contextual analysis to
include the emotive discourses of fiction. This article starts from the
premisses that the orthodox separation of literary expression from
social scientific writing is not immutable and that different temporal
settings are not barriers to exploring themes that traverse them. It uses
Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, a story of policing and anarchism
in late nineteenth-century London, in order to discuss the limits of
policing today. This novel is read in parallel with two modern police
studies to show how it prefigures current concerns, portraying policing
as an imperfect totem of security, immaterial to the individual's
emotional crises, which, by extension, can be seen to illustrate the
limits of law itself. This article thus raises methodological and
theoretical issues of general interest to the study of law in society and
suggests how reading literature can `thicken' legal analysis by offering
experience of the emotional beyond that law ignores.
INTRODUCTION
Taking courage from some of law in literature's recent supporters,
1
this
article argues that Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent raises fundamental
420
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*Jean Monnet Fellow, European University Institute, Florence and School
of Law, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, England
I am grateful to Neil Walker, Catherine DupreÂ, and Patrick Hanafin for reading and
commenting on earlier drafts of this article
1 I. Ward, `Law and Literature' (1993) 4 Law and Critique 43±79 and Law and
Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives (1995) 3; M. Williams, Empty Justice:
One Hundred Years of Law, Literature and Philosophy (2002) xx; M. Aristodemou,
Law and Literature: Journeys from Here to Eternity (2000) 6±10; K. Dolin, Fiction
and the Law: Legal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature (1999) 3.
questions about the police in modern society. It is argued that deep
contextual analysis of legal problems is enriched by consideration of
literary texts from the realm of what was traditionally cordoned off as
fiction.
2
This is because `an understanding of legal institutions and
principles cannot come [only] from within law itself, nor only from its
social, economic and historical contexts' but requires `interdisciplinary
enquiries, contextuality, and perspectivism in a bid to put legal doctrine
back in the cultural context in which it belongs and from which it was
divorced by positivist methodologies in legal studies.'
3
The article
examines the role of the Metropolitan police in Conrad's fictitious late
nineteenth-century world and draws parallels with the police's role and
function today.
4
In so doing, it explores the importance of individual and
social well-being that remain outside the scope of state policing, in order
to illustrate the limits of the law and its institutions in relation to the real
lives of individuals.
The Secret Agent is a complex and darkly comic novel, partly rooted in fact
and characterized by Conrad's ironic narrative style. It has been chosen as the
focus of this article for two main reasons: first, personal preference and
familiarity with the text;
5
secondly, because of its central police plot, which
has not so far received the attention it deserves
6
from police scholars or legal
commentator s.
7
Conrad's sto ry portrays th e surveillan ce and control
functions of the late nineteenth-century Metropolitan police, but his primary
concern in this fictional narrative was to address its protagonists' emotional
421
2
Ward, id. (1993), p. 79. The use of literature in social science also has important
precedents outside the sphere of `law and literature' studies. For example, R.
Reiner discusses literary portrayals of policing in The Politics of the Police (2000)
147-62 and R. Berki frequently uses literary examples to illustrate his discussion
of security in his Security and Society: Reflections on Law, Order and Politics
(1986) 70.
3 Aristodemou, op. cit., n. 1, p. 10. I outlined some initial reflections on these ideas in
`Legal History and Legal Critique: the Significance of Constitutional Culture in
Analytical Methodology or Mutton Dressed up as Piltdown Lamb?' (2001),
unpublished paper presented at the British Legal History Conference, Aberystwyth;
for a historical critique of law see my `Citizens in Uniform: Public Defence,
Reasonableness and Human Rights' (2000) Public Law 266±81.
4 The term policing is used here to refer to the role and function of the police, which
includes both the semi-historical force in The Secret Agent and the police today:
compare Reiner's concern that the ideas of `police' and `policing' be distinguished:
Reiner, op. cit., n. 2, pp. 1±2.
5 I have found The Secret Agent to be a stimulating resource in teaching police history
to undergraduates and thank the students who studied History of Crime and
Punishment at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1999 for encouraging my
interest in this novel.
6 Apart from a curious reference in O. Hood Phillips, P. Jackson, and P. Leopold, O.
Hood Phillips & Jackson: Constitutional and Administrative Law (2001) 409.
7 Although the police theme is but one of several that can be identified and
interrelated: V. Barnish, Notes on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1974) 55±60.
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