Book review: Luke William Hunt, The Retrieval of Liberalism in Policing
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619887279 |
| Author | C.D. Christensen |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 713
Luke William Hunt, The Retrieval of Liberalism in Policing, Oxford University Press: New York,
2019; 248 pp.: 9780190904999, $74.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: C.D. Christensen, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Luke William Hunt’s The Retrieval of Liberalism in Policing opens with a proclamation
of certain uncertainty. Legal and political norms that once supplied a clear conception of
how best to govern and what it meant to be governed, particularly in the West, have been
untethered from the moorings that might have once fastened the modern democratic pol-
ity. What unfastened that mooring, however, is unclear: “Norms are changing”, Hunt
writes, but “it is not altogether clear when and why things began to change” (p. 1). The
norms to which Hunt refers are those of the liberal tradition, broadly construed, and his
objects of analysis are the methods and practices by which “policing in liberal socie-
ties”—though, especially the USA—has become illiberal. This move places Hunt in
crowded terrain, as the last two decades have suffered no shortage of accounts that map
the gulf separating US policing from the political ideals it purports to espouse. However,
unlike other attempts to navigate this space, which have tended to favor questions of
administrative and constitutional law, public policy, and democratic theory, Hunt turns to
moral philosophy. What might be required of policing, Hunt asks, if against these chang-
ing tides, we returned to the basic tenets of the liberal tradition?
The answer, developed over the course of six chapters that Hunt divides evenly between
those dedicated to “theory” and those to “applications”, is—unsurprisingly—that police
power ought to be “limited by a liberal conception of persons coupled with rule of law
principles” (p. 11). Absent of any clear historical anchor, Hunt’s account is a work of ana-
lytical philosophy that pursues abstract first principles of government to arrive at a series
of bright-lined boundaries for a range of police conduct spanning entrapment (Chapter 5),
the use of confidential human sources (Chapter 4), surveillance (Chapter 6), and police
discretion, generally. Policies that are morally congruent with the constraints of the liberal
tradition will be those that respect a “tripartite conception of liberal personhood” (Chapter
3), which understands persons both as “reciprocators” and “moral agents” as well as pos-
sessing nonfungible value, or dignity. Politically, respecting this moral conception of per-
sons must assume a “pre-political conception of persons as free and equal” (p. 102) and
base political community on commitments to collective cooperation and “congruence
between declared rules and the administration of those rules” (pp. 93–96).
Pursuing these principles results in what Hunt terms “policing as nonideal governance
by law” (p. 63): nonideal because it deals with the challenges and injustices of policing
as they “actually exist”, nonideal because it seeks to respond to each by reference to “a
conception of justice that is politically and practically possible” (p. 72). The ambition, in
Hunt’s words, is to “look to ideal theory in the pursuit of nonideal policies” (p. 101) such
that we may produce institutional arrangements that “transition” us toward an ideal the-
ory of justice. This analytic strategy is not of Hunt’s own design; instead he borrows,
methodologically and substantively, from John Rawls’s approach to orienting our politi-
cal institutions toward an idealized version by stipulating the intermediate phases that
must be satisfied along the way. For Hunt, quoting Rawls (1999), “until the ideal is
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