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
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Author | Simon Devereaux |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12500 |
DOI: 10.1111/ho jo.12500
BOOK REVIEWS
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
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 anyreasonably well-informed historian of crim-
inal 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 moraland 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 wrong-
doers. 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 crit-
ically 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
© 2022 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
556 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hojo HowardJ. Crim. Justice. 2022;61:556–560.
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