Policing the Global Crisis

Abstract

As part of my research for a book manuscript on the crisis of global capitalism I recently finished writing (Robinson forthcoming), I decided to re-read the classic 1978 study conducted by the noted socialist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall and several of his colleagues, Policing the Crisis. The authors show in that book how the restructuring of capitalism as a response to the crisis of the 1970s - which was the last major crisis of world capitalism until the current one hit in 2008 -led in the United Kingdom and elsewhere to an "exceptional state," by which they meant a situation in which there was an ongoing breakdown of consensual mechanisms of social control and a growing authoritarianism.