Command and Persuade: Crime, Law, and the State Across History (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780262045629)

Why, when we have been largely socialized into good behavior, are there more laws that govern our behavior than ever before? Voted one of the best law books of 2021 by the UK Times.

Levels of violent crime have been in a steady decline for centuries--for millennia, even. Over the past five hundred years, homicide rates have decreased a hundred-fold. We live in a time that is more orderly and peaceful than ever before in human history. Why, then, does fear of crime dominate modern politics? Why, when we have been largely socialized into good behavior, are there more laws that govern our behavior than ever before? In Command and Persuade, Peter Baldwin examines the evolution of the state's role in crime and punishment over three thousand years.

Baldwin explains that the involvement of the state in law enforcement and crime prevention is relatively recent. In ancient Greece, those struck by lightning were assumed to have been punished by Zeus. In the Hebrew Bible, God was judge, jury, and prosecutor when Cain killed Abel. As the state's power as lawgiver grew, more laws governed behavior than ever before; the sum total of prohibited behavior has grown continuously. At the same time, as family, community, and church exerted their influences, we have become better behaved and more law-abiding. Even as the state stands as the socializer of last resort, it also defines through law the terrain on which we are schooled into acceptable behavior.

Author: Peter Baldwin
ISBN-10: 0262045621
ISBN-13: 9780262045629
Publisher: MIT Press
Language: English
Published: 10/05/2021
Pages: 480
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.70lbs
Size: 9.06h x 6.14w x 1.42d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 11/01/2021 pg. 98
Choice 08/01/2022

About the Author
Peter Baldwin is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Global Distinguished Professor in the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU. He is the author of The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle, The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe Are Alike, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930, and Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS.