Table of Contents

Introduction: Crime and the State through the Ages 1
1. Crime's Ever-Expanding Universe 13
2. Crime before the State 39 
3. Crime as a Social Problem 57
4. The State as Victim: Treason 73
5. Parallel Justice 99
6. Why Punish? 107
7. How to Punish? 117
8. Moderating Punishment 139
9. Crimes of Thought 149
10. Obliged to Be Good 173
11. From Retribution to Prevention 197
12. The State as Enforcer: From Polizei to Police 247
Conclusion: Still Present after All These Years 311
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index

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.

Reviews

One of the six best law books of 2021, The Times (UK) Historians, criminologists, and those with a strong academic interest in policing and criminal justice will learn a great deal from this book.
--Library Journal [Peter] Baldwin is a historian who is addressing readers for whom libertarianism may well become an emotional as well as a ratiocinative lifeline, and the wealth of scholarship he marshals is extraordinary. Mind you, there's not so much as a hint in the book that its author is a libertarian himself, or even harbors any more than very broadly libertarian sympathies. But his masterful handling of the subject matter, as indeed the translatory impetus he gives to the subject itself, is such that his book would make a libertarian of Pol Pot... The book is a feast.
--Andrei Navrozov, The Fleming Foundation