Police Power in the Exercise of Governmental Rationality in the Nineteenth Century

The purpose of this paper is to determine what in the nineteenth-century legal and
political doctrine was called police power. To achieve this objective, we resorted to a
study of the middle of the last century by an Argentine jurist named Alberto Dominguez,
which gathered and systematically presented sources of European and North
American legal thought of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The analysis
of these sources serves to trace a line of study in continuity with the work of Michel
Foucault on the police technique of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which
has placed the relationship between police and government at the center of the debates
of contemporary political philosophy. The aim was to define the place of police
power in the new governmental configuration, emerging since the nineteenth century