Observe, describe, create

In the minds of many reformers, the police were supposed to function automatically. It is therefore no coincidence that the state was likened to the machine in the 18th century. In the second half of the 18th century, the police no longer stood for the general administration of a country or a municipality as in earlier centuries, but it was not yet the body overseeing order and security as we know it today. Through the police, the state administered its internal affairs, thus giving them and itself a clearer outline. While the literature to date has focused primarily on the control and repression through which the Habsburg monarchy responded to social developments after the French Revolution, the focus of this book is on the police in the sense of the nascent public administration that created knowledge about the state's population, but also regulated and stimulated the lives of its inhabitants on the basis of that knowledge. In Vienna, Prague and smaller Czech towns, the thesis traces not only the institutional development of the police, but also the genesis of the official communication network, identification practices, and how "public order" or "public morality" was (re)defined through surveillance. < br> < br>