Taming the State and its State of Exception

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing counter-terrorism legislation passed across the globe, scholars have taken a new and reinvigorated interest in emergency powers. Critics hold that under the fog of fear and uncertainty, the executive is granted excessive discretionary authority endangering the constitutional order. Radical critics even contend that we have entered a permanent state of exception. Emergency powers posit in clear form the enduring question of the legitimacy of political order and its fundamental relation to law. This book confronts justifications and critiques of the state-anchored political order and the problem of legitimate violence in a series of analyses revolving around the norm/exception problem and the challenge of taming executive prerogative. The emergency has inherited structural features from its predecessor, raison d État, which marked the first systematic political framing of the paradox of violating legal order with the aim of upholding it. Emergency authority is subjected to a tripartite treatment: A critical survey of the debates, a genealogy of raison d'État, and finally a discussion of the prospects of positively codifying exceptions.