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of society more generally, periodically demand the exercise of prerogative power.³⁶ The prerogative power of decision is not in fact exceptional but rather a basic and permanent feature of the modern liberal state.

      Before the procedural enactment of emergency powers, the particular threat that occasions the emergency must be identified or imagined. In the settler-colonial context, the emergency that required or sanctioned the exception was the (racialized) state of nature broadly conceived. Following September 11, 2001, the “terrorist threat” was quickly established as an emergency that demanded the invocation of emergency powers. In all cases, “security” is the reason of state that permits the invocation of emergency or enactment of prerogative within the normative body of the liberal state. When the “security” of the political community is under threat from the savage or the terrorist, exception is justified—indeed, is legally provided for. Perhaps it is more appropriate to think not of a power that moves beyond “the rule of law,” but one that is sanctioned by it, that is essential to it. The instances in which a state of emergency might be invoked in the name of security today are various, ranging from economic crisis to natural disaster to foreign or domestic war. But in each case a fundamental contradiction is at work: the suspension of the law, by the law, in the name of the law.

      As with race, the concept and practice of “emergency” were developed in concert with the exercise of colonial power. Locke imagined the “state of nature” as a space of pure exception. “In the State of Nature,” he observed, “every one has the Executive Power of the Law of Nature.”³⁷ One fundamental purpose of government, Locke contended, is not to do away with this natural exception, exactly, but to centralize and codify it. Exception (or “emergency”) is both a reason for and core technology of the nascent security state, its imperial form in particular. In the British imperial imagination, the “rule of law” was upheld as a singular gift, bestowed by the colonizer upon the colonized. “The establishment of a system of law which regulates the most important parts of the daily life of the people,” the political philosopher James Fitzjames Stephen put it in the 1870s, “constitutes in itself a moral conquest more striking, more durable, and far more solid, than the physical conquest which renders it possible.”³⁸ Central to this colonial “system of law,” though, was the fact of its recurrent suspension: the fluid definition of certain “acts of state”—including, in circumstances both exigent and everyday, murder—as beyond juridical oversight, and the indefinite detention of colonized subjects without charge or trial.³⁹ The colony, Achille Mbembe has argued, is the zone of exception par excellence—a space “where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization.”⁴⁰ “That colonies might be ruled over in absolute lawlessness,” Mbembe writes, “stems from the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native. . . . Savage life,” he continues, “is just another form of animal life.”⁴¹ Unrecognizably human, capable of neither political commonwealth nor industrious labor, the savage exists outside the moral and rational calculus of the modern state. The state of nature, the pure space of exception, is the laboratory within which colonial power synthesizes methods of dehumanization with processes of extra-juridical violence. The extra-legal violence honed there is later institutionalized in the legal apparatus of the modern state, and in the security project that is its raison d’être.⁴²

       Economic Emergency, Capitalist Security

      In the United States, the invocation of emergency powers—usually expressed in the enactment of martial law—was until the late nineteenth century limited to moments of imminent physical threat or danger, due to invasion from without or rebellion or civil war within.⁴³ In the decades surrounding the turn of the century, however, martial law was in multiple instances imposed to suppress labor unrest.⁴⁴ Further, during the First World War but most profoundly in its aftermath, exceptional executive power was enacted in the economic realm, as a response not to violent disorder but to capitalist crisis. In continuance of this trend, the purview of emergency powers expanded throughout the twentieth century.

      The economic recovery legislation that gave initial form to the New Deal was enacted by President Roosevelt under a legally declared state of emergency and was conditioned by the recurring invocation of “emergency” in public discourse—a rhetorical proliferation that coincided with the heightened discursive power of “security.” The emergency of the Great Depression, Roosevelt held, required a countervailing exercise of emergency executive power. Roosevelt was responding to mass unemployment and a dramatic fall in national income, and to a wave of labor protest and intensifying culture of class struggle more broadly. Immediate and decisive intervention was an imperative if people were to be put back to work and economic growth were to resume; but intervention was also required to alleviate class fracture and obviate the possibility of socialist revolution. The emergency, that is, referred not only to the welfare—or security—of the citizenry but to the security of capitalist social relations.⁴⁵

       Cold War Emergency

      The emergency declared by Roosevelt in 1933 marked the beginning of a continuous line of emergency governance that remains unbroken today.⁴⁶ The normalization of emergency has had profound political and social effects, occasioning the dramatic expansion of executive powers and contributing to the militarization of society.⁴⁷ President Truman’s declaration of emergency in 1950, in response to China’s invasion of Korea, represents one particularly important moment in this twentieth-century genealogy. Truman’s proclamation consolidated the emergent but already hegemonic National Security state—a new political order founded on the specter of total and permanent war, which blurred the spatial and temporal distinctions between war and peace and incorporated all of society into the military sphere.⁴⁸

      Truman’s declaration of emergency in 1950 concretized and escalated an extant policy program, one the president had famously articulated to a joint session of Congress in his 1947 “Truman Doctrine” speech. In that address, Truman outlined a new, more anticipatory and interventionist foreign policy based on “containment” rather than détente. The emergency declared by Truman in 1950—in the name of the nation’s economic and military security, and in the defense of capitalist freedom against “communist imperialism”—was premised not just on the actuality of military conflict but on the “looming peril” of an existential threat to the nation. The infamous internal policy document NSC-68, drafted by the National Security Council and approved by President Truman just two days before his declaration of emergency in 1950, outlined the culture and rationale of Cold War emergency governance. The intellectual and spiritual antecedent of the Bush Doctrine, NSC-68—which warned of “the ever-present possibility of annihilation,” and which argued that at stake was the survival “not only of this republic but of civilization itself”—argued for constant military and security mobilization in the face of the communist threat.⁴⁹ It argued, moreover, that the struggle against communism would necessarily be waged internal to the United States as well as in the world. NSC-68, that is, defined the ways in which National Security is more than a mode of U.S. global power—it is also a technique for policing individual citizens and structuring the national body politic.⁵⁰ In the Cold War emergency order, military buildup and McCarthyite repression went hand in hand, just as the War on Terror and Patriot Act exist in tandem today.

       Neoliberal Emergency

      In the neoliberal moment, the expanding scope of emergency powers—an expansion that has coincided with security’s ever-greater purchase on human social life—is on full display. In the case of the New Deal, emergency was enacted to mitigate class contradiction and ensure the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Today, emergency powers have a different intent and effect: not the mollification of class contradiction but its intensification; not the preemptive management of economic insecurity and crisis, but the deliberate cultivation of a general culture of insecurity and crisis. If the security of capital has always been prior to and above the security of the person or the public—the latter only privileged when it acts as a conduit to the former—this enduring hierarchy is in neoliberalism utterly transparent. The neoliberal state of emergency demands the constant and militarized securing of capital,

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