¹University of Texas, San Antonio

^*I thank Verity Smith and Andrew Rehfeld for helpful comments on this essay as well as three anonymous reviewers and the editor of Polity. I also acknowledge the influence of Richard Ashcraft on my interpretation of Locke and William Gienapp regarding the Civil War.

Abstract

This article explores Hobbes's and Locke's justifications for the exercise of prerogative power domestically. The argument challenges the conventional separation of the state into welfare and warfare and suggests that the State of Nature is not temporally displaced by civil society but rather exists alongside it. This analysis also contests the notion that prerogative power in a liberal democracy was only conceived of as being exercised internationally. Rather, it is deployed against individuals whose status places them in the State of Nature and marks them as "bare life" in Giorgio Agamben's words. Finally, it is contended that prerogative power is exercised through bureaucracy—that the rule of law can lead to the suspension of law—thus explaining how the War on Drugs and the War on Terror are examples of prerogative and yet involve the dispersion of power and reference to the rule of law.