The market for life assurance did not emerge 'naturally' from a particular problem of the allocation of resources, it had to be made. Life insurance had to appear desirable and reliable.This involved the circulation of a variety of advertising media, one aspect of which was the fabrication of grand offices as headquarters for life assurance companies. These buildings and their widely-circulated images were part of a process of making life assurance appear prudent and proper, but more importantly secure. Through this fabrication of the liberal market, the City of London was transformed into a centre of commerce and finance.

IRecent years have seen considerable interest in the idea of "police" in the eighteenth century.1 "Police" in this archaic sense did not mean a uniformed force employed by the state to govern law and order, it implied a much more general system of government, the task of which was to regulate broad aspects of communal existence with the aim of establishing the common good of the community and was closely associated with maintenance of the moral order, security and the maximization of national resources. Although discussed briefly in histories of policing, and more substantially in Andrew's work on philanthropy, English discourses on police are nowhere engaged with on their 2 own terms, as arguments for the reorganization of a general system of urban government. 4Discourses on English police do, however, surface occasionally in the work of several sociologists, who locate the transformation of English government in the eighteenth century in relation to several dominant explanations for this process common in social science: the emergence of modern governmentality, the "disciplinary society,"or "social control." However, there remains scope for an historical engagement with, and deepening of this work.Mitchell Dean, focusing on the English police of poverty, writes the subject into the Foucaultian narrative of the emergence of modern governmentality, arguing that eighteenth-century police passed from an early-modern concern with reforming the social order, to a desire to augment national power and prosperity through the enforcement of industry. Here, police was not concerned with reconstructing the old order but with achieving new national goals through the administration of the population. This was superseded by a "liberal" concept of prevention, where police means not the condition of order, but institutions for the prevention of threats to order, based around the management of the circumstances of its occurrence. We can contribute to these sociological accounts with an historicist exploration of the emergence of "police" in England, avoiding the problem of locating English governmental practices in relation to German discourses, and at the same time extending the range of our study of English discourses on police. Dean and Neocleous, for example, draw principally on the work of Colquhoun and Gilbert, while mentioning Blackstone and Adam Smith as authors on police. 7John McMullan does focus directly on eighteenth-century English police discourse, writing it into a second Foucaultian narrative: the emergence of "disciplinary society." 8 However, he also draws on only two sources (Colquhoun and John Fielding) for the eighteenth century and does not fully locate these texts in their context. Like Dean and Neocleous, he places great emphasis on the government of the poor, idleness, and the typological and ethnographic approach to crime. But these features were common to discourse on disorder and vice from the sixteenth century, and English police was, like its European counterparts, not only concerned with povert...

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This article examines the issues that are at stake in the current resurgence of interest in the subject of habit. We focus on the role that habit has played in conceptions of the relations between body and society, and the respects in which such conceptions have been implicated in processes of governance. We argue that habit has typically constituted a point of leverage for regulatory practices that seek to effect some realignment of the relations between different components of personhood – will, character, memory and instinct, for example – in order to bring about a specific end. In reviewing its functioning in this regard across a range of modern disciplines – philosophy, psychology, sociology – we explore the tensions between its use and interpretation in different lineages: in particular, the Cartesian–Kantian/Ravaisson–Bergson–Deleuze lineages. The article then identifies how these questions are addressed across the contributions collected in this special issue.

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