Stalking the Sociological Imagination: J. Edgar Hoover's FBI Surveillance of American Sociology

“Secret Services Are Meant To Serve”: State Violence in the Autobiographic Memory of Secret Police Officers in Communist Poland

“…as M. F. Keen put it, "The FBI's activities, including its widespread surveillance of american sociologists, served to silence dissent, inhibit democratic discourse, and push the mainstream of the discipline toward an uncritical support of the status quo." 72 Policing practices implemented by the bureau under Hoover were a dead ringer for the crackdown on the student protests on 1968 carried out by the Polish Security Service. 73 Perhaps one should revise the classical taxonomy of secret services, where the notorious authoritarian and totalitarian political police belongs to an isolated category, detached, scorned, and deemed to share no common traits with widely respectable institutions such as MI5, Scotland Yard, 74 or the FBI.…”