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This chapter argues that the substantive law that protects the right to security has the character of emergency power that takes a normalized form. It critiques the theory of the normalization of the state of exception, arguing that this experience offers compelling evidence that the sovereignty of the state has decayed significantly in the UK, so that the criminal law's threats are premised on their own inadequacy. It also identifies the historical precondition of this paradoxical state of affairs in the decay of representative politics — a decay that is an aspect of the political experience already discussed in Chapter 5. This theory is contrasted with Garland's apparently similar ‘myth of the sovereign state’ thesis, arguing that the problem of the expansion of penal control is the result of the actual decline of sovereign authority rather than of the political pursuit of its myth, as proposed by Garland.

This chapter discusses how Ernst Cassirer traced the powers of symbolic form within the mythic origin of thinking. Nowhere in his studies does Cassirer label the archetypes of mythical thinking with Western concepts, however they mesmerized him in a way that calls him to see the human subject immersed in the world of myth. Based on an analysis of Cassirer's Myth of the State, this chapter concludes that myth carries a staying power throughout people's lives and within symbolic forms.

Chapter five examines how the modern state of Tamil Nadu imagines concepts of a good life in a public political performance. It explores both an acultural concept and a cultural vision of a good life proposed by the State. It shows how the cultural imagination of an alternative modernity repeats the twofold political agenda as it was developed by the Dravidian parties: social reform, justice, equality, the affirmation of everyday life, and secularism. In addition, this imagination of a cultural Tamil modernity is defined by Tamil ethics and identity. The chapter also describes how Tamil modernity is imagined in acultural terms of development, progress, economic and materialistic prosperity. It turns out that Tamil alternative modernity is imagined as depending on two powers, the state apparatus and the power of what has been called the ‘myth’ of the state, which depicts both the state as much as the power of the ‘amman’ (mother) embodied by the female chief minister as essential for well-being, safety, and modernity.

The smaller a group, the less need there is to distinguish law from all else that its members expectantly say to each other. Law is words and only words because our need for law is a need for impersonal communication, for a news source about what group members we do not know will likely do and expect. Law's predictions are multifaceted, addressing the likely actions and expectations of people throughout the group, not only the likely actions and expectations of people whom law calls government officials. Recognizing law's descriptive character reconciles our use of the word about human relations with our use of the word about the rest of the natural world. “Human” law describes the character of its human community. All law works the way international law most obviously does—as a prediction system. What lets us feel that we live under the rule of law is not that lawgiving is separated from other “governing” but that lawgiving is shared among many. Lawgiving and governing are synonymous; we all do law applying, at least to ourselves. The choice to call some geographic communities with some institutional arrangements “nation states” adds nothing to our understanding of law's moral contribution to our individual choices of what to do. The rule of law can live with a nontrivial level of retroactive addition. If law were a way to express moral duties to obey lawgivers, it could not live with retroactivity at all. The pervasiveness with which people in community take an internal point of view toward their law suggests a common denominator, shared reason for sharing the view.