The Private Investigator as an Agent of Justice

• In Event: Pop Culture and The Framing of Politics

Abstract

Mary Roberts Rinehart observed that stories of private detectives, as distinct from police or state investigators, are only produced in liberal and democratic cultures. The liberty to investigate in private, or to pursue justice in private and without official imprimatur, seems to be associated especially with the liberal and democratic regime. Stories of the private investigator offer lessons for a popular audience in the problem of knowledge and justice in a liberal and democratic regime.
First, I examine the character and motivations of the private detective. The private detective is often a “foreigner” who mixes piety, playfulness, and cynicism in ways that reflect concerns for truth or justice, honor or pride, or surviving in a corrupt world. I then explore the diverse sources of knowledge - testimony, physical evidence, observation, experimentation, psychology, intuition – that detectives use, and the epistemological inadequacies of the regime (why are the state’s investigators and laws inadequate?). In the third section I consider the moral limits of the liberal regime, and the distinctions between law and justice and between the public regime and the work of the private intellectual. I conclude that the intellectual and moral horizon of the liberal regime is constrained and insufficient in the ways other regimes are, but that the liberty of citizens to remedy the inadequacies of the regime – especially to recognize that the enforcement of the law may violate liberal principles of justice - mitigates the problems of the liberal state.

Author

• Peter Josephson, Saint Anselm College