»The Dual Penal State«: The work addresses one of today's most pressing social and political issues: the rampant, at best haphazard, and ever-expanding use of penal power by states ostensibly committed to the enlightenment-based legal-political project of Western liberal democracy. At bottom, this crisis of modern penality is a crisis of the liberal project itself; the penal paradox is merely the sharpest formulation of the general paradox of power in a liberal state: the legitimacy of state sovereignty in the name of personal autonomy.