From the standpoint of legal theory, the modern state and the police constitute each other: the police is the instrument by which the state internally realizes its monopoly of violence and thus its sovereignty. From a sociological point of view, however, the state, its law and its bureaucratic regulations are only one moral order towards which policemen orient their actions. For policemen, like all bureaucrats, have to face a fundamental paradox: It is their role as bureaucrats which brings them into contact with the life-worlds of citizens, but a purely bureaucratic logic does not suffice to process these problems.