James Scott (1998), Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press
Much of early modern European statecraft seemed similarly devoted to rationalizing and standardizing what was a social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format.” (p.3)
Bad state engineering originates in a combination of four elements:
1. The administrative ordering of nature and society
2. A high-modernist ideology – a version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws…It was, accordingly, uncritical, un skeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production.
3. An authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being.
4. A prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist. (pp. 4-5)
Legibility
“In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.” (p.5)
The book is a case against the imperialism of high-modernist, planned social order.
“Schematic, authoritarian solutions to production and social order inevitably fail when they exclude the fund of valuable knowledge embodied in local practices.” (p.6)
Motives for legibility – simplification, legibility, control, appropriation and manipulation.
The radical simplification of the forest to a single commodity – “an exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora-which were, and still are, not entirely understood-was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences.” (pp.19-20)
“No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification.” (p.22)
Local measurements are interested, contextual, and historically specific. (p.27)
According to Witold Kula (Measures and men) three factors made the “metrical revolution” in France possible:
- The growth of market exchange encouraged uniformity in measures.
- Both popular sentiment and Enlightenment philosophy favored a single standard throughout France.
- The Revolution and especially Napoleonic state building actually enforced the metric system in France and the empire. (p.30)
“At one stroke the equality of all French people before the law was guaranteed by the state; they were no longer mere subjects of their lords and sovereign but bearers of inalienable rights as citizens.” (p.32)
From collective taxation (of communities) to individual taxation. (pp.37-38)
The construction of cadastral maps.
Redesigning cities ( at the center of Haussmann plans for Paris lay the military security of the state – to made the city safe against popular insurrections.) pp. 60-61
The creation of surnames – to create legible people.
The creation of a standard, official language.
The centralization of traffic patterns.
Simplifications have at least 5 features:
- State simplifications are observations of only those aspects of social life that are of official interest. They are interested, utilitarian facts.
- They are also nearly always written (verbal or numerical) documentary facts.
- They are typically static facts.
- Most stylized state facts are also aggregate facts. Aggregate facts may be impersonal (the density of transportation networks) or simply a collection of facts about individuals (employment rates, literacy rates, residence patterns).
- For most purposes, state officials need to group citizens in ways that permit them to make a collective assessment. Facts that can be aggregated and presented as averages or distributions must therefore be standardized facts. (p.80)
The process by which standardized facts susceptible to aggregation are manufactured:
- The creation of common units of measurement or coding
- Each item or instance falling within a category is counted and classified according to the new unit of assessment.
- One arrives this way at synoptic facts that are useful to officials. (p.80)
“The modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess, and manage.” (pp.81-82)
“Until recently, the ability of the state to impose its schemes on society was limited by the state’s modest ambitions and its limited capacity.” (p.88)
“Many of the great state-sponsored calamities of the twentieth century have been the work of rulers with grandiose and utopian plans for their society.” (p.89)
“The discovery of society as a reified object that was separate from the state and that could be scientifically described.” (p.91)
High-modernism implies:
- a truly radical break with history and tradition.
- tends to devalue or banish politics.
- authoritarianism.
- the temporal emphasis is on the future.
- progress is objectified by a series of preconceived goals.
- it appeals greatly to the classes and strata who have the most to gain – in status, power, and wealth – from its worldview (bureaucratic intelligentsia, technicians, planners, and engineers). (pp.93-97)
Obstacles to high-modernist planning:
- the existence and belief in a private sphere of activity in which the state and its agencies may not legitimately interfere.
- the private sector in liberal political economy.
- the existence of working, representative institutions through which a resistant society could make its influence felt. (pp.101-102)
“The most rigidly planned economies tend to be accompanied by large “underground, ‘gray,’ informal,” economies that supply, in a thousand ways, what the formal economy fails to supply.” (p.261)
High-modernims vs metis.
Metis – cunning intellingence, indigenous technical knowledge, practical skills, a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment. The practice and experience reflected in metis is almost always local (p.313)
“What proved to be dangerous to us and to our environment is the combination of the universalist pretensions of epistemic knowledge and authoritarian engineering.” (p.340)
The case for institutions that are multifunctional, plastic, diverse, and adaptable. (p.353)
Tags: politics, state, utopianism