Large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay. Throughout the book I make the case for the indispensable role of practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face of unpredictability. I am, however, making a case against an imperial or hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledge and know-how. 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.ĭesigned or planned social order is necessarily schematic it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order.
War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make the populace more receptive to a new dispensation. A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.
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The third element is 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… The most fertile soil for this element has typically been times of war, revolution, depression, and struggle for national liberation.It is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, 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. The second element is what I call a high-modernist ideology.The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society-the transformative state simplifications described above.All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster. I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements. I aim, in what follows, to provide a convincing account of the logic behind the failure of some of the great utopian social engineering schemes of the twentieth century. It is harder to grasp why so many well-intended schemes to improve the human condition have gone so tragically awry. Thus a state cadastral map created to designate taxable property-holders does not merely describe a system of land tenure it creates such a system through its ability to give its categories the force of law. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored. Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification.
As a result, its interventions were often crude and self-defeating. It lacked, for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to “translate” what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people. The premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity.
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