High-Level Thoughts

A phenomenal, interesting look at how governments and the desire to govern shape human life. Only a 9 because
it is dense and slow and not a particularly fun book to read.

SUMMARY NOTES

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. It lacked anything
like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people. 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. As a result, its
interventions were often crude and self-defeating.
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. 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.
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.
It is harder to grasp why so many well-intended schemes to improve the human condition have gone so
tragically awry. 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.
I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious
combination of four elements. All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster.
1. The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society—the transformative state
simplifications described above.
2. The second element is what I call a high-modernist ideology. 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.
3. 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.
4. A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist
these plans.
War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make the populace more
receptive to a new dispensation.
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.
Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any
real, functioning social order.
I am, however, making a case against an imperial or hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the
necessary role of local knowledge and know-how.
Throughout the book I make the case for the indispensable role of practical knowledge, informal
processes, and improvisation in the face of unpredictability.
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.

NATURE AND SPACE

Once we have seen how simplification, legibility, and manipulation operate in forest management, we
can then explore how the modern state applies a similar lens to urban planning, rural settlement, land
administration, and agriculture.
 In state “fiscal forestry,” however, the actual tree with its vast number of possible uses was
replaced by an abstract tree representing a volume of lumber or firewood. Some level of abstraction is
necessary for virtually all forms of analysis, and it is not at all surprising that the abstractions of state officials
should have reflected the paramount fiscal interests of their employer.
The new forestry science was a subdiscipline of what was called cameral science, an effort to reduce
the fiscal management of a kingdom to scientific principles that would allow systematic planning. The
great simplification of the forest into a “one-commodity machine” was precisely the step that allowed German
forestry science to become a rigorous technical and commercial discipline that could be codified and taught. A
condition of its rigor was that it severely bracketed, or assumed to be constant, all variables except those bearing
directly on the yield of the selected species and on the cost of growing and extracting them. As we shall see with
urban planning, revolutionary theory, collectivization, and rural resettlement, a whole world lying “outside the
brackets” returned to haunt this technical vision.
As pioneers in scientific forestry, the Germans also became pioneers in recognizing and attempting to
remedy many of its undesirable consequences. To this end, they invented the science of what they called “forest
hygiene.”
“Restoration forestry” attempted with mixed results to create a virtual ecology, while denying its
chief sustaining condition: diversity.
The metaphorical value of this brief account of scientific production forestry is that it illustrates the dangers
of dismembering an exceptionally complex and poorly understood set of relations and processes in order to
isolate a single element of instrumental value.
Most early measures were human in scale. One sees this logic at work in such surviving
expressions as a “stone’s throw” or “within earshot” for distances and a “cartload,” a “basketful,” or a
“handful” for volume.
Thus an Ethiopian response to a query about how much salt is required for a dish might be “Half as much
as to cook a chicken.”
Virtually everywhere in early modern Europe were endless micropolitics about how baskets might be
adjusted through wear, bulging, tricks of weaving, moisture, the thickness of the rim, and so on. In some areas
the local standards for the bushel and other units of measurement were kept in metallic form and placed in the
care of a trusted official or else literally carved into the stone of a church or the town hall.
No effective central monitoring or controlled comparisons were possible without standard, fixed
units of measurement.
Officials and physiocrats alike were convinced that uniform measures were the precondition for creating
a national market and promoting rational economic action. “As mathematics was the language of science, so
would the metric system be the language of commerce and industry,” serving to unify and transform French
society.
Just as the scientific forester needed an inventory of trees to realize the commercial potential of the forest,
so the fiscal reformer needed a detailed inventory of landownership to realize the maximum, sustainable
revenue yield. The state’s case against communal forms of land tenure, however, was based on the correct
observation that it was fiscally illegible and hence fiscally less productive. Rather than trying, like the hapless
Lalouette, to bring the map into line with reality, the historical resolution has generally been for the state to
impose a property system in line with its fiscal grid.
The door-and-window tax established in France under the Directory and abolished only in 1917 is a
striking case in point… As a simple, workable formula, it was a brilliant stroke, but it was not without
consequences. Peasant dwellings were subsequently designed or renovated with the formula in mind so
as to have as few openings as possible.
The state’s increasing concern with productivity, health, sanitation, education, transportation, mineral
resources, grain production, and investment was less an abandonment of the older objectives of statecraft than
a broadening and deepening of what those objectives entailed in the modern world.

CITIES, PEOPLE, AND LANGUAGE

Ask if an outsider would have needed a local guide (a native tracker) in order to find her way successfully.
If the answer is yes, then the community or terrain in question enjoys at least a small measure of insulation from
outside intrusion.
Illegibility, then, has been and remains a reliable resource for political autonomy.
Other things being equal, the city laid out according to a simple, repetitive logic will be easiest to
administer and to police.
 Until at least the fourteenth century, the great majority of Europeans did not have permanent
patronymics. An individual’s name was typically his given name, which might well suffice for local identification.
If something more were required, a second designation could be added, indicating his occupation (in the English
case, smith, baker), his geographical location (hill, edgewood), his father s given name, or a personal
characteristic (short, strong). These secondary designations were not permanent surnames; they did not survive
their bearers, unless by chance, say, a baker’s son went into the same trade and was called by the same second
designation.
Family names in early fifteenth-century Tuscany were confined to a very few powerful, property-owning
lineages (such as the Strozzi). For such lineages, a surname was a way of achieving social recognition as a
“corporate group,” and kin and affines adopted the name as a way of claiming the backing of an influential
lineage.
William Robertson’s male son might be called Thomas Williamson (son of William), while
Thomas’s son, in turn, might be called Henry Thompson (Thomas’s son).
A great many northern European surnames, though now permanent, still bear, like a fly caught in
amber, particles that echo their antique purpose of designating who a man’s father was (Fitz–, O’–, –sen,
–son, –s, Mac–, –vich).
Filipinos were instructed by the decree of November 21, 1849, to take on permanent Hispanic surnames.
In practice, each town was given a number of pages from the alphabetized catalogo, producing whole towns
with surnames beginning with the same letter.
Tracking property ownership and inheritance, collecting taxes, maintaining court records, performing
police work, conscripting soldiers, and controlling epidemics were all made immeasurably easier by the clarity of
full names and, increasingly, fixed addresses.
The creation of birth and death certificates, more specific addresses (that is, more specific than
something like “John–on–the–hill”), identity cards, passports, social security numbers, photographs,
fingerprints, and, most recently, DNA profiles have superseded the rather crude instrument of the
permanent surname.
A society that is relatively opaque to the state is thereby insulated from some forms of finely tuned state
interventions, both welcomed (universal vaccinations) and resented (personal income taxes).
Most obviously, state simplifications are observations of only those aspects of social life that are of official
interest. They are interested, utilitarian facts. Second, they are also nearly always written (verbal or numerical)
documentary facts. Third, they are typically static facts. Fourth, 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). Finally, 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.

ANOTHER REVIEW
The book is a study of how the modern state has imposed order upon thoseaspects of society that it
needed to understand and control. The order is imposedby simplifying complex phenomena such as land
ownership through processes suchas making highly regular maps. Sc ott calls this process creating
“legibility”.Scott argues that “the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in the
pernicious combination of four elements”:

The “administrative ordering of nature and society.”

A “confidence about scientific and technical progress” that leads to the conclusion that science comprehends all
knowledge and therefore maximizes all productivity. He calls this “high modernist ideology”.

“An authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power…”

“A prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.”
He opens the first chapter with a description that will serve as a metaphorthroughout the book. This is the story
of scientific forestry in Germany toward theend of the eighteenth century. The Prussian state of this time had a
strong interest in the value and productive potential of forests. The state therefore undertook to measure forests
and count the trees of various kinds in them. Since certain trees provided greater capital returns, it made sense
to create homogenous forests of these trees alone. To do so, forests were cleared of underbrush and of other
kinds of wood, trees were planted in straight lines to facilitate counting and cutting, and personnel were trained
in managing the designed forests according to a few simple rules. These steps greatly facilitated centralized
management. When these managed, artificial forests began to die, the state undertook to introduce measures
that would duplicate the original forests, such as creating birdhouses and anthills, and even importing spiders.
By this time the German model of planned forestry (founded upon the desirability of being able to quickly assess
the value of the forest and the belief that scientific principles could improve upon the workings of nature) had
spread throughout the world with devastating results unilaterally. Despite the failures of the planned forest (which
took many years to realize), planning and measurement spread as highly desirable activities among emerging
nation states. The main impetus for planning and standardized measurement was a concern about tax collection.
Tax collection had been an irregular habit of royal demands followed by a popular effort to give enough to
appease the state and hide the rest. The foundation of this irregularity was non-uniform weights and measures.
People commonly weighed and measured based upon local tradition, with any common denominator (such as a
“basket” or a “bushel”) being anything but common. “Standard” measurements might vary by two or three times
from one town to the next. Even when standardized to seemingly fixed measures, the local populace would
commonly find a way to gain some advantage, such as by “rounding” the top of measured wheat. In France, the
State brought this situation under control by imposing the metric system. An increasing market economy brought
popular demands for regular measures, the State had a strong desire to regulate taxation, and Enlightenment
thinkers pushed the desirability of regularity. Rarely have the people’s will and the government’s need aligned
so neatly as with the imposition and adoption of the metric system in eighteenth century France. The regulation
of taxation within an emerging market economy was a small problem in comparison with the measurability and
quantifiability of land. The early modern state was confronted with a morass of local customs that regulated how
land was distributed that boggled the mind of all those except those who grew up with it.

These customs constituted a “system” of local politics that took into consideration individual family needs,
inheritance, land yield, ecology, wildlife, and myriad other factors. The rules that governed land ownership and
use resembled a Rube Goldberg project. However, “the very concept of a modern state presupposes a vastly
simplified and uniform property regime that is legible and hence manipulable from the center.” Given the disparity
of aims between existing local customs and the modern state’s desire for easily assessable (taxable) and
manageable (saleable) land, one of the two had to give. The state won, of course, by imposing regular land
parcels upon the populace: “the historical resolution has generally been for the state to impose a property system
in line with its fiscal grid.” The dream was to manage and tax land more easily; the result was to completely
disrupt a system of community land tenure that provided protection to the collective local community and replace
it with forced individual holdings that rewarded individual effort and forced and facilitated a shift to a market
economy. In this shift, the state gained the ability to survey quickly. It ignored, however, a large body of
knowledge about the land and its people. Two parcels of equal size were deemed equal; one however might be
fertile and the other unproductive. The impact upon individuals was sometimes grave. Since taxation was levied
based upon parcel size, the state made no effort to discern what the productive capacity of a lot might be, and
thereby demanded equal taxes from each. The unlucky recipient of unproductive land was often impoverished,
while he who received productive land in the transition to government-regulated parcels might pay his taxes
easily and have much to spare. This first step in statehood concerned itself with basic measurement and
uniformity for the sake of taxation. The modern state would build upon uniformity of measurement in trade and
land as it began to be involved in “productivity, health, sanitation, education, transportation, mineral resources,
grain production and investment.” That is the topic of the second chapter.