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\title{Seeing Like a State}
\date{March 1998}
\author{James C. Scott}
\subtitle{How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed}






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\begin{quote}


OWEN: What is happening?


YOLLAND: I’m not sure. But I’m concerned about my part in it. It’s an
eviction of sorts.


OWEN: We’re making a six-inch map of the country. Is there something
sinister in that?


YOLLAND: Not in \dots{}


OWEN: And we’re taking place names that are riddled with confusion
and\dots{}


YOLLAND: Who’s confused? Are the people confused?


OWEN: And we’re standardising those names as accurately and as sensitively as we can.


YOLLAND: Something is being eroded.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

— Brian Friel, \emph{Translations} 2.1


\end{flushright}

\chapter{Acknowledgments}


This book has been longer in the making than I would care to admit. It
would be nice to be able to claim that it just took that long to think
it through. Nice, but not truthful. A nearly fatal combination of
malingering and administrative chores accounts for part of the delay.
For the rest, the scope of the book simply expanded, in an academic
version of Parkinson’s Law, to fill all the space that I would give to
it. Finally, I had to call an arbitrary halt or else start thinking of
it as a life’s work.


The scope of the book together with the time it took to complete it
explain the long list of intellectual debts I have accumulated along
the way. A full accounting of them would be interminable except for
the fact that I realize some of my creditors would just as soon not be
associated with the final product. Though I shall not implicate them
here, I owe them nonetheless. Instead of turning my argument in the
direction they urged, I took their criticisms to heart by fortifying
my case so that it would better answer their objections. My other
intellectual creditors, having failed to disavow the final product in
advance, will be named here and, it is to be hoped, implicated.


Some of my debts are to institutions. I spent the 1990–91 academic
year at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin as a recipient of their
hospitality and largesse. The temptation of living for a time in
Berlin, just a year after the Wall came down, proved
irresistible. After physically laboring for six weeks on an
ex-collective farm on the Mecklenburg Plain in eastern Germany
(an alternative that I dreamed up to avoid sitting for six weeks in
Goethe Institute classes with pimply teenagers), I hurled myself at
the German language, Berlin, and my German colleagues. My research
hardly advanced in any formal sense, but I realize that many fruitful
lines of inquiry opened up then. I want particularly to thank Wolf
Lepenies, Reinhard Prasser, Joachim Nettlebeck, Barbara Sanders,
Barbara Golf, Christine Klohn, and Gerhard Riedel for their many
kindnesses. The intellectual boon companionship of Georg Elwert, my
local patron saint, as well as that of Shalini Randeria, Gabor
Klaniczay, Christoph Harbsmeier, Barbara Lane, Mitchell Ash, Juan
Linz, Jochen Blaschke, Arthur von Mehren, Akim von Oppen, Hans Luther,
Carola Lenz, Gerd Spittler, Hans Medick, and Alf Lüdke opened my eyes
to lines of inquiry that proved formative. Only the great efforts and
unfailing friendship of Heinz Lechleiter and Ursula Hess brought my
German to a (barely) tolerable level.


At various stages in the laborious preparation of this book, I had the
privilege of making extended visits to institutions filled with
largespirited but skeptical colleagues. My good luck was that they so
often made a project of straightening me out. They might not be
satisfied with the final result, but I’ll bet that they can see their
influence at work. At the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, Marseille, I especially want to thank my patron, Jean-Pierre
Olivier de Sardan, Thomas Bierschenk, and their colleagues in the
staff seminar.  Living in Le Vieux Panier and working every day in the
magnificent atmosphere of La Vielle Charite were unforgettable
experiences. At the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian
National University in Canberra, I had the benefit of an unmatched
crowd of humanists and Asian specialists looking over my
shoulder. Thanks go in particular to Graeme Clark, director, and lain
McCalman, associate director, who invited me, and to Tony Reid and
David Kelly, who organized the conference, “Ideas of Freedom in Asia,”
which was the premise of my visit. Tony Milner and Claire Milner,
Ranajit Guha (my guru) and Mechthild Guha, Bob Goodin and Diane
Gibson, Ben Tria Kerkvliet and Melinda Tria, Bill Jenner, Ian Wilson,
and John Walker in various ways made my stay convivial and
intellectually rewarding.


This book would definitely have been much longer in the making were it
not for the fact that Dick Ohmann and Betsy Traube invited me to spend
the academic year of 1994–95 as a fellow of the Center for Humanities
at Wesleyan University. My colleagues there and our weekly seminars
together were intellectually bracing, thanks in large part to Betsy
Traube’s capacity to frame each paper brilliantly. The center’s ideal
combination of solitude and a staff that could not have been more
helpful allowed me to finish a first draft of the entire manuscript. I
am enormously grateful to Pat Camden and Jackie Rich for their
inexhaustible fund of kindnesses. The astute insights of Betsy Traube
and Khachig Tololyan mark this work in many ways. Thanks also to Bill
Cohen, Peter Rutland, and Judith Goldstein.


I would not have had the leisure for reflection and writing in 1994–95
had it not been for generous grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim
Foundation (Research for Understanding and Reducing Violence,
Aggression, and Dominance) and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation Peace and Security Program Fellowship. But for their
confidence in my work and their assistance, which made possible a
respite from all administrative and teaching chores, I wouldn’t have
had a prayer of finishing this study when I did.


Finally, I want to thank my colleagues in the Netherlands and at the
Amsterdam School for Social Science Research for the opportunity of
visiting there in order to give the Sixth Annual W. F. Wertheim
Lecture: Jan Breman, Bram de Swaan, Hans Sonneveld, Otto van den
Muijzenberg, Anton Blok, Rod Aya, Roseanne Rutten, Johan Goudsblom,
Jan-Willem Duyvendak, Ido de Haan, Johan Heilbron, Jose Komen, Karin
Peperkamp, Niels Mulder, Frans Hiisken, Ben White, Jan Nederveen
Pieterse, Franz von Benda-Beckmann, and Keebet von
Benda-Beckmann. Having Wim Wertheim there to offer advice and
criticism was a great privilege for me, for I have admired his many
contributions to social science theory and Southeast Asian studies. I
learned at least as much from the thesis-writing graduate students in
my seminar there as they learned from me; Talja Potters and Peer Smets
were kind enough to read my chapter on urban planning and provide
searching critiques.


There are a good many scholars whose writings opened up new
perspectives for me or provided outstanding analyses of issues that I
could not have hoped to study so comprehensively on my own. Some of
them have not seen this work, some of them I have never met, and some
of them would probably want to disown what I have
written. Nevertheless, I will venture to acknowledge my heavy
intellectual debts to them all: Edward Friedman, Ben Anderson, Michael
Adas, Teodor Shanin, James Ferguson, and Zygmunt Bauman. I could not
have written the chapter on the high-modernist city without taking
shameless advantage of the insights of James Holston’s fine book on
Brasilia. The chapter on Soviet collectivization and its connection
with industrial agriculture in the United States leans heavily on the
work of Sheila Fitzpatrick and Deborah Fitzgerald. I thank Sheila
Fitzpatrick for her searching comments, only a few of which are
adequately reflected in the finished chapter.


The elaboration of the concept of mētis I owe to Marcel Detienne and
Jean-Pierre Vernant. Although our terminology differs, Stephen Marglin
and I had, unbeknownst to one another, been taking separate trains to
roughly the same destination. Thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation,
Marglin organized a conference, “The Greening of Economics,” in
Bellagio, Italy, where I had my first opportunity to present some of
my initial ideas, and Marglin’s work on episteme and techne as well as
his work on agriculture have influenced my thinking. Stephen Gudeman’s
perceptive comments, Frédérique Apffel Marglin’s work on
“variolation,” and Arun Agrawal’s work and commentary have helped to
shape my sense of practical knowledge. Chapter 8, which is about
agriculture, bears the distinct marks of all that I have learned from
the work of Paul Richards and from Jan Douwe van der Ploeg. I am an
amateur as an Africanist, and the chapter on \emph{ujamaa} villages in
Tanzania owes a great deal to Joel Gao Hiza, who wrote a brilliant
senior honors thesis on the subject while at Yale University and who
generously shared his voluminous research materials. (He is now
finishing a thesis in anthropology at the University of California at
Berkeley.) Bruce McKim, Ron Aminzade, Goran Hyden, David Sperling, and
Allen Isaacman read the chapter on Tanzania and saved me from some
blunders; some undoubtedly remain despite their efforts. Birgit
Müller’s fine analysis of the role of “fixers and traders” in the East
German factory economy before unification helped me to understand the
symbiotic relationship between planned order and informal
arrangements.


Larry Lohmann and James Ferguson read an early draft of the manuscript
and made comments that clarified my thinking enormously and prevented
some serious missteps. A few other good friends offered to read all or
part of the manuscript, in spite of its forbidding length. Those who
rolled their eyes when offering or whose body language suggested mixed
feelings, I avoided burdening. The few who genuinely wanted to read
it, or whose feigned interest was completely convincing, in every case
provided a set of comments that shaped the book in important ways. I
owe an enormous debt and my warmest thanks to Ron Herring, Ramachandra
Guha, Zygmunt Bauman, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Mark Lendler, Allan
Isaacman, and Peter Vandergeest.


A great many thoughtful colleagues made useful criticisms or brought
to my attention work that contributed to improvements in the argument
and evidence. They include Arjun Appadurai, Ken Alder, Gregory Kasza,
Daniel Goldhagen, Erich Goldhagen, Peter Perdue, Esther Kingston-Mann,
Peter Sahlins, Anna Selenyi, Doug Gallon, and Jane Mansbridge. I also
thank Sugata Bose, Al McCoy, Richard Landes, Gloria Raheja, Kiren Aziz
Chaudhry, Jess Gilbert, Tongchai Winichakul, Dan Kelliher, Dan Little,
Jack Kloppenberg, Tony Gulielmi, Robert Evenson, and Peter Sahlins.
Others who kindly contributed are Adam Ashforth, John Tehranian,
Michael Kwass, Jesse Ribot, Ezra Suleiman, Jim Boyce, Jeff Burds, Fred
Cooper, Ann Stoler, Atul Kohli, Orlando Figes, Anna Tsing, Vernon
Ruttan, Henry Bernstein, Michael Watts, Allan Pred, Witoon
Permpongsacharoen, Gene Ammarell, and David Feeny.


For the past five years the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale has
been for me the site of a broad, interdisciplinary education in rural
life and a major source of intellectual companionship. The program has
given me more that I can imagine ever giving back. Virtually every
page of this book can be traced to one or another of the wide-ranging
encounters fostered by the program. I will forgo mentioning fifty or
so postdoctoral fellows who have visited for a year, but all of them
have contributed in large and small ways to this enterprise. We
invited them to join us because we admired their work, and they have
never disappointed us. The chief of the Program in Agrarian Studies,
Marvel Kay Mansfield, has been the heart and soul of the success of
Agrarian Studies and every other enterprise with which I have been
associated at Yale. This is not the first occasion I have acknowledged
my debt to her; it has only grown with time. Nor could Agrarian
Studies have thrived as it has without the initiative of
K. Sivaramakrishnan, Rick Rheingans, Donna Perry, Bruce McKim, Nina
Bhatt, and Linda Lee.


My intellectual debts to colleagues at Yale defy accounting. Those
with whom I have taught—Bill Kelly, Helen Siu, Bob Harms, Angelique
Haugerud, Nancy Peluso, John Wargo, Cathy Cohen, and Lee Wandel—have,
in practice, taught me. Other Yale colleagues whose fingerprints can
be found on this manuscript include Ian Shapiro, John Merriman, Hal
Conklin, Paul Landau, Enrique Meyer, Dimitri Gutas, Carol Rose, Ben
Kiernan, Joe Errington, Charles Bryant, and Arvid Nelson, a visiting
fellow who is completing a thesis on forestry in East Germany and who
was an exceptional source of information on the history of scientific
forestry in Germany. The graduate students in my seminar, “Anarchism,”
and in a jointly taught seminar, “The Comparative Study of Agrarian
Societies,” read several draft chapters of the manuscript, pulling
them to pieces in ways that forced me to rethink more than a few
issues.


I have been blessed with research assistants who turned what began as
wild goose chases into serious quests. Without their imagination and
work I would have learned little about the invention of permanent last
names, the physical layout of new villages, and language
planning. Here is my chance to thank Kate Stanton, Cassandra Moseley,
Meredith Weiss, John Tehranian, and Allan Carlson for their superb
work. I owe Cassandra Moseley not only thanks but an apology, because
all her fine work on the Tennessee Valley Authority resulted in a
chapter that I reluctantly cut in order to keep the book within
reasonable bounds. It will find another home, I trust.


Yale University Press has been good to me in more ways than one. I
want to thank particularly John Ryden; Judy Metro; my editor, Charles
Grench; and the best manuscript editor I have ever worked with, Brenda
Kolb.


Several variants of chapter 1, each with some material from later
chapters, have appeared elsewhere: “State Simplifications: Nature,
Space, and People,” Occasional Paper No. 1, Department of History,
University of Saskatchewan, Canada, November 1994; “State
Simplifications,” \emph{Journal of Political Philosophy} 4, no. 2 (1995):
1-42; “State Simplifications: Nature, Space, and People,” in Ian
Shapiro and Russell Hardin, eds., \emph{Political Order}, vol. 38 of
\emph{Nomos} (New York: New York University Press, 1996): 42-85; “Freedom
Contra Freehold: State Simplification, Space, and People in Southeast
Asia,” in David Kelly and Anthony Reid, eds., \emph{Freedom in Asia}
(forthcoming); “State Simplifications: Some Applications to Southeast
Asia,” Sixth Annual W. F. Wertheim Lecture, Centre for Asian Studies,
Amsterdam, June 1995; and “State Simplifications and Practical
Knowledge,” in Stephen Marglin and Stephen Gudeman, eds., \emph{People’s
Economy, People’s Ecology} (forthcoming).


I’d like to kick the habit of writing books, at least for a while. If
there were a detox unit or an analog to the nicotine patch for serial
offenders, I think I would sign up for treatment. My habit has already
cost me more precious time than I care to admit. The problem with book
writing and other addictions is that the resolve to quit is greatest
during withdrawal, but as the painful symptoms recede, the craving is
apt to return. Louise and our children, Mia, Aaron, and Noah, would, I
know, be only too happy to have me committed until I was “clean.” I’m
trying. God knows I’m trying.

\chapter{Introduction}


This book grew out of an intellectual detour that became so gripping
that I decided to abandon my original itinerary altogether. After I
had made what appeared to be an ill-considered turn, the surprising
new scenery and the sense that I was headed for a more satisfying
destination persuaded me to change my plans. The new itinerary, I
think, has a logic of its own. It might even have been a more elegant
trip had I possessed the wit to conceive of it at the outset. What
does seem clear to me is that the detour, although along roads that
were bumpier and more circuitous than I had foreseen, has led to a
more substantial place. It goes without saying that the reader might
have found a more experienced guide, but the itinerary is so
peculiarly off the beaten track that, if you’re headed this way, you
have to settle for whatever local tracker you can find.


A word about the road not taken. Originally, I set out to understand
why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of “people who move
around,” to put it crudely. In the context of Southeast Asia, this
promised to be a fruitful way of addressing the perennial tensions
between mobile, slash-and-burn hill peoples on one hand and wet-rice,
valley kingdoms on the other. The question, however, transcended
regional geography. Nomads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and
Bedouins), hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people,
itinerants, runaway slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the
side of states. Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples
(sedentarization) seemed to be a perennial state project—perennial, in
part, because it so seldom succeeded.


The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came
to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange
the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of
taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to
think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem
in statecraft. 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.


It is at this point that the detour began. How did the state gradually
get a handle on its subjects and their environment? 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.


The organization of the natural world was no exception. Agriculture
is, after all, a radical reorganization and simplification of flora to
suit man’s goals. Whatever their other purposes, the designs of
scientific forestry and agriculture and the layouts of plantations,
collective farms, ujamaa villages, and strategic hamlets all seemed
calculated to make the terrain, its products, and its workforce more
legible—and hence manipulable—from above and from the center.


A homely analogy from beekeeping may be helpful here. In premodern
times the gathering of honey was a difficult affair. Even if bees were
housed in straw hives, harvesting the honey usually meant driving off
the bees and often destroying the colony. The arrangement of brood
chambers and honey cells followed complex patterns that varied from
hive to hive—patterns that did not allow for neat extractions. The
modern beehive, in contrast, is designed to solve the beekeeper’s
problem. With a device called a “queen excluder,” it separates the
brood chambers below from the honey supplies above, preventing the
queen from laying eggs above a certain level. Furthermore, the wax
cells are arranged neatly in vertical frames, nine or ten to a box,
which enable the easy extraction of honey, wax, and
propolis. Extraction is made possible by observing “bee space”—the
precise distance between the frames that the bees will leave open as
passages rather than bridging the frames by building intervening
honeycomb. From the beekeeper’s point of view, the modern hive is an
orderly, “legible” hive allowing the beekeeper to inspect the
condition of the colony and the queen, judge its honey production (by
weight), enlarge or contract the size of the hive by standard units,
move it to a new location, and, above all, extract just enough honey
(in temperate climates) to ensure that the colony will overwinter
successfully.


I do not wish to push the analogy further than it will go, but 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. The social
simplifications thus introduced not only permitted a more finely tuned
system of taxation and conscription but also greatly enhanced state
capacity. They made possible quite discriminating interventions of
every kind, such as public-health measures, political surveillance,
and relief for the poor.


These state simplifications, the basic givens of modern statecraft,
were, I began to realize, rather like abridged maps. They did not
successfully represent the actual activity of the society they
depicted, nor were they intended to; they represented only that slice
of it that interested the official observer. They were, moreover, not
just maps.  Rather, they were maps that, when allied with state power,
would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade. 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. Much of
the first chapter is intended to convey how thoroughly society and the
environment have been refashioned by state maps of legibility.


This view of early modern statecraft is not particularly original.
Suitably modified, however, it can provide a distinctive optic through
which a number of huge development fiascoes in poorer Third World
nations and Eastern Europe can be usefully viewed.


But “fiasco” is too lighthearted a word for the disasters I have in
mind. The Great Leap Forward in China, collectivization in Russia, and
compulsory villagization in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Ethiopia are
among the great human tragedies of the twentieth century, in terms of
both lives lost and lives irretrievably disrupted. At a less dramatic
but far more common level, the history of Third World development is
littered with the debris of huge agricultural schemes and new cities
(think of Brasília or Chandigarh) that have failed their residents. It
is not so difficult, alas, to understand why so many human lives have
been destroyed by mobilized violence between ethnic groups, religious
sects, or linguistic communities. But 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. The
first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society—the
transformative state simplifications described above. By themselves,
they are the unremarkable tools of modern statecraft; they are as
vital to the maintenance of our welfare and freedom as they are to the
designs of a would-be modern despot. They undergird the concept of
citizenship and the provision of social welfare just as they might
undergird a policy of rounding up undesirable minorities.


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. It originated, of course, in the West,
as a by-product of unprecedented progress in science and industry.


High modernism must not be confused with scientific practice. It was
fundamentally, as the term “ideology” implies, a faith that borrowed,
as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was,
accordingly, uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically
optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of
human settlement and production. The carriers of high modernism tended
to see rational order in remarkably visual aesthetic terms. For them,
an efficient, rationally organized city, village, or farm was a city
that \emph{looked} regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense. The
carriers of high modernism, once their plans miscarried or were
thwarted, tended to retreat to what I call miniaturization: the
creation of a more easily controlled micro-order in model cities,
model villages, and model farms.


High modernism was about “interests” as well as faith. Its carriers,
even when they were capitalist entrepreneurs, required state action to
realize their plans. In most cases, they were powerful officials and
heads of state. They tended to prefer certain forms of planning and social
organization (such as huge dams, centralized communication and
transportation hubs, large factories and farms, and grid cities),
because these forms fit snugly into a high-modernist view and also
answered their political interests as state officials. There was, to
put it mildly, an elective affinity between high modernism and the
interests of many state officials.


Like any ideology, high modernism had a particular temporal and social
context. The feats of national economic mobilization of the
belligerents (especially Germany) in World War I seem to mark its high
tide. Not surprisingly, its most fertile social soil was to be found
among planners, engineers, architects, scientists, and technicians
whose skills and status it celebrated as the designers of the new
order.  High-modernist faith was no respecter of traditional political
boundaries; it could be found across the political spectrum from left
to right but particularly among those who wanted to use state power to
bring about huge, utopian changes in people’s work habits, living
patterns, moral conduct, and worldview. Nor was this utopian vision
dangerous in and of itself. Where it animated plans in liberal
parliamentary societies and where the planners therefore had to
negotiate with organized citizens, it could spur reform.


Only when these first two elements are joined to a third does the
combination become potentially lethal. 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. In such situations, emergency conditions foster the
seizure of emergency powers and frequently delegitimize the previous
regime. They also tend to give rise to elites who repudiate the past
and who have revolutionary designs for their people.


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. Late colonial rule, with its social engineering
aspirations and ability to run roughshod over popular opposition,
occasionally met this last condition.


In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for
largescale 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.


I have not yet explained, the reader will have noted, why such
high-modernist plans, backed by authoritarian power, actually failed.
Accounting for their failure is my second purpose here.


Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always
ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This
truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the
fact that any production process depends on a host of informal
practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely
following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt
production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans
for, say, a city, a village, or a collective farm were inadequate as a
set of instructions for creating a functioning social order. The
formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it
could not create or maintain. To the degree that the formal scheme
made no allowance for these processes or actually suppressed them, it
failed both its intended beneficiaries and ultimately its designers as
well.


Much of this book can be read as a case against the \emph{imperialism} of
high-modernist, planned social order. I stress the word “imperialism”
here because I am emphatically not making a blanket case against
either bureaucratic planning or high-modernist ideology. I am,
however, making a case against an imperial or hegemonic planning
mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledge and
know-how.


\hairline


Throughout the book I make the case for the indispensable role of
practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face
of unpredictability. In chapters 4 and 5, I contrast the high-modernist
views and practices of city planners and revolutionaries with critical
views emphasizing process, complexity, and open-endedness. Le Corbusier
and Lenin are the protagonists, with Jane Jacobs and Rosa Luxemburg cast
as their formidable critics. Chapters 6 and 7 contain accounts of Soviet
collectivization and Tanzanian forced villagization, which illustrate
how schematic, authoritarian solutions to production and social order
inevitably fail when they exclude the fund of valuable knowledge
embodied in local practices. (An early draft contained a case study of
the Tennessee Valley Authority, the United States’ highmodernist
experiment and the granddaddy of all regional development projects. It
was reluctantly swept aside to shorten what is still a long book.)


Finally, in chapter 9 I attempt to conceptualize the nature of
practical knowledge and to contrast it with more formal, deductive,
epistemic knowledge. The term \emph{mētis}, which descends from classical
Greek and denotes the knowledge that can come only from practical
experience, serves as a useful portmanteau word for what I have in
mind. Here I should also acknowledge my debt to anarchist writers
(Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, Proudhon) who consistently emphasize
the role of mutuality as opposed to imperative, hierarchical
coordination in the creation of social order. Their understanding of
the term “mutuality” covers some, but not all, of the same ground that
I mean to cover with “\emph{mētis}.”


Radically simplified designs for social organization seem to court the
same risks of failure courted by radically simplified designs for
natural environments. The failures and vulnerability of monocrop
commercial forests and genetically engineered, mechanized monocropping
mimic the failures of collective farms and planned cities. At this
level, I am making a case for the resilience of both social and
natural diversity and a strong case about the limits, in principle, of
what we are likely to know about complex, functioning order. One
could, I think, successfully turn this argument against a certain kind
of reductive social science. Having already taken on more than I could
chew, I leave this additional detour to others, with my blessing.


In trying to make a strong, paradigmatic case, I realize that I have
risked displaying the hubris of which high modernists are justly
accused. Once you have crafted lenses that change your perspective, it
is a great temptation to look at everything through the same
spectacles.  I do, however, want to plead innocent to two charges that
I do not think a careful reading would sustain. The first charge is
that my argument is uncritically admiring of the local, the
traditional, and the customary.  I understand that the practical
knowledge I describe is often inseparable from the practices of
domination, monopoly, and exclusion that offend the modern liberal
sensibility. My point is not that practical knowledge is the product
of some mythical, egalitarian state of nature. Rather, my point is
that formal schemes of order are untenable without some elements of
the practical knowledge that they tend to dismiss. The second charge
is that my argument is an anarchist case against the state itself. The
state, as I make abundantly clear, is the vexed institution that is
the ground of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms. My case is that
certain kinds of states, driven by utopian plans and an authoritarian
disregard for the values, desires, and objections of their subjects,
are indeed a mortal threat to human well-being. Short of that
draconian but all too common situation, we are left to weigh
judiciously the benefits of certain state interventions against their
costs.


As I finished this book, I realized that its critique of certain forms
of state action might seem, from the post-1989 perspective of
capitalist triumphalism, like a kind of quaint archaeology. States
with the pretensions and power that I criticize have for the most part
vanished or have drastically curbed their ambitions. And yet, as I
make clear in examining scientific farming, industrial agriculture,
and capitalist markets in general, 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. A market necessarily reduces
quality to quantity via the price mechanism and promotes
standardization; in markets, money talks, not people. Today, global
capitalism is perhaps the most powerful force for homogenization,
whereas the state may in some instances be the defender of local
difference and variety.  (In \emph{Enlightenment’s Wake}, John Gray makes a
similar case for liberalism, which he regards as self-limiting because
it rests on cultural and institutional capital that it is bound to
undermine.) The “interruption,” forced by widespread strikes, of
France’s structural adjustments to accommodate a common European
currency is perhaps a straw in the wind. Put bluntly, my bill of
particulars against a certain kind of state is by no means a case for
politically unfettered market coordination as urged by Friedrich Hayek
and Milton Friedman. As we shall see, the conclusions that can be
drawn from the failures of modern projects of social engineering are
as applicable to market-driven standardization as they are to
bureaucratic homogeneity.

\part{Part 1. State Projects of Legibility and Simplification}

\chapter{Chapter 1. Nature and Space}



\begin{quote}


Would it not be a great satisfaction to the king to know at a
designated moment every year the number of his subjects, in total and
by region, with all the resources, wealth \& poverty of each place;
[the number] of his nobility and ecclesiastics of all kinds, of men of
the robe, of Catholics and of those of the other religion, all
separated according to the place of their residence? \dots{} [Would it not
be] a useful and necessary pleasure for him to be able, in his own
office, to review in an hour’s time the present and past condition of
a great realm of which he is the head, and be able himself to know
with certitude in what consists his grandeur, his wealth, and his
strengths?



\end{quote}


— Marquis de Vauban, \emph{proposing an annual census to Louis XIV in 1686}


Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision.
The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp
focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and
unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the
phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence
more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation. Combined with
similar observations, an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a
selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree of
schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation.


The invention of scientific forestry in late eighteenth-century
Prussia and Saxony serves as something of a model of this process.\footnote{Henry E. Lowood, “The Calculating Forester: Quantification, Cameral Science, and the Emergence of Scientific Forestry Management in Germany,” in Tore Frangsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider, eds., \emph{The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 315-42. The following account is largely drawn from Lowood’s fine analysis.}
Although the history of scientific forestry is important in its own
right, it is used here as a metaphor for the forms of knowledge and
manipulation characteristic of powerful institutions with sharply
defined interests, of which state bureaucracies and large commercial
firms are perhaps the outstanding examples. 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.

\section{The State and Scientific Forestry: A Parable}



\begin{quote}


I [Gilgamesh] would conquer in the Cedar Forest\dots{}
I will set my hand to it and will chop down the Cedar.



\end{quote}


— \emph{Epic of Gilgamesh}


The early modern European state, even before the development of
scientific forestry, viewed its forests primarily through the fiscal
lens of revenue needs. To be sure, other concerns—such as timber for
shipbuilding, state construction, and fuel for the economic security
of its subjects—were not entirely absent from official
management. These concerns also had heavy implications for state
revenue and security.\footnote{The most striking exception was the royal attention to the supply of “noble game” (e.g., deer, boars, foxes) for the hunt and hence to the protection of its habitat. Lest one imagine this to be a quaint premodern affectation, it is worth recalling the enormous social importance of the hunt to such recent “monarchs” as Erich Honeker, Nicolae Ceausescu, Georgy Zhuvkov, Władysław Gomułka, and Marshal Tito.} Exaggerating only slightly, one might say
that the crown’s interest in forests was resolved through its fiscal
lens into a single number: the revenue yield of the timber that might
be extracted annually.


The best way to appreciate how heroic was this constriction of vision is
to notice what fell outside its field of vision. Lurking behind the
number indicating revenue yield were not so much forests as commercial
wood, representing so many thousands of board feet of saleable timber
and so many cords of firewood fetching a certain price. Missing, of
course, were all those trees, bushes, and plants holding little or no
potential for state revenue. Missing as well were all those parts of
trees, even revenue-bearing trees, which might have been useful to the
population but whose value could not be converted into fiscal receipts.
Here I have in mind foliage and its uses as fodder and thatch; fruits,
as food for people and domestic animals; twigs and branches, as bedding,
fencing, hop poles, and kindling; bark and roots, for making medicines
and for tanning; sap, for making resins; and so forth. Each species of
tree—indeed, each part or growth stage of each species—had its unique
properties and uses. A fragment of the entry under “elm” in a popular
seventeenth-century encyclopedia on aboriculture conveys something of
the vast range of practical uses to which the tree could be put.



\begin{quote}


Elm is a timber of most singular use, especially whereby it may be
continually dry, or wet, in extremes; therefore proper for water
works, mills, the ladles and soles of the wheel, pumps, aqueducts,
ship planks below the water line, \dots{} also for wheelwrights, handles
for the single handsaw, rails and gates. Elm is not so apt to rive
[split] \dots{} and is used for chopping blocks, blocks for the hat maker,
trunks and boxes to be covered with leather, coffins and dressers and
shovelboard tables of great length; also for the carver and those
curious workers of fruitage, foliage, shields, statues and most of the
ornaments appertaining to the orders of architecture\dots{} And finally
\dots{} the use of the very leaves of this tree, especially the female, is
not to be despised, \dots{} for they will prove of great relief to cattle
in the winter and scorching summers when hay and fodder is
dear\dots{} The green leaf of the elms contused heals a green wound or
cut, and boiled with the bark, consolidates bone fractures.\footnote{John Evelyn, \emph{Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest Trees} (London, 1664, 1679), p. 118, cited in John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Tinte (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 97-98.}



\end{quote}


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. If the princely conception of the
forest was still utilitarian, it was surely a utilitarianism confined
to the direct needs of the state.


From a naturalist’s perspective, nearly everything was missing from
the state’s narrow frame of reference. Gone was the vast majority of
flora: grasses, flowers, lichens, ferns, mosses, shrubs, and
vines. Gone, too, were reptiles, birds, amphibians, and innumerable
species of insects. Gone were most species of fauna, except those that
interested the crown’s gamekeepers.


From an anthropologist’s perspective, nearly everything touching on
human interaction with the forest was also missing from the state’s
tunnel vision. The state did pay attention to poaching, which impinged
on its claim to revenue in wood or its claim to royal game, but
otherwise it typically ignored the vast, complex, and negotiated
social uses of the forest for hunting and gathering, pasturage,
fishing, charcoal making, trapping, and collecting food and valuable
minerals as well as the forest’s significance for magic, worship,
refuge, and so on.\footnote{Ramachandra Guha reminds me that the verb “ignore” is inadequate here, for the state typically sought to control, regulate, and extinguish those practices that interfered with its own management policies. For much of my (admittedly limited) early education in the history of forestry, I am grateful to Ramachandra Guha and his two books, \emph{The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), and, with Madhav Gadgil, \emph{This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India} (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). For an evocative and wide-ranging exploration of the changing cultural meaning of the forest in the West, see Robert Pogue Harrison, \emph{Forests: The Shadow of Civilization} (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).}


If the utilitarian state could not see the real, existing forest for
the (commercial) trees, if its view of its forests was abstract and
partial, it was hardly unique in this respect. 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 entry under “forest” in Diderot’s \emph{Encyclopédie} is
almost exclusively concerned with the \emph{utilité publique} of forest
products and the taxes, revenues, and profits that they can be made to
yield. The forest as a habitat disappears and is replaced by the
forest as an economic resource to be managed efficiently and
profitably.\footnote{Harrison, \emph{Forests}, p. 121.} Here, fiscal and commercial logics coincide; they are
both resolutely fixed on the bottom line.


The vocabulary used to organize nature typically betrays the
overriding interests of its human users. In fact, utilitarian
discourse replaces the term “nature” with the term “natural
resources,” focusing on those aspects of nature that can be
appropriated for human use. A comparable logic extracts from a more
generalized natural world those flora or fauna that are of utilitarian
value (usually marketable commodities) and, in turn, reclassifies
those species that compete with, prey on, or otherwise diminish the
yields of the valued species. Thus, plants that are valued become
“crops,” the species that compete with them are stigmatized as
“weeds,” and the insects that ingest them are stigmatized as “pests.”
Thus, trees that are valued become “timber,” while species that
compete with them become “trash” trees or “underbrush.” The same logic
applies to fauna. Highly valued animals become “game” or “livestock,”
while those animals that compete with or prey upon them become
“predators” or “varmints.”


The kind of abstracting, utilitarian logic that the state, through its
officials, applied to the forest is thus not entirely
distinctive. What is distinctive about this logic, however, is the
narrowness of its field of vision, the degree of elaboration to which
it can be subjected, and above all, as we shall see, the degree to
which it allowed the state to impose that logic on the very reality
that was observed.\footnote{This last is a kind of twist on the Heisenberg principle. Instead of altering the phenomenon observed through the act of observation, so that the pre-observation state of the phenomenon is unknowable in principle, the effect of (interested) observation in this case is to alter the phenomenon in question over time so that it, in fact, more closely resembles the stripped down, abstract image the lens had revealed.}


Scientific forestry was originally developed from about 1765 to 1800,
largely in Prussia and Saxony. Eventually, it would become the basis
of forest management techniques in France, England, and the United
States and throughout the Third World. Its emergence cannot be
understood outside the larger context of the centralized state-making
initiatives of the period. In fact, 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.\footnote{See Keith Tribe, \emph{Governing Economy: The Reformation of German Economic Discourse, 1750-1840} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). The more general process of codifying the principles of state administration in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe is examined by Michel Foucault under the (misleading) heading of “police state” (from \emph{Polizeiwissenschaft}) in his lectures on “governmentality,” delivered at the Collège de France. See Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., \emph{The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality} (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), especially chap. 4.} Traditional domainal forestry had
hitherto simply divided the forest into roughly equal plots, with the
number of plots coinciding with the number of years in the assumed
growth cycle.\footnote{In the late seventeenth century, Jean-Baptiste Colbert had extensive plans to “rationalize” forest administration in order both to prevent poaching and to generate a more reliable revenue yield. To this end, Etienne Dralet’s \emph{Traité du régime forestier} proposed regulated plots (\emph{tire-wire}) “so that the growth is regular and easy to guard” Despite these initiatives, nothing much came of it in France until 1820, when the new German techniques were imported. See Peter Sahlins, \emph{Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France}, Harvard Historical Studies no. 115 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).} One plot was cut each year on the assumption of equal
yields (and value) from plots of equal size. Because of poor maps, the
uneven distribution of the most valuable large trees (\emph{Hochwald}), and
very approximate cordwood (\emph{Bruststaerke}) measures, the results were
unsatisfactory for fiscal planning.


Careful exploitation of domainal forests was all the more imperative
in the late eighteenth century, when fiscal officials became aware of
a growing shortage of wood. Many of the old-growth forests of oak,
beech, hornbeam, and linden had been severely degraded by planned and
unplanned felling, while the regrowth was not as robust as hoped. The
prospect of declining yields was alarming, not merely because it
threatened revenue flows but also because it might provoke massive
poaching by a peasantry in search of firewood. One sign of this
concern were the numerous state-sponsored competitions for designs of
more efficient woodstoves.


The first attempt at more precise measurements of forests was made by
Johann Gottlieb Beckmann on a carefully surveyed sample plot. Walking
abreast, several assistants carried compartmentalized boxes with
color-coded nails corresponding to five categories of tree sizes,
which they had been trained to identify. Each tree was tagged with the
appropriate nail until the sample plot had been covered. Because each
assistant had begun with a certain number of nails, it was a simple
matter to subtract the remaining nails from the initial total and
arrive at an inventory of trees by class for the entire plot. The
sample plot had been carefully chosen for its representativeness,
allowing the foresters to then calculate the timber and, given certain
price assumptions, the revenue yield of the whole forest. For the
forest scientists (\emph{Forstwissenschaftler}) the goal was always to
“deliver the greatest possible \emph{constant} volume of wood.”\footnote{Lowood, “The Calculating Forester,” p. 338.}


The effort at precision was pushed further as mathematicians worked
from the cone-volume principle to specify the volume of saleable wood
contained by a standardized tree (\emph{Normalbaum}) of a given size-class.
Their calculations were checked empirically against the actual volume
of wood in sample trees.\footnote{Various techniques were tried, including cutting an actual tree into bits and then compressing them to find the volume of the tree, and putting wood in a barrel of known volume and adding measured amounts of water to calculate the volume of the barrel \emph{not} occupied by the wood (ibid., p. 328).} The final result of such calculations was
the development of elaborate tables with data organized by tree size
and age under specified conditions of normal growth and maturation. By
radically narrowing his vision to commercial wood, the state forester
had, with his tables, paradoxically achieved a synoptic view of the
entire forest.\footnote{The utilitarian framework could, in principle, have been used to emphasize some other calculable “end” of the forest—e.g., game populations, mast-quality timber, or grazing acreage. Where several agencies superintending the forest have conflicting utilitarian agendas, the result can be incoherence and room for the local population to maneuver. See the fine study by K. Sivaramakrishnan, “Forests, Politics, and Governance in Bengal, 1794-1994” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Anthropology, Yale University, 1996).} This restriction of focus reflected in the tables
was in fact the only way in which the whole forest could be taken in
by a single optic. Reference to these tables coupled with field tests
allowed the forester to estimate closely the inventory, growth, and
yield of a given forest. In the regulated, abstract forest of the
forst- wissenschaftler, calculation and measurement prevailed, and the
three watchwords, in modern parlance, were “minimum diversity,” the
“balance sheet,” and “sustained yield.” The logic of the state-managed
forest science was virtually identical with the logic of commercial
exploitation.\footnote{I was tempted to add that, with regard to the use of forests, the view of the state might be longer and broader than that of private firms, which can, and have, plundered old-growth forests and then sold their acreage or surrendered it for back taxes (e.g., the “cutover” in the Upper Midwest of the United States at the turn of the century). The difficulty is that in cases of war or a fiscal crisis, the state often takes an equally shortsighted view.}


The achievement of German forestry science in standardizing techniques
for calculating the sustainable yield of commercial timber and hence
revenue was impressive enough. What is decisive for our purposes,
however, was the next logical step in forest management. That step was
to attempt to create, through careful seeding, planting, and cutting,
a forest that was easier for state foresters to count, manipulate,
measure, and assess. The fact is that forest science and geometry,
backed by state power, had the capacity to transform the real,
diverse, and chaotic old-growth forest into a new, more uniform forest
that closely resembled the administrative grid of its techniques. To
this end, the underbrush was cleared, the number of species was
reduced (often to monoculture), and plantings were done simultaneously
and in straight rows on large tracts. These management practices, as
Henry Lowood observes, “produced the monocultural, even-age forests
that eventually transformed the Normalbaum from abstraction to
reality. The German forest became the archetype for imposing on
disorderly nature the neatly arranged constructs of science. Practical
goals had encouraged mathematical utilitarianism, which seemed, in
turn, to promote geometric perfection as the outward sign of the
well-managed forest; in turn the rationally ordered arrangements of
trees offered new possibilities for controlling nature.”\footnote{Lowood, “The Calculating Forester,” p. 341. See also Harrison, \emph{Forests}, pp. 122-23.}


The tendency was toward regimentation, in the strict sense of the
word.  The forest trees were drawn up into serried, uniform ranks, as
it were, to be measured, counted off, felled, and replaced by a new
rank and file of lookalike conscripts. As an army, it was also
designed hierarchically from above to fulfill a unique purpose and to
be at the disposition of a single commander. At the limit, the forest
itself would not even have to be seen; it could be “read” accurately
from the tables and maps in the forester’s office.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-2.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 1. Mixed temperate forest, part managed, part natural regeneration}
\end{figure}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-3.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 2. One aisle of a managed poplar forest in Tuscany}
\end{figure}


How much easier it was to manage the new, stripped-down forest. With
stands of same-age trees arranged in linear alleys, clearing the
underbrush, felling, extraction, and new planting became a far more
routine process. Increasing order in the forest made it possible for
forest workers to use written training protocols that could be widely
applied. A relatively unskilled and inexperienced labor crew could
adequately carry out its tasks by following a few standard rules in
the new forest environment. Harvesting logs of relatively uniform
width and length not only made it possible to forecast yields
successfully but also to market homogeneous product units to logging
contractors and timber merchants.\footnote{The recent cloning of tree stock to produce genetically uniform members of a given species is a yet more dramatic step in the direction of uniformity and control.} Commercial logic and
bureaucratic logic were, in this instance, synonymous; it was a system
that promised to maximize the return of a single commodity over the
long haul and at the same time lent itself to a centralized scheme of
management.


The new legible forest was also easier to manipulate
experimentally. Now that the more complex old-growth forest had been
replaced by a forest in which many variables were held constant, it
was a far simpler matter to examine the effects of such variables as
fertilizer applications, rainfall, and weeding, on same-age,
single-species stands. It was the closest thing to a forest laboratory
one could imagine at the time.\footnote{One of the innovations such experimentation gave rise to was “financial rotation.” Close attention to annual rates of growth over the life of a pure stand and the surer knowledge about timber yields enabled foresters to calculate precisely the point at which the added value of another year of growth was exceeded by the added value (minus the amortized cost of earlier felling and replanting) of new growth. The precision was, of course, predicated on the comparisons made possible by the assumption of homogeneous units of timber and market prices.} The very simplicity of the forest
made it possible, for the first time, to assess novel regimens of
forest management under nearly experimental conditions.


Although the geometric, uniform forest was intended to facilitate
management and extraction, it quickly became a powerful aesthetic as
well. The visual sign of the well-managed forest, in Germany and in the
many settings where German scientific forestry took hold, came to be the
regularity and neatness of its appearance. Forests might be inspected in
much the same way as a commanding officer might review his troops on
parade, and woe to the forest guard whose “beat” was not sufficiently
trim or “dressed.” This aboveground order required that underbrush be
removed and that fallen trees and branches be gathered and hauled off.
Unauthorized disturbances-whether by fire or by local populations-were
seen as implicit threats to management routines. The more uniform the
forest, the greater the possibilities for centralized management; the
routines that could be applied minimized the need for the discretion
necessary in the management of diverse old-growth forests.


The controlled environment of the redesigned, scientific forest
promised many striking advantages.\footnote{The term “redesigned” is adopted from Chris Maser’s valuable book, \emph{The Redesigned Forest} (San Pedro: R. and E. Miles, 1988). Much of his argument can be inferred from the oppositions he emphasizes in the headings of the early sections: “Nature designed a forest as an experiment in unpredictability\dots{} We are trying to design a regulated forest”; “Nature designed a forest of long-term trends\dots{} We are trying to design a forest of short-term absolutes”; “Nature designed a forest with diversity\dots{} We are designing a forest with simplistic uniformity”; “Nature designed a forest with interrelated processes\dots{} We are trying to design a forest based on isolated products” (p. vii).} It could be synoptically
surveyed by the chief forester; it could be more easily supervised and
harvested according to centralized, long-range plans; it provided a
steady, uniform commodity, thereby eliminating one major source of
revenue fluctuation; and it created a legible natural terrain that
facilitated manipulation and experimentation.


This utopian dream of scientific forestry was, of course, only the
\emph{immanent} logic of its techniques. It was not and could not ever be
realized in practice. Both nature and the human factor intervened. The
existing topography of the landscape and the vagaries of fire, storms,
blights, climatic changes, insect populations, and disease conspired
to thwart foresters and to shape the actual forest. Also, given the
insurmountable difficulties of policing large forests, people living
nearby typically continued to graze animals, poach firewood and
kindling, make charcoal, and use the forest in other ways that
prevented the foresters’ management plan from being fully
realized.\footnote{See, for example, Honoré de Balzac’s \emph{Les paysans} (Paris: Pleiades, 1949); E. P. Thompson, \emph{Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act} (New York: Pantheon, 1975); Douglas Hay, “Poaching on Cannock Chase,” in Douglas Hay et al., eds., \emph{Albion’s Fatal Tree} (New York: Pantheon, 1975); and Steven Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South,” \emph{Radical History Review} 26 (1982): 37-64. For an apposite German case, see one of Karl Marx’s first published articles linking the theft of wood to the business cycle and unemployment in the Rhineland: reported in Peter Linebaugh, “Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working-Class Composition: A Contribution to the Current Debate,” \emph{Crime and Social Justice}, Fall-Winter 1976, pp. 5-16.} Although, like all utopian schemes, it fell well short
of attaining its goal, the critical fact is that it did partly succeed
in stamping the actual forest with the imprint of its designs.


The principles of scientific forestry were applied as rigorously as
was practicable to most large German forests throughout much of the
nineteenth century. The Norway spruce, known for its hardiness, rapid
growth, and valuable wood, became the bread-and-butter tree of
commercial forestry. Originally, the Norway spruce was seen as a
restoration crop that might revive overexploited mixed forests, but
the commercial profits from the first rotation were so stunning that
there was little effort to return to mixed forests. The monocropped
forest was a disaster for peasants who were now deprived of all the
grazing, food, raw materials, and medicines that the earlier forest
ecology had afforded. Diverse old-growth forests, about three-fourths
of which were broadleaf (deciduous) species, were replaced by largely
coniferous forests in which Norway spruce or Scotch pine were the
dominant or often only species.


In the short run, this experiment in the radical simplification of the
forest to a single commodity was a resounding success. It was a rather
long short run, in the sense that a single crop rotation of trees
might take eighty years to mature. The productivity of the new forests
reversed the decline in the domestic wood supply, provided more
uniform stands and more usable wood fiber, raised the economic return
of forest land, and appreciably shortened rotation times (the time it
took to harvest a stand and plant another).\footnote{The results of three rotations might require as much as two hundred years, or the working lives of perhaps six foresters, to observe. Compare this with, say, the results of three rotations of maize, which would require only three years. For most contemporary forests, the results of the third rotation are not yet in. In forest experimentation, the experimental period easily stretches well beyond a single lifetime. See Maser, \emph{The Redesigned Forest}.} Like row crops in a
field, the new softwood forests were prodigious producers of a single
commodity. Little wonder that the German model of intensive commercial
forestry became standard throughout the world.\footnote{There was within Germany a debate between the utilitarian outlook I have described and an anti-utilitarian, anti-Manchester School stream of thought represented by, among others, Karl Geyer, an exponent of the \emph{Mischwald} and natural regeneration. But the short-run success of the utilitarians ensured that their view became the hegemonic “export model” of German scientific forestry. I am grateful to Arvid Nelson for this information and for sharing his deep knowledge about the history of forest policy in Germany. In 1868, Deitrich Brandes, the German chief of colonial India’s forests, proposed a plan that would have encouraged community forests as well as state production forests, but the first part of his plan was vetoed by British administrators. The interests of state officials, it appears, tended to select out of the mixed heritage of German forestry those elements most favorable to legibility, management, and revenue.} Gifford Pinchot,
the second chief forester of the United States, was trained at the
French forestry school at Nancy, which followed a German-style
curriculum, as did most U.S. and European forestry schools.\footnote{Pinchot toured Prussian and Swiss forests after his studies in Nancy. Carl Schenk, the founder of the first forestry school in the United States, was a German immigrant trained in German universities, and Bernhard Fernow, the chief of the federal government’s forestry division from 1886 to 1898 (before Pinchot), was a graduate of the Prussian Forest Academy at Meunden. I am grateful to Carl Jacoby for this information.} The
first forester hired by the British to assess and manage the great
forest resources of India and Burma was Dietrich Brandes, a
German.\footnote{For a detailed and analytically searching account of colonial forest policy in India, see Sivaramakrishnan, “Forests, Politics, and Governance in Bengal.” In chap. 6 he shows how three principles of scientific forestry-that pure stands of commercial timber did better than mixed stands, that fire was a destructive factor to be avoided, and that grazing or firewood collecting could only threaten the forest management program-were overthrown by accumulating evidence in India.} By the end of the nineteenth century, German forestry
science was hegemonic.


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.


In the German case, the negative biological and ultimately commercial
consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only
after the \emph{second} rotation of conifers had been planted. “It took
about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up
clearly. Many of the pure stands grew excellently in the first
generation but already showed an amazing retrogression in the second
generation. The reason for this is a very complex one and only a
simplified explanation can be given\dots{} Then the whole nutrient cycle
got out of order and eventually was nearly stopped\dots{} Anyway, the
drop of one or two site classes [used for grading the quality of
timber] during two or three generations of pure spruce is a well known
and frequently observed fact. This represents a production loss of 20
to 30 percent.”\footnote{Richard Plochmann, \emph{Forestry in the Federal Republic of Germany}, Hill Family Foundation Series (Corvallis: Oregon State University School of Forestry, 1968), pp. 24-25; quoted in Maser, \emph{The Redesigned Forest}, pp. 197-98. The elided sentences, for those interested in the specific interactions, continue: “A spruce stand may serve as an example. Our spruce roots are normally very shallow. Planted on former hardwood soil, the spruce roots could follow the deep root channels of the former hardwoods in the first generation. But in the second gen oration the root systems turned shallow on account of progressive soil compaction. As a result, the available nutrient supply for the trees became smaller. The spruce stand could profit from the mild humus accumulated in the first generation by the hardwoods, but it was not able to produce a mild humus itself. Spruce litter rots much more slowly than broadleaf litter and is much more difficult for the fauna and flora of the upper soil layer to decompose. Therefore a raw humus developed in most cases. Its humic acids started to leach the soil under our humid climate and impoverished the soil fauna and flora. This caused an even poorer decomposition and a faster development of raw humus.” Plochmann points out that the process in pine plantations is roughly similar. I have confirmed this pattern with David Smith of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, author of \emph{The Practice of Silviculture}, an important reference on modern forestry techniques. For a similar account of how the techniques of scientific forestry, particularly its aversion to fire and its preference for monoculture, negatively affected forest health and production, see Nancy Langston, \emph{Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West} (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).}


A new term, \emph{Waldsterben} (forest death), entered the German
vocabulary to describe the worst cases. 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. Most of these consequences can be traced to the
radical simplicity of the scientific forest.


Only an elaborate treatise in ecology could do justice to the subject
of what went wrong, but mentioning a few of the major effects of
simplification will illustrate how vital many of the factors bracketed
by scientific forestry turned out to be. German forestry’s attention
to formal order and ease of access for management and extraction led
to the clearing of underbrush, deadfalls, and snags (standing dead
trees), greatly reducing the diversity of insect, mammal, and bird
populations so essential to soil-building processes.\footnote{“When snags are removed from short-rotation stands, 10\% of the wildlife species (excluding birds) will be eliminated; 29\% of the wildlife species will be eliminated when both snags and fallen trees (logs) are removed from intensively managed young growth forests. As pieces are continually removed from the forest with the notion of the simplistic uniformity that is termed ‘intensive timber management,’ we come closer to the ultimate simplistic view of modern forestry-the plantation or ‘Christmas tree farm’” (Maser, \emph{The Redesigned Forest}, p. 19).} The absence
of litter and woody biomass on the new forest floor is now seen as a
major factor leading to thinner and less nutritious soils.\footnote{The key step in this process seems to be the below-ground, symbiotic fungusroot structures (mycorrhizal association) studied closely by Sir Albert Howard. See chapter 7.}
Same-age, same-species forests not only created a far less diverse
habitat but were also more vulnerable to massive storm-felling. The
very uniformity of species and age among, say, Norway spruce also
provided a favorable habitat to all the “pests” which were specialized
to that species. Populations of these pests built up to epidemic
proportions, inflicting losses in yields and large outlays for
fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, or rodenticides.\footnote{Some of the pests in question included the “pine looper moth, pine beauty, pine moth, Nun moth, saw flies, bark beetles, pine needle cast fungus, pine bluster rust, honey fungus, red rot” (Maser, \emph{The Redesigned Forest}, p. 78).} Apparently
the first rotation of Norway spruce had grown exceptionally well in
large part because it was living off (or mining) the long-accumulated
soil capital of the diverse old-growth forest that it had
replaced. Once that capital was depleted, the steep decline in growth
rates began.


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.” In place of hollow trees that had been home
to woodpeckers, owls, and other tree-nesting birds, the foresters
provided specially designed boxes. Ant colonies were artificially
raised and implanted in the forest, their nests tended by local
schoolchildren.  Several species of spiders, which had disappeared
from the monocropped forest, were reintroduced.\footnote{For a brief description of these practices, see Rachel Carson, \emph{Silent Spring} (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962, 1987). Carson praised these advances because they seemed to herald the use of biological controls rather than pesticides.} What is striking
about these endeavors is that they are attempts to work around an
impoverished habitat still planted with a single species of conifers
for production purposes.\footnote{The untoward consequences of engineering a forest in order to maximize the production of a single commodity is by now a worldwide experience. After World War II, Japan adopted a policy of replacing many of the forests that had been plundered for fuelwood and building materials with a single species: the Japanese cedar, selected for its rapid growth and commercial value. Now it is clear that the miles of tall, slender, uniform cedars have caused heavy soil erosion and landslides, have reduced the water table, and are easily felled by storms. They allow little sunlight to filter through to the forest floor and provide little protection or food for fauna. For urban Japanese, the chief short-term inconvenience of the cedars is their seasonal massive release of pollen, which triggers severe allergic responses. But allergies are just the most manifest symptom of the deeper consequences of such radical simplification. See James Sterngold, “Japan’s Cedar Forests Are a Man-Made Disaster,” \emph{New York Times}, January 17, 1995, pp. C1, C10.} In this case, “restoration forestry”
attempted with mixed results to create a \emph{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.
The instrument, the knife, that carved out the new, rudimentary forest
was the razorsharp interest in the production of a single commodity.
Everything that interfered with the efficient production of the key
commodity was implacably eliminated. Everything that seemed unrelated to
efficient production was ignored. Having come to see the forest as a
commodity, scientific forestry set about refashioning it as a commodity
machine.\footnote{Maser, \emph{The Redesigned Forest}, pp. 54-55. The “commodity” in question in a great many contemporary forests is not wood per se but pulp for making paper. This has led, in turn, to the genetic engineering of species and cloned stock that will produce the ideal quality and quantity of pulp.} Utilitarian simplification in the forest was an effective way
of maximizing wood production in the short and intermediate term.
Ultimately, however, its emphasis on yield and paper profits, its
relatively short time horizon, and, above all, the vast array of
consequences it had resolutely bracketed came back to haunt it.\footnote{In the context of welfare economics, the practice of scientific forestry was able to externalize a large number of costs to the community at large which did not appear on its own balance sheet: e.g., soil depletion, loss of water retention capacity and water quality, reduction of game, and loss of biodiversity.}


Even in the realm of greatest interest—namely, the production of wood
fiber—the consequences of not seeing the forest for the trees sooner
or later became glaring. Many were directly traceable to the basic
simplification imposed in the interest of ease of management and
economic return: monoculture. Monocultures are, as a rule, more
fragile and hence more vulnerable to the stress of disease and weather
than polycultures are. As Richard Plochmann expresses it, “One further
drawback, which is typical of all pure plantations, is that the
ecology of the natural plant associations became unbalanced. Outside
of the natural habitat, and when planted in pure stands, the physical
condition of the single tree weakens and resistance against enemies
decreases.”\footnote{Plochmann, \emph{Forestry in the Federal Republic of Germany}, p. 25. There are, of course, naturally occurring pure stands of timber, usually in constrained ecological conditions, including, diagnostically, those found on severely degraded sites. For a range of views on this issue, see Matthew J. Kelty, Bruce C. Larson, and Chadwick D. Oliver, eds., \emph{The Ecology and Silviculture of Mixed-Species Forests: A Festschrift for David W. Smith} (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishing, 1992).} Any unmanaged forest may experience stress from
storms, disease, drought, fragile soil, or severe cold. A diverse,
complex forest, however, with its many species of trees, its full
complement of birds, insects, and mammals, is far more resilient—far
more able to withstand and recover from such injuries—than pure
stands. Its very diversity and complexity help to inoculate it against
devastation: a windstorm that fells large, old trees of one species
will typically spare large trees of other species as well as small
trees of the same species; a blight or insect attack that threatens,
say, oaks may leave lindens and hornbeams unscathed. Just as a
merchant who, not knowing what conditions her ships will face at sea,
sends out scores of vessels with different designs, weights, sails,
and navigational aids stands a better chance of having much of her
fleet make it to port, while a merchant who stakes everything on a
single ship design and size runs a higher risk of losing everything,
forest biodiversity acts like an insurance policy. Like the enterprise
run by the second merchant, the simplified forest is a more vulnerable
system, especially over the long haul, as its effects on soil, water,
and “pest” populations become manifest. Such dangers can only partly
be checked by the use of artificial fertilizers, insecticides, and
fungicides. Given the fragility of the simplified production forest,
the massive outside intervention that was required to establish it—we
might call it the administrators’ forest—is increasingly necessary in
order to sustain it as well.\footnote{Nancy Langston has a more global assessment: “Everyone who has ever tried to fix the forests has ended up making them worse” (\emph{Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares}, p. 2).}

\section{Social Facts, Raw and Cooked}



\begin{quote}


Society must be remade before it can be the object of quantification.
Categories of people and things must be defined, measures must be
interchangeable; land and commodities must be conceived as represented
by an equivalent in money. There is much of what Weber called
rationalization in this, and also a good deal of centralization.



\end{quote}


— Theodore M. Porter, \emph{“Objectivity as Standardization”}


The administrators’ forest cannot be the naturalists’ forest. Even if
the ecological interactions at play in the forest were known, they would
constitute a reality so complex and variegated as to defy easy shorthand
description. The intellectual filter necessary to reduce the complexity
to manageable dimensions was provided by the state’s interest in
commercial timber and revenue.


If the natural world, however shaped by human use, is too unwieldy in
its “raw” form for administrative manipulation, so too are the actual
social patterns of human interaction with nature bureaucratically
indigestible in their raw form. No administrative system is capable of
representing \emph{any} existing social community except through a heroic
and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification. It
is not simply a question of capacity, although, like a forest, a human
community is surely far too complicated and variable to easily yield
its secrets to bureaucratic formulae. It is also a question of
purpose.  State agents have no interest—nor should they—in describing
an entire social reality, any more than the scientific forester has an
interest in describing the ecology of a forest in detail. Their
abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small number of
objectives, and until the nineteenth century the most prominent of
these were typically taxation, political control, and
conscription. They needed only the techniques and understanding that
were adequate to these tasks. As we shall see, here are some
instructive parallels between the development of modern “fiscal
forestry” and modern forms of taxable property in land. Premodern
states were no less concerned with tax receipts than are modern
states. But, as with premodern state forestry, the taxation techniques
and reach of the premodern state left much to be desired.


Absolutist France in the seventeenth century is a case in point.\footnote{The brief description that follows is drawn largely from James B. Collins, \emph{Fiscal Limits of Absolutism: Direct Taxation in Early Seventeenth-Century France} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).}
Indirect taxes—excise levies on salt and tobacco, tolls, license fees,
and the sale of offices and titles—were favored forms of taxation;
they were easy to administer and required little or nothing in the way
of information about landholding and income. The tax-exempt status of
the nobility and clergy meant that a good deal of the landed property
was not taxed at all, transferring much of the burden to wealthy
commoner farmers and the peasantry. Common land, although it was a
vitally important subsistence resource for the rural poor, yielded no
revenue either. In the eighteenth century, the physiocrats would
condemn all common property on two presumptive grounds: it was
inefficiently exploited, and it was fiscally barren.\footnote{P. M. Jones, \emph{The Peasantry in the French Revolution} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 17.}


What must strike any observer of absolutist taxation is how wildly
variable and unsystematic it was. James Collins has found that the
main direct land tax, the \emph{taille}, was frequently not paid at all and
that no community paid more than one-third of what they were
assessed.\footnote{Collins, \emph{Fiscal Limits of Absolutism}, pp. 201, 204. It was precisely this capacity for evading taxes that gave the fiscal regime a degree of unintended (from the top, at least) flexibility and helped states to avoid even more rebellion in the troubled seventeenth century.} The result was that the state routinely relied on
exceptional measures to overcome shortfalls in revenue or to pay for
new expenses, particularly military campaigns. The crown exacted
“forced loans” (\emph{rentes, droits aliénés}) in return for annuities that
it might or might not honor; it sold offices and titles (\emph{vénalites
d’offices}); it levied exceptional hearth taxes (\emph{fouages
extraordinaires}); and, worst of all, it billeted troops directly in
communities, often ruining the towns in the process.\footnote{J. L. Heilbron notes that in 1791 an English colonel in the militia obliged the Scottish clergy to send him inventories of their population by threatening to quarter troops in their parish (introduction to Tore Frangsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider, eds., \emph{The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century} [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991], p. 13).}


The billeting of troops, a common form of fiscal punishment, is to
modern forms of systematic taxation as the drawing and quartering of
would-be regicides (so strikingly described by Michel Foucault at the
beginning of \emph{Discipline and Punish}) is to modern forms of systematic
incarceration of criminals. Not that there was a great deal of choice
involved. The state simply lacked both the information and the
administrative grid that would have allowed it to exact from its
subjects a reliable revenue that was more closely tied to their actual
capacity to pay. As with forest revenue, there was no alternative to
rough-and-ready calculations and their corresponding fluctuations in
yields. Fiscally, the premodern state was, to use Charles Lindblom’s
felicitous phrase, “all thumbs and no fingers”; it was incapable of
fine tuning.


Here is where the rough analogy between forest management and taxation
begins to break down. In the absence of reliable information about
sustainable timber yield, the state might either inadvertently
overexploit its resources and threaten future supply or else fail to
realize the level of proceeds the forest might sustain.\footnote{This assumes that the crown wanted to maximize its proceeds in the long run. It was and is common, of course, for regimes in political or military crises to mortgage their futures by squeezing as much as possible from their forests or their subjects. See, in this context, the superb analytical synthesis of Charles Tilly, \emph{Coercion, Capital, and European States}, A.D. 990-1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), who stresses the influence of preparation for war and war-making in state formation and describes the transition from “tributary” states to states that extract directly from citizens.} The trees
themselves, however, were not political actors, whereas the taxable
subjects of the crown most certainly were. They signaled their
dissatisfaction by flight, by various forms of quiet resistance and
evasion, and, in extremis, by outright revolt. A reliable format for
taxation of subjects thus depended not just on discovering what their
economic conditions were but also on trying to judge what exactions
they would vigorously resist.


How were the agents of the state to begin measuring and codifying,
throughout each region of an entire kingdom, its population, their
landholdings, their harvests, their wealth, the volume of commerce, and
so on? The obstacles in the path of even the most rudimentary knowledge
of these matters were enormous. The struggle to establish uniform
weights and measures and to carry out a cadastral mapping of
landholdings can serve as diagnostic examples. Each required a large,
costly, long-term campaign against determined resistance. Resistance
came not only from the general population but also from local
power-holders; they were frequently able to take advantage of the
administrative incoherence produced by differing interests and missions
within the ranks of officialdom. But in spite of the ebbs and flows of
the various campaigns and their national peculiarities, a pattern of
adopting uniform measurements and charting cadastral maps ultimately
prevailed.


Each undertaking also exemplified a pattern of relations between local
knowledge and practices on one hand and state administrative routines
on the other, a pattern that will find echoes throughout this book. In
each case, local practices of measurement and landholding were
“illegible” to the state in their raw form. They exhibited a diversity
and intricacy that reflected a great variety of purely local, not
state, interests.  That is to say, they could not be assimilated into
an administrative grid without being either transformed or reduced to
a convenient, if partly fictional, shorthand. The logic behind the
required shorthand was provided, as in scientific forestry, by the
pressing material interests of rulers: fiscal receipts, military
manpower, and state security. In turn, this shorthand functioned, as
did Beckmann’s Normalbaume, as not just a description, however
inadequate. Backed by state power through records, courts, and
ultimately coercion, these state fictions transformed the reality they
presumed to observe, although never so thoroughly as to precisely fit
the grid.

\section{Forging the Tools of Legibility: Popular Measures, State Measures}


Nonstate forms of measurement grew from the logic of local practice. As
such, they shared some generic features despite their bewildering
variety-features that made them an impediment to administrative
uniformity. Thanks to the synthesis of the medievalist Witold Kula, the
reasoning that animated local practices of measurement may be set out
fairly succinctly.\footnote{Witold Kula, \emph{Measures and Men}, trans. R. Szreter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).}


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.  Given that the size of a cart or basket might vary from place
to place and that a stone’s throw might not be precisely uniform from
person to person, these units of measurement varied geographically and
temporally.  Even measures that were apparently fixed might be
deceptive. The \emph{pinte} in eighteenth-century Paris, for example, was
equivalent to .93 liters, whereas in Seine-en-Montagne it was 1.99
liters and in Precy-sous-Thil, an astounding 3.33 liters. The \emph{aune},
a measure of length used for cloth, varied depending on the material
(the unit for silk, for instance, was smaller than that for linen),
and across France there were at least seventeen different aunes.\footnote{J. L. Heilbron, “The Measure of Enlightenment,” in Tore Frangsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider, eds., \emph{The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century} [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991], pp. 207-8.}


Local measures were also relational or “commensurable.”\footnote{For an illuminating discussion along these lines, see Arjun Appadurai, “Measurement Discourse in Rural Maharastra,” in Appadurai et al., \emph{Agriculture, Language, and Knowledge in South Asia: Perspectives from History and Anthropology} (forthcoming).} Virtually
any request for a judgment of measure allows a range of responses
depending on the context of the request. In the part of Malaysia with
which I am most familiar, if one were to ask “How far is it to the
next village?” a likely response would be “Three rice-cookings.” The
answer assumes that the questioner is interested in how much time it
will take to get there, not how many miles away it is. In varied
terrain, of course, distance in miles is an utterly unreliable guide
to travel time, especially when the traveler is on foot or riding a
bicycle. The answer also expresses time not in minutes—until recently,
wristwatches were rare—but in units that are locally
meaningful. Everyone knows how long it takes to cook the local
rice. 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.” The
reply refers back to a standard that everyone is expected to
know. Such measurement practices are irreducibly local, inasmuch as
regional differences in, say, the type of rice eaten or the preferred
way of cooking chicken will give different results.


Many local units of measurement are tied practically to particular
activities. Marathi peasants, as Arjun Appadurai notes, express the
desired distance between the onion sets they plant in terms of
handbreadths. When one is moving along a field row, the hand is, well,
the most handy gauge. In similar fashion, a common measure for twine
or rope is the distance between the thumb and elbow because this
corresponds with how it is wrapped and stored. As with setting onions,
the process of measuring is embedded in the activity itself and
requires no separate operation. Such measurements, moreover, are often
approximate; they are only as exact as the task at hand requires.\footnote{Ibid., p. 14.}
Rainfall may be said to be abundant or inadequate if the context of
the query implies an interest in a particular crop. And a reply in
terms of inches of rainfall, however accurate, would also fail to
convey the desired information; it ignores such vital matters as the
timing of the rain. For many purposes, an apparently vague measurement
may communicate more valuable information than a statistically exact
figure. The cultivator who reports that his rice yield from a plot is
anywhere between four and seven baskets is conveying more accurate
information, when the focus of attention is on the variability of the
yield, than if he reported a ten-year statistical average of 5.6
baskets.


There is, then, no single, all-purpose, correct answer to a question
implying measurement unless we specify the relevant local concerns
that give rise to the question. Particular customs of measurement are
thus situationally, temporally, and geographically bound.


Nowhere is the particularity of customary measurement more evident
than with cultivated land. Modern abstract measures of land by surface
area—so many hectares or acres—are singularly uninformative figures to
a family that proposes to make its living from these acres. Telling a
farmer only that he is leasing twenty acres of land is about as
helpful as telling a scholar that he has bought six kilograms of
books.  Customary measures of land have therefore taken a variety of
forms corresponding to those aspects of the land that are of greatest
practical interest. Where land was abundant and manpower or draftpower
scarce, the most meaningful gauge of land was often the number of days
required to plow or to weed it. A plot of land in nineteenthcentury
France, for example, would be described as representing so many
\emph{morgen} or \emph{journals} (days of work) and as requiring a specific kind
of work (\emph{homée, bechée, fauchée}). How many morgen were represented
by a field of, say, ten acres could vary greatly; if the land were
rocky and steeply pitched, it might require twice as much labor to
work than if it were rich bottomland. The morgen would also differ
from place to place depending on the strength of local draftpower and
the crops sown, and it would differ from time to time as technology
(plow tips, yokes, harnesses) affected the work a man could accomplish
in a day.


Land might also be evaluated according to the amount of seed required
to sow it. If the soil were very good, a field would be densely sown,
whereas poor land would be more lightly seeded. The amount of seed
sown to a field is in fact a relatively good proxy for average yield,
as the sowing is done in anticipation of average growing conditions,
while the actual seasonal yield would be more variable. Given a
particular crop regimen, the amount of seed sown would indicate
roughly how productive a field had been, although it would reveal
little about how arduous the land was to cultivate or how variable the
harvests were. But the average yield from a plot of land is itself a
rather abstract figure. What most farmers near the subsistence margin
want to know above all is whether a particular farm will meet their
basic needs reliably. Thus small farms in Ireland were described as a
“farm of one cow” or a “farm of two cows” to indicate their grazing
capacity to those who lived largely by milk products and potatoes. The
physical area a farm might comprise was of little interest compared to
whether it would feed a particular family.\footnote{The same motive was at work in the folk categories of stratification used by Javanese villagers: the \emph{Kekurangans} (those-who-have-less-than-enough) and the \emph{Kecukupans} (those-who-have-enough). See Clifford Geertz, \emph{Agricultural Involution} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963).}


To grasp the prodigious variety of customary ways of measuring land,
we would have to imagine literally scores of “maps” constructed along
very different lines than mere surface area. I have in mind the sorts
of maps devised to capture our attention with a kind of fun-house
effect in which, say, the size of a country is made proportional to
its population rather than its geographical size, with China and India
looming menacingly over Russia, Brazil, and the United States, while
Libya, Australia, and Greenland virtually disappear. These types of
customary maps (for there would be a great many) would construct the
landscape according to units of work and yield, type of soil,
accessibility, and ability to provide subsistence, none of which would
necessarily accord with surface area. The measurements are decidedly
\emph{local, interested, contextual,} and \emph{historically specific}. What
meets the subsistence needs of one family may not meet the subsistence
needs of another. Factors such as local crop regimens, labor supply,
agricultural technology, and weather ensure that the standards of
evaluation vary from place to place and over time. Directly
apprehended by the state, so many maps would represent a hopelessly
bewildering welter of local standards. They definitely would not lend
themselves to aggregation into a single statistical series that would
allow state officials to make meaningful comparisons.

\subsection{The Politics of Measurement}


Thus far, this account of local measurement practices risks giving the
impression that, although local conceptions of distance, area, volume,
and so on were different from and more varied than the unitary
abstract standards a state might favor, they were nevertheless aiming
at objective accuracy. That impression would be false. Every act of
measurement was an act marked by the play of power relations. To
understand measurement practices in early modern Europe, as Kula
demonstrates, one must relate them to the contending interests of the
major estates: aristocrats, clergy, merchants, artisans, and serfs.


A good part of the politics of measurement sprang from what a
contemporary economist might call the “stickiness” of feudal rents.
Noble and clerical claimants often found it difficult to increase
feudal dues directly; the levels set for various charges were the
result of long struggle, and even a small increase above the customary
level was viewed as a threatening breach of tradition.\footnote{What was seen as customary might not have had a very long pedigree. It was always in the interests of at least one party, who feared a disadvantageous renegotiation, to treat the existing arrangement as fixed and sacrosanct.} Adjusting
the measure, however, represented a roundabout way of achieving the
same end. The local lord might, for example, lend grain to peasants in
smaller baskets and insist on repayment in larger baskets. He might
surreptitiously or even boldly enlarge the size of the grain sacks
accepted for milling (a monopoly of the domain lord) and reduce the
size of the sacks used for measuring out flour; he might also collect
feudal dues in larger baskets and pay wages in kind in smaller
baskets. While the formal custom governing feudal dues and wages would
thus remain intact (requiring, for example, the same number of sacks
of wheat from the harvest of a given holding), the actual transaction
might increasingly favor the lord.\footnote{Occasionally, the balance of power might swing in the other direction. See, in this connection, the evidence for a long decline in tithe payments in France: Emmanuel LeRoi Ladurie and Joseph Gay, \emph{Tithe and Agrarian History from the Fourteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century: An Essay in Comparative History}, trans. Susan Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 27.} The results of such fiddling
were far from trivial. Kula estimates that the size of the bushel
(\emph{boisseau}) used to collect the main feudal rent (taille) increased
by one-third between 1674 and 1716 as part of what was called the
\emph{réaction féodale}.\footnote{Kula, \emph{Measures and Men}, p. 150. In Lower Burma in the 1920s and ‘30s, the landlord’s paddy basket for receiving tenants’ rent in kind was nicknamed “the cartbreaker” (James C. Scott, \emph{The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia} [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976], p. 71).}


Even when the unit of measurement-say, the bushel-was apparently
agreed upon by all, the fun had just begun. 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.\footnote{The famous iron \emph{toise} of Paris, for example, was set in one of the walls of the Grand Chatelet; see Ken Alder, “A Revolution Made to Measure: The Political Economy of the Metric System in France,” in Norton W. Wise, ed., \emph{Values of Precision} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 44.} Nor did it end
there. How the grain was to be poured (from shoulder height, which
packed it somewhat, or from waist height?), how damp it could be,
whether the container could be shaken down, and, finally, if and how
it was to be leveled off when full were subjects of long and bitter
controversy. Some arrangements called for the grain to be heaped, some
for a “halfheap,” and still others for it to be leveled or “striked”
(\emph{ras}). These were not trivial matters. A feudal lord could increase
his rents by 25 percent by insisting on receiving wheat and rye in
heaped bushels.\footnote{Marsenne, in the seventeenth-century spirit of exactitude, calculated that a striked boisseau held 172,000 grains of wheat, whereas a heaped measure held 220,160 (Kula, \emph{Measures and Men}, p. 172). The advantage with oats, a larger grain, is less.} If, by custom, the bushel of grain was to be
striked, then a further micropolitics erupted over the strickle. Was
it to be round, thereby packing in grain as it was rolled across the
rim, or was it to be sharp-edged? Who would apply the strickle? Who
could be trusted to keep it?


A comparable micropolitics, as one might expect, swirled around the
unit of land measurement. A common measure of length, the ell, was
used to mark off the area to be plowed or weeded as a part of feudal
labor dues.  Once again, the lengths and widths in ells were “sticky,”
having been established through long struggle. It was tempting for a
lord or overseer to try raising labor dues indirectly by increasing
the length of the ell. If the attempt were successful, the formal
rules of corvee labor would not be violated, but the amount of work
extracted would increase. Perhaps the stickiest of all measures before
the nineteenth century was the price of bread. As the most vital
subsistence good of premodern times, it served as a kind of
cost-of-living index, and its cost was the subject of deeply held
popular customs about its relationship to the typical urban wage. Kula
shows in remarkable detail how bakers, afraid to provoke a riot by
directly violating the “just price,” managed nevertheless to
manipulate the size and weight of the loaf to compensate to some
degree for changes in the price of wheat and rye flour.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 73-74. As with the other challenges to customary measures, this one provoked municipal authorities and the populace to insist on weighing and measuring, in this case bakers’ loaves, to prevent such practices.}

\subsection{Statecraft and the Hieroglyphics of Measurement}


Because local standards of measurement were tied to practical needs,
because they reflected particular cropping patterns and agricultural
technology, because they varied with climate and ecology, because they
were “an attribute of power and an instrument of asserting class
privilege,” and because they were “at the center of bitter class
struggle,” they represented a mind-boggling problem for
statecraft.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 98-99.} Efforts to simplify or standardize measures recur like
a leitmotif throughout French history—their reappearance a sure sign
of previous failure. More modest attempts to simply codify local
practices and create conversion tables were quickly overtaken and
rendered obsolete by changes on the ground. The king’s ministers were
confronted, in effect, with a patchwork of local measurement codes,
each of which had to be cracked. It was as if each district spoke its
own dialect, one that was unintelligible to outsiders and at the same
time liable to change without notice. Either the state risked making
large and potentially damaging miscalculations about local conditions,
or it relied heavily on the advice of local trackers—the nobles and
clergy in the Crown’s confidence—who, in turn, were not slow to take
full advantage of their power.


The illegibility of local measurement practices was more than an
administrative headache for the monarchy. It compromised the most
vital and sensitive aspects of state security. Food supply was the
Achilles heel of the early modern state; short of religious war,
nothing so menaced the state as food shortages and the resulting
social upheavals.  Without comparable units of measurement, it was
difficult if not impossible to monitor markets, to compare regional
prices for basic commodities, or to regulate food supplies
effectively.\footnote{Ibid., p. 173.} Obliged to grope its way on the basis of sketchy
information, rumor, and self-interested local reports, the state often
responded belatedly and inappropriately. Equity in taxation, another
sensitive political issue, was beyond the reach of a state that found
it difficult to know the basic comparative facts about harvests and
prices. A vigorous effort to collect taxes, to requisition for military
garrisons, to relieve urban shortages, or any number of other
measures might, given the crudeness of state intelligence, actually
provoke a political crisis. Even when it did not jeopardize state
security, the Babel of measurement produced gross inefficiencies and a
pattern of either undershooting or overshooting fiscal targets.\footnote{It was, in fact, the active evasion of regions that were fiscally hard-pressed that provided the “drag” or gyroscope that often prevented an ill-considered tax claim from provoking an actual resistance.} No
effective central monitoring or controlled comparisons were possible
without standard, fixed units of measurement.

\subsection{Simplification and Standardization of Measurement}



\begin{quote}


The conquerors of our days, peoples or princes, want their empire to
possess a unified surface over which the superb eye of power can wander
without encountering any inequality which hurts or limits its view. The
same code of law, the same measures, the same rules, and if we could
gradually get there, the same language; that is what is proclaimed as
the perfection of the social organization\dots{} The great slogan of the
day is \emph{uniformity}.



\end{quote}


— Benjamin Constant, \emph{De l’esprit de conquete}


If scientific forestry’s project of creating a simplified and legible
forest encountered opposition from villagers whose usage rights were
being challenged, the political opposition to standard and legible
units of measurement was even more refractory. The power to establish
and impose local measures was an important feudal prerogative with
material consequences which the aristocracy and clergy would not
willingly surrender. Testimony to their capacity to thwart
standardization is evident in the long series of abortive initiatives
by absolutist rulers who tried to insist on some degree of
uniformity. The very particularity of local feudal practices and their
impenetrability to would-be centralizers helped to underwrite the
autonomy of local spheres of power.


Three factors, in the end, conspired to make what Kula calls the
“metrical revolution” possible. First, the growth of market exchange
encouraged uniformity in measures. Second, both popular sentiment and
Enlightenment philosophy favored a single standard throughout France.
Finally, the Revolution and especially Napoleonic state building
actually enforced the metric system in France and the empire.


Large-scale commercial exchange and long-distance trade tend to
promote common standards of measurement. For relatively smallscale
trade, grain dealers could transact with several suppliers as long as
they knew the measure each was using. They might actually profit from
their superior grasp of the profusion of units, much as smugglers take
advantage of small differences in taxes and tariffs. Beyond a certain
point, however, much of commerce is composed of long chains of
transactions, often over great distances, between anonymous buyers and
sellers. Such trade is greatly simplified and made legible by standard
weights and measures.  Whereas artisanal products were typically made
by a single producer according to the desires of a particular customer
and carried a price specific to that object, the mass-produced
commodity is made by no one in particular and is intended for any
purchaser at all. In a sense, the virtue of the mass commodity is its
reliable uniformity. In proportion, then, as the volume of commerce
grew and the goods exchanged became increasingly standardized (a ton
of wheat, a dozen plow tips, twenty cart wheels), there was a growing
tendency to accept widely agreed upon 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.\footnote{As Ken Alder points out, the absence of a central authority that could impose standardization does not seem to have impeded the growth of national markets in Britain, Germany, or the United States (“A Revolution Made to Measure,” p. 62). Mobility and economic growth alone seem to produce common standards of exchange. For a more general historical treatment, see Frank J. Swetz, \emph{Capitalism and Arithmetic: The New Math of the Fifteenth Century} (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987).}


The perennial state project of unifying measures throughout the
kingdom received a large degree of popular support in the eighteenth
century, thanks to the réaction féodale. Aiming to maximize the return
on their estates, owners of feudal domains, many of them arrivistes,
achieved their goal in part by manipulating units of measurement. This
sense of victimization was evident in the \emph{cahiers} of grievances
prepared for the meeting of the Estates General just before the
Revolution. The cahiers of the members of the Third Estate
consistently called for equal measures (although this was hardly their
main grievance), whereas the cahiers of the clergy and nobility were
silent, presumably indicating their satisfaction with the status quo
on this issue. The following petition from Brittany is typical of the
way in which an appeal for unitary measures could be assimilated to
devotion to the Crown: “We beg them [the king, his family, and his
chief minister] to join with us in checking the abuses being
perpetrated by tyrants against that class of citizens which is kind
and considerate and which, until this day has been unable to present
its very grievances to the very foot of the throne, and now we call on
the King to mete out justice, and \emph{we express our most sincere desire
for but one king, one law, one weight, and one measure.}”\footnote{Quoted in Kula, \emph{Measures and Men}, pp. 203-4.}


For centralizing elites, the universal meter was to older,
particularistic measurement practices as a national language was to
the existing welter of dialects. Such quaint idioms would be replaced
by a new universal gold standard, just as the central banking of
absolutism had swept away the local currencies of feudalism. The
metric system was at once a means of administrative centralization,
commercial reform, and cultural progress. The academicians of the
revolutionary republic, like the royal academicians before them, saw
the meter as one of the intellectual instruments that would make
France “revenue-rich, militarily potent, and \emph{easily
administered}.”\footnote{Alder, “A Revolution Made to Measure,” p. 48.} Common measures, it was supposed, would spur the
grain trade, make land more productive (by permitting easier
comparisons of price and productivity), and, not incidentally, lay the
groundwork for a national tax code.\footnote{Ibid., p. 54.} But the reformers also had in
mind a genuine cultural revolution. “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.\footnote{Ibid., p. 56. The meter was only one shell in a barrage of measurement reforms. For a time, there was a concerted effort to divide the day into ten hours of one hundred minutes, with each minute containing one hundred seconds, as well as an initiative to create a duodecimal, or base-twelve, system of numbers.} A
rational unit of measurement would promote a rational citizenry.


The simplification of measures, however, depended on that other
revolutionary political simplification of the modern era: the concept
of a uniform, homogeneous citizenship. As long as each estate operated
within a separate legal sphere, as long as different categories of
people were unequal in law, it followed that they might also have
unequal rights with respect to measures.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 122-23.} The idea of equal
citizenship, the abstraction of the “unmarked” citizen, can be traced
to the Enlightenment and is evident in the writings of the
Encyclopedists.\footnote{I believe that the recent impassioned debate in France about whether Muslim schoolgirls should be allowed to wear head scarves in class was about preserving this tradition of the unmarked citizen in secular education.} For the Encyclopedists, the cacophony among
measurements, institutions, inheritance laws, taxation, and market
regulations was the great obstacle to the French becoming a single
people. They envisioned a series of centralizing and rationalizing
reforms that would transform France into a national community where
the same codified laws, measures, customs, and beliefs would
everywhere prevail. It is worth noting that this project promotes the
concept of \emph{national} citizenship—a national French citizen
perambulating the kingdom and encountering exactly the same fair,
equal conditions as the rest of his compatriots. In place of a welter
of incommensurable small communities, familiar to their inhabitants
but mystifying to outsiders, there would rise a single national
society perfectly legible from the center. The proponents of this
vision well understood that what was at stake was not merely
administrative convenience but also the transformation of a people:
“The uniformity of customs, viewpoints, and principles of action will,
inevitably, lead to a greater community of habits and
predispositions.”\footnote{Alder, “A Revolution Made to Measure,” p. 211.} The abstract grid of equal citizenship would
create a new reality: the French citizen.


The homogenization of measures, then, was part of a larger,
emancipatory simplification. 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.\footnote{As Tony Judt has astutely noted, the difference between citizens’ rights as established by revolutionary decrees and natural or individual rights is that the former are in principle contingent on the state and its law and hence revocable by statute, whereas the latter are in principle unabridgeable. See Judt, \emph{Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).} All the previous “natural” distinctions were
now “denaturalized” and nullified, at least in law.\footnote{The revolutionary conception of citizenship in France swept away the legal impediments under which the Jewish community had labored. Wherever French armies penetrated after the Revolution and in the Napoleonic conquests, their arrival was accompanied by the extension of full citizenship to Jews. See Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, eds., \emph{Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).} In an
unprecedented revolutionary context where an entirely new political
system was being created from first principles, it was surely no great
matter to legislate uniform weights and measures. As the revolutionary
decree read: “The centuries old dream of the masses of only one just
measure has come true! The Revolution has given the people the
meter.”\footnote{Gianfranco Poggi, \emph{The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction} (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), p. 78. For all the advance in human rights that equal citizenship carried with it, it is worth recalling that this momentous step also undercut the intermediary structures between the state and the citizen and gave the state, for the first time, direct access to its subjects. Equal citizenship implied not only legal equality and universal male suffrage but also universal conscription, as those mobilized into Napoleon’s armies were shortly to discover. From the heights of the state, the society below increasingly appeared as an endless series of nationally equal \emph{particuliers} with whom it dealt in their capacity as subjects, taxpayers, and potential military draftees.}


Proclaiming the universal meter was far simpler than ensuring that it
became the daily practice of French citizens. The state could insist
on the exclusive use of its units in the courts, in the state school
system, and in such documents as property deeds, legal contracts, and
tax codes. Outside these official spheres, the metric system made its
way only very slowly. In spite of a decree for confiscating \emph{toise}
sticks in shops and replacing them with meter sticks, the populace
continued to use the older system, often marking their meter sticks
with the old measures. Even as late as 1828 the new measures were more
a part of \emph{le pays légal} than of \emph{le pays réel}. As Chateaubriand
remarked, “Whenever you meet a fellow who, instead of talking \emph{arpents},
\emph{toises}, and \emph{pieds}, refers to hectares, meters, and centimeters, rest
assured, the man is a prefect.”\footnote{Quoted in Kula, \emph{Measures and Men}, p. 286.}

\section{Land Tenure: Local Practice and Fiscal Shorthand}


The revenue of the early modern state came mainly from levies on
commerce and land, the major sources of wealth. For commerce, this
implied an array of excise taxes, tolls and market duties, licensing
fees, and tariffs. For landed wealth, this meant somehow attaching every
parcel of taxable property to an individual or an institution
responsible for paying the tax on it. As straightforward as this
procedure seems in the context of the modern state, its achievement was
enormously difficult for at least two reasons. First, the actual
practices of customary land tenure were frequently so varied and
intricate as to defy any one-to-one equation of taxpayer and taxable
property. And second, as was the case with standardizing measurement,
there were social forces whose interests could only be damaged by the
unified and transparent set of property relations desired by the state’s
fiscal agents. In the end, the centralizing state succeeded in imposing
a novel and (from the center) legible property system, which, as had the
work of the scientific foresters, not only radically abridged the
practices that the system described but at the same time transformed
those practices to align more closely with their shorthand, schematic
reading.

\subsection{An Illustration}



\begin{quote}


\emph{Negara mawi tata, desa mawi cara} (The capital has its order, the
village its customs).



\end{quote}


— \emph{Javanese proverb}


A hypothetical case of customary land tenure practices may help
demonstrate how difficult it is to assimilate such practices to the
barebones schema of a modern cadastral map. The patterns I will
describe are an amalgam of practices I have encountered in the
literature of or in the course of fieldwork in Southeast Asia, and
although the case is hypothetical, it is not unrealistic.


Let us imagine a community in which families have usufruct rights to
parcels of cropland during the main growing season. Only certain
crops, however, may be planted, and every seven years the usufruct
land is redistributed among resident families according to each
family’s size and its number of able-bodied adults. After the harvest
of the mainseason crop, all cropland reverts to common land where any
family may glean, graze their fowl and livestock, and even plant
quickly maturing, dry-season crops. Rights to graze fowl and livestock
on pastureland held in common by the village is extended to all local
families, but the number of animals that can be grazed is restricted
according to family size, especially in dry years when forage is
scarce.  Families not using their grazing rights can give them to
other villagers but not to outsiders. Everyone has the right to gather
firewood for normal family needs, and the village blacksmith and baker
are given larger allotments. No commercial sale from village woodlands
is permitted.


Trees that have been planted and any fruit they may bear are the
property of the family who planted them, no matter where they are now
growing. Fruit fallen from such trees, however, is the property of
anyone who gathers it. When a family fells one of its trees or a tree
is felled by a storm, the trunk belongs to the family, the branches to
the immediate neighbors, and the “tops” (leaves and twigs) to any
poorer villager who carries them off. Land is set aside for use or
leasing out by widows with children and dependents of conscripted
males. Usufruct rights to land and trees may be let to anyone in the
village; the only time they may be let to someone outside the village
is if no one in the community wishes to claim them.


After a crop failure leading to a food shortage, many of these
arrangements are readjusted. Better-off villagers are expected to
assume some responsibility for poorer relatives—by sharing their land,
by hiring them, or by simply feeding them. Should the shortage
persist, a council composed of heads of families may inventory food
supplies and begin daily rationing. In cases of severe shortages or
famine, the women who have married into the village but have not yet
borne children will not be fed and are expected to return to their
native village. This last practice alerts us to the inequalities that
often prevail in local customary tenure; single women, junior males,
and anyone defined as falling outside the core of the community are
clearly disadvantaged.


This description could be further elaborated. It is itself a
simplification, but it does convey some of the actual complexity of
property relations in contexts where local customs have tended to
prevail. To describe the usual practices in this fashion, as if they
were laws, is itself a distortion. Customs are better understood as a
living, negotiated tissue of practices which are continually being
adapted to new ecological and social circumstances—including, of
course, power relations. Customary systems of tenure should not be
romanticized; they are usually riven with inequalities based on
gender, status, and lineage. But because they are strongly local,
particular, and adaptable, their plasticity can be the source of
microadjustments that lead to shifts in prevailing practice.


Imagine a lawgiver whose only concern was to respect land practices.
Imagine, in other words, a written system of positive law that
attempted to represent this complex skein of property relations and
land tenure.  The mind fairly boggles at the clauses, sub-clauses, and
subsub-clauses that would be required to reduce these practices to a
set of regulations that an administrator might understand, never mind
enforce. And even if the practices could be codified, the resulting
code would necessarily sacrifice much of their plasticity and subtle
adaptability. The circumstances that might provoke a new adaptation
are too numerous to foresee, let alone specify, in a regulatory
code. That code would in effect freeze a living process. Changes in
the positive code designed to reflect evolving practice would
represent at best a jerky and mechanical adaptation.


And what of the \emph{next} village, and the village after that? Our
hypothetical code-giver, however devilishly clever and conscientious,
would find that the code devised to fit one set of local practices
would not travel well. Each village, with its own particular history,
ecology, cropping patterns, kinship alignments, and economic activity,
would require a substantially new set of regulations. At the limit,
there would be at least as many legal codes as there were communities.


Administratively, of course, such a cacophony of local property
regulations would be a nightmare. The nightmare is experienced not by
those whose particular practices are being represented but by those
state officials who aspire to a uniform, homogeneous, national
administrative code. Like the “exotic” units of weights and measures,
local land tenure practice is perfectly legible to all who live within
it from day to day. Its details may often be contested and far from
satisfactory to all its practitioners, but it is completely familiar;
local residents have no difficulty in grasping its subtleties and
using its flexible provisions for their own purposes. State officials,
on the other hand, cannot be expected to decipher and then apply a new
set of property hieroglyphs for each jurisdiction. Indeed, the very
concept of the modern state presupposes a vastly simplified and
uniform property regime that is legible and hence manipulable from the
center.


My use of the term “simple” to describe modern property law, whose
intricacies provide employment to armies of legal professionals, will
seem grossly misplaced. It is surely the case that property law has in
many respects become an impenetrable thicket for ordinary
citizens. The use of the term “simple” in this context is thus both
relative and perspectival. Modern freehold tenure is tenure that is
mediated through the state and therefore readily decipherable only to
those who have sufficient training and a grasp of the state
statutes.\footnote{As E. P. Thompson wrote in \emph{Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act} (New York: Pantheon, 1975): “During the eighteenth century one legal decision after another signaled that the lawyers had become converted to notions of absolute property ownership, and that (wherever the least doubt could be found) the law abhorred the messy complexities of coincident use-right” (p. 241).} Its relative simplicity is lost on those who cannot
break the code, just as the relative clarity of customary tenure is
lost on those who live outside the village.


The fiscal or administrative goal toward which all modern states
aspire is to measure, codify, and simplify land tenure in much the
same way as scientific forestry reconceived the forest. Accommodating
the luxuriant variety of customary land tenure was simply
inconceivable. The historical solution, at least for the liberal
state, has typically been the heroic simplification of individual
freehold tenure. Land is owned by a legal individual who possesses
wide powers of use, inheritance, or sale and whose ownership is
represented by a uniform deed of title enforced through the judicial
and police institutions of the state. Just as the flora of the forest
were reduced to Normalbaume, so the complex tenure arrangements of
customary practice are reduced to freehold, transferrable title. In an
agrarian setting, the administrative landscape is blanketed with a
uniform grid of homogeneous land, each parcel of which has a legal
person as owner and hence taxpayer. How much easier it then becomes to
assess such property and its owner on the basis of its acreage, its
soil class, the crops it normally bears, and its assumed yield than to
untangle the thicket of common property and mixed forms of tenure.


The crowning artifact of this mighty simplification is the cadastral
map. Created by trained surveyors and mapped to a given scale, the
cadastral map is a more or less complete and accurate survey of all
landholdings. Since the driving logic behind the map is to create a
manageable and reliable format for taxation, the map is associated
with a property register in which each specified (usually numbered)
lot on the map is linked to an owner who is responsible for paying its
taxes.  The cadastral map and property register are to the taxation of
land as the maps and tables of the scientific forester were to the
fiscal exploitation of the forest.

\subsection{The \emph{Code Rural} That Almost Was}


The rulers of postrevolutionary France confronted a rural society that
was a nearly impenetrable web of feudal \emph{and} revolutionary
practices. It was inconceivable that they could catalogue its
complexities, let alone effectively eliminate them, in the short
run. Ideologically, for example, their commitment to equality and
liberty was contradicted by customary rural contracts like those used
by craft guilds, which still employed the terms “master” (maître) and
“servant” (\emph{serviteur}). As rulers of a new nation-not a kingdom-they
were likewise offended by the absence of an overall legal framework
for social relations. For some, a new civil code covering all
Frenchmen seemed as if it would be sufficient.\footnote{The \emph{code civil} did not deal with agriculture explicitly, with one exception: it specified guidelines for tenant farming (\emph{fermage}), in recognition of the wealthy and influential large tenants in the Paris basin and to the north. I am grateful to Peter Jones for bringing to my attention the study on which this brief discussion is based: Serge Aberdam, \emph{Aux origines du code rural}, 1789-1900: \emph{Un siècle de débat} (n.d., but probably 1978-80).} But for bourgeois
owners of rural property who, along with their noble neighbors, had
been threatened by the local uprisings of the Revolution and La Grand
Peur and, more generally, by the aggressiveness of an emboldened and
autonomous peasantry, an explicit \emph{code rural} seemed necessary to
underwrite their security.


In the end, no postrevolutionary rural code attracted a winning
coalition, even amid a flurry of Napoleonic codes in nearly all other
realms. For our purposes, the history of the stalemate is instructive.
The first proposal for a code, which was drafted between 1803 and
1807, would have swept away most traditional rights (such as common
pasturage and free passage through others’ property) and essentially
recast rural property relations in the light of bourgeois property
rights and freedom of contract.\footnote{“En resumé, la ligne genérale du projet de 1807 est de refuser toute specificité au droit rural en ramenant, autant que possible, les rapports socieux a la campagne à la forme d’authorité légale que la bourgeoisie projette sur l’ensemble de la population” (In brief, the general policy of the proposal of 1807 is to deny any particularity to rural law, placing rural social relations as much as possible in the context of the legal authority that the bourgeoisie applied to the population as a whole [my translation]; ibid., p. 19).} Although the proposed code
prefigured certain modern French practices, many revolutionaries
blocked it because they feared that its hands-off liberalism would
allow large landholders to recreate the subordination of feudalism in
a new guise.\footnote{No such political scruples were in evidence in the colonies, where administrative convenience and commercial logic prevailed over popular opinion and practice. See, for example, the fine case study by Dennis Galvan, “Land Pawning as a Response to the Standardization of Tenure,” chap. 4 of “The State Is Now Master of Fire: Peasant Lore, Land Tenure, and Institutional Adaptation in the Siin Region of Senegal” (Ph.D. dirs., Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, 1996).}


A reexamination of the issue was then ordered by Napoleon and presided
over by Joseph Verneilh Puyrasseau. Concurrently, Depute Lalouette
proposed to do precisely what I supposed, in the hypothetical example,
was impossible. That is, he undertook to systematically gather
information about all local practices, to classify and codify them,
and then to sanction them by decree. The decree in question would
become the code rural. Two problems undid this charming scheme to
present the rural populace with a rural code that simply reflected its
own practices. The first difficulty was in deciding which aspects of
the literally “infinite diversity” of rural production relations were
to be represented and codified.\footnote{Ibid., p. 18.} Even in a particular locality,
practices varied greatly from farm to farm and over time; any
codification would be partly arbitrary and artificially static. To
codify local practices was thus a profoundly political act. Local
notables would be able to sanction their preferences with the mantle
of law, whereas others would lose customary rights that they depended
on. The second difficulty was that Lalouette’s plan was a mortal
threat to all the state centralizers and economic modernizers for whom
a legible, national property regime was the precondition of
progress. As Serge Aberdam notes, “The Lalouette project would have
brought about exactly what Merlin de Douai and the bourgeois,
revolutionary jurists always sought to avoid.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 22.} Neither Lalouette’s
nor Verneilh’s proposed code was ever passed, because they, like their
predecessor in 1807, seemed to be designed to strengthen the hand of
the landowners.

\subsection{The Illegibility of Communal Tenure}


The premodern and early modern state, as we have noted, dealt more
with communities than with individuals when it came to taxes. Some
apparently individual taxes, such as the notorious Russian “soul tax,”
which was collected from all subjects, were actually paid directly by
the communities or indirectly through the nobles whose subjects they
were.  Failure to deliver the required sum usually led to collective
punishment.\footnote{In colonial Vietnam, the head tax, or capitation, was levied on whole communities on the basis of their presumed population. If the sum were not remitted, the police would come and hold an auction of whatever they could seize (e.g., water buffalos, furniture, jewelry) until they had the required sum. This system gave the village notables, who owned most of the goods worth seizing, an incentive to make sure that the taxes were remitted on time.} The only agents of taxation who regularly reached to
the level of the household and its cultivated fields were the local
nobility and clergy in the course of collecting feudal dues and the
religious tithe. For its part, the state had neither the
administrative tools nor the information to penetrate to this level.


The limitations on state knowledge were partly due to the complexity
and variability of local production. This was not the most important
reason, however. The collective form of taxation meant that it was
generally in the interest of local officials to misrepresent their
situation in order to minimize the local tax and conscription
burden. To this end, they might minimize the local population,
systematically understate the acreage under cultivation, hide new
commercial profits, exaggerate crop losses after storms and droughts,
and so on.\footnote{This generalization also has validity for modern socialist forms of collective farming. A considerable amount of farmland, for example, “disappeared” from the books when Hungary’s collective farms were created; see Istvan Rev, “The Advantages of Being Atomized: How Hungarian Peasants Coped with Collectivization,” \emph{Dissent} 34 (Summer 1987): 335-49. In China, after the deadly Great Leap Forward, many collective farms systematically hid production from central authorities in the interest of local survival; see Daniel Kelliher, \emph{Peasant Power in China} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).} The point of the cadastral map and land register was
precisely to eliminate this fiscal feudalism and rationalize the
fiscal take of the state. 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.\footnote{Cadastral surveys might also be undertaken by aristocratic holders of large fiefs who were convinced that they could thereby uncover taxable land and subjects who had hitherto eluded them.}


Assuming that the state had the will to challenge the resistance of
the local nobles and elites and the financial resources to undertake a
full cadastral survey (which was both time-consuming and expensive),
it faced other obstacles as well. In particular, some communal forms
of tenure simply could not be adequately represented in cadastral
form. Rural living in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century
Denmark, for example, was organized by \emph{ejerlav}, whose members had
certain rights for using local arable, waste, and forest land. It
would have been impossible in such a community to associate a
household or individual with a particular holding on a cadastral
map. The Norwegian large farm (\emph{gard}) posed similar problems. Each
household held rights to a given proportion of the value (\emph{skyld}) of
the farm, not to the plot of land; none of the joint owners could call
a specific part of the farm his own.\footnote{Both the Danish and Norwegian examples are from the valuable historical analysis in Roger J. P. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent, \emph{The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: A History of Property Mapping} (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 116.} Although it was possible to
estimate the arable land of each community and, making some
assumptions about crop yields and subsistence needs, arrive at a
plausible tax burden, these villagers derived a substantial part of
their livelihood from the commons by fishing, forestry, collecting
resin, hunting, and making charcoal. Monitoring this kind of income
was almost impossible. Nor would crude estimates of the value of the
commons solve the problem, for the inhabitants of nearby villages
often shared one another’s commons (even though the practice was
outlawed). The mode of production in such communities was simply
incompatible with the assumption of individual freehold tenure
implicit in a cadastral map. It was claimed, although the evidence is
not convincing, that common property was less productive than freehold
property.\footnote{The great efficiency of the Hutterite grain farmers in the northern Plains states and Canada is but one of many pieces of conflicting evidence. For more, see George Yaney, \emph{The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia} (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 165-69.} 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.


As long as common property was abundant and had essentially no fiscal
value, the illegibility of its tenure was no problem. But the moment
it became scarce (when “nature” became “natural resources”), it became
the subject of property rights in law, whether of the state or of the
citizens. The history of property in this sense has meant the
inexorable incorporation of what were once thought of as free gifts of
nature: forests, game, wasteland, prairie, subsurface minerals, water
and watercourses, air rights (rights to the air above buildings or
surface area), breathable air, and even genetic sequences, into a
property regime. In the case of common-property farmland, the
imposition of freehold property was clarifying not so much for the
local inhabitants—the customary structure of rights had always been
clear enough to them—as it was for the tax official and the land
speculator.  The cadastral map added documentary intelligence to state
power and thus provided the basis for the synoptic view of the state
and a supralocal market in land.\footnote{A contemporary example from Mexico can be found in a fine analysis by Sergio Zendejas in “Contested Appropriation of Governmental Reforms in the Mexican Countryside: The Ejido as an Arena of Confrontation of Political Practices,” in Sergio Zendejas and Pieter de Vries, eds., \emph{Rural Transformation as Seen from Below: Regional and Local Perspectives from Western Mexico} (La Jolla, Calif.: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1997). As Zendejas shows, the ejido system emerging from the Mexican revolution has had the effect of depriving the state of a great deal of knowledge about agricultural patterns, house lots, or village common-land tenure in most of the twenty-eight thousand ejidos in the country. Michoacán villagers have regarded a national program to survey, register, and title every plot of rural land as a prelude to the individualization of property rights, the division of the common lands, and the imposition of property taxes, and they have therefore resisted having their lands measured. Under the changes made to article 27 of the constitution, which envisions a national, freehold land market, their fears have proven justified. It has not been a question of establishing local land markets; as one villager said, “Haven’t we always been selling and renting [ejido] parcels with or without certificates?” It has been, rather, a question of creating a regional and national market for land, backed by state power. To do this, the first task of the state has been to make legible a tenure landscape that the local autonomy achieved by the revolution had helped make opaque. See also, in this context, Luin Goldring, \emph{Having One’s Cake and Eating It, Too: Selective Appropriation of Ejido Reform in an Urbanizing Ejido in Michoacán} (forthcoming).}


An example may help to clarify the process of installing a new, more
legible property regime. The case of two prerevolutionary Russian
villages provides a nearly textbook example of state attempts to create
individual tenure in keeping with its convictions about agricultural
growth and administrative order. Most of rural Russia, even after the
emancipation of 1861, was a model of fiscal illegibility. Communal forms
of tenure prevailed, and the state had little or no knowledge of who
cultivated which strips of land or what their yields and income were.


Novoselok village had a varied economy of cultivation, grazing, and
forestry, whereas Khotynitsa village was limited to cultivation and some
grazing (figures 3 and 4). The complex welter of strips was designed to
ensure that each village household received a strip of land in every
ecological zone. An individual household might have as many as ten to
fifteen different plots constituting something of a representative
sample of the village’s ecological zones and microclimates. The
distribution spread a family’s risks prudently, and from time to time
the land was reshuffled as families grew or shrunk.\footnote{Here I am guilty of conveying a false sense of uniformity. In fact, there were a host of land arrangements, even in “black earth” Russia, and many villages did not redistribute land (Yaney, \emph{The Urge to Mobilize}, p. 169).}


It was enough to make the head of a cadastral surveyor swim. At first
glance it seems as if the village itself would need a staff of
professional surveyors to get things right. But in practice the
system, called interstripping, was quite simple to those who lived
it. The strips of land were generally straight and parallel so that a
readjustment could be made by moving small stakes along just one side
of a field, without having to think of areal dimensions. Where the
other end of the field was not parallel, the stakes could be shifted
to compensate for the fact that the strip lay toward the narrower or
wider end of the field. Irregular fields were divided, not according
to area, but according to yield. To the eye—and certainly to those
involved in cadastral mapping—the pattern seemed convoluted and
irrational. But to those familiar with it, it was simple enough and
worked admirably for their purposes.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-4.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 3. Novoselok village before the Stolypin Reform}
\end{figure}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-5.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 4. Khotynitsa village before the Stolypin Reform}
\end{figure}


The dream of state officials and agrarian reformers, at least since
emancipation, was to transform the open-field system into a series of
consolidated, independent farmsteads on what they took to be the
western European model. They were driven by the desire to break the
hold of the community over the individual household and to move from
collective taxation of the whole community to a tax on individual
landholders. As in France, fiscal goals were very much connected to
reigning ideas of agricultural progress. Under Count Sergei Witte and
Petr Stolypin, as George Yaney notes, plans for reform shared a common
vision of how things were and how they needed to be: “First tableau:
poor peasants, crowded together in villages, suffering from hunger,
running into each other with their plows on their tiny strips. Second
tableau: agriculture specialist agent leads a few progressive peasants
off to new lands, leaving those remaining more room. Third tableau:
departing peasants, freed from restraints of strips, set up khutor
[integral farmsteads with dwellings] on new fields and adapt latest
methods.  Those who remain, freed of village and family restraints,
plunge into a demand economy—all are richer, more productive, the
cities get fed, and the peasants are not proletarianized.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 212.} It was
abundantly clear that the prejudicial attitude toward interstripping
was based as much on the autonomy of the Russian village, its
illegibility to outsiders, and prevailing dogma about scientific
agriculture as it was on hard evidence.\footnote{Yaney points out that Mennonite land that was interstripped was just as productive as Mennonite land that was organized into consolidated farms (ibid., p. 160).} The state officials and
agrarian reformers reasoned that, once given a consolidated, private
plot, the peasant would suddenly want to get rich and would organize
his household into an efficient workforce and take up scientific
agriculture. The Stolypin Reform therefore went forward, and cadastral
order was brought to both villages in the wake of the reform
(figures 5 and 6).


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-6.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 5. Novoselok village after the Stolypin Reform}
\end{figure}


In Novoselok village, seventeen independent farmsteads (\emph{khutor}) were
created in a way that aimed to give each household a share of meadow,
arable, and forest. In Khotynitsa village, ten khutor were created as
well as seventy-eight farms (\emph{otrub}), whose owners continued to dwell
in the village center. As a cadastral matter, the new farms were
mappable, easily legible from above and outside, and, since each was
owned by an identifiable person, assessable.


Taken alone, the maps shown in figures 5 and 6 are misleading. Such
model villages suggest efficient cadastral teams working their way
diligently through the countryside and turning open-field chaos into
tidy little farms. Reality was something else. In fact, the dream of
orderly, rectangular fields was approximated only on newly settled
land, where the surveyor faced little geographical or social
resistance.\footnote{And not always in such newly settled lands, inasmuch as \emph{group} land settlement, with common property and against the government’s wishes, was also common.} Elsewhere, the reformers were generally thwarted,
despite tremendous pressure to produce integral farms. There were
unauthorized consolidations, although they were forbidden; there were
also “paper consolidations,” in which the new farmers continued to
farm their strips as before.\footnote{Ibid., chaps. 7 and 8. The Peasant Bank, under great pressure to loan money to poor peasants, inadvertently encouraged the older allotment system. The bank needed collateral that it could seize in the event of default, but poorer peasants farming allotment land had no fixed land that could serve as security. Faced with this quandary, the bank found itself loaning to whole villages or to groups of peasants farming adjacent, identifiable plots. It is worth noting that, like the modern tax system, the modern credit system requires a legible property regime for its functioning.} The best evidence that the
agricultural property system had in fact not become legible to central
tax officials was the immensely damaging procurement policies pursued
by the czarist government during World War I. No one knew what a
reasonable levy on grain or draft animals might be; as a result, some
farmers were ruined, while others managed to hoard grain and
livestock.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 412-42.} The same experience of forced procurement without
adequate knowledge of landholdings and wealth was repeated again after
the October Revolution during the period of War Communism.\footnote{Orlando Figes, \emph{Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917-1921} (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), chap. 6, “The Rural Economy Under War Communism.”}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-7.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 6. Khotynitsa village after the Stolypin Reform}
\end{figure}

\subsection{The Cadastral Map as Objective Information for Outsiders}


The value of the cadastral map to the state lies in its abstraction
and universality. In principle, at least, the same objective standard
can be applied throughout the nation, regardless of local context, to
produce a complete and unambiguous map of all landed property. The
completeness of the cadastral map depends, in a curious way, on its
abstract sketchiness, its lack of detail—its thinness. Taken alone, it
is essentially a geometric representation of the borders or frontiers
between parcels of land. What lies inside the parcel is left
blank—unspecified—since it is not germane to the map plotting itself.


Surely many things about a parcel of land are far more important than
its surface area and the location of its boundaries. What kind of soil
it has, what crops can be grown on it, how hard it is to work, and how
close it is to a market are the first questions a potential buyer
might ask. These are questions a tax assessor would also want to
ask. From a capitalist perspective, the physical dimensions of land
are beside the point. But these other qualities can become relevant
(especially to the state) only after the terrain to which they apply
has been located and measured. And unlike identifying location and
dimension, identifying these qualities involves judgments that are
complex, susceptible to fraud, and easily overtaken by events. Crop
rotations and yields may change, new tools or machines may transform
cultivation, and markets may shift. The cadastral survey, by contrast,
is precise, schematic, general, and uniform. Whatever its other
defects, it is the precondition of a tax regimen that comprehensively
links every patch of land with its owner—the taxpayer.\footnote{Before comprehensive cadastral surveys, some land was open to all and belonged to no one, though social arrangements might regulate its use. With the first cadastral map, such land was generally designated as state land. All land was accounted for; everything not owned privately became the property of the state.} In this
spirit, the survey for a 1807 Dutch land tax (inspired by Napoleonic
France) stressed that all surveyors were to use the same measurements,
surveyors’ instruments were to be periodically inspected to ensure
conformity, and all maps were to be drawn up on a uniform scale of
1:2,880.\footnote{Kain and Biagent, \emph{The Cadastral Map}, p. 33. Seas, rivers, and wastes were to be omitted since they did not bear revenue. The whole operation was guided by a manual entitled \emph{Mode d’arpentage pour l’impôt foncier.}}


Land maps in general and cadastral maps in particular are designed to
make the local situation legible to an outsider. For purely local
purposes, a cadastral map was redundant. Everyone knew who held, say,
the meadow by the river, the value of the fodder it yielded, and the
feudal dues it carried; there was no need to know its precise
dimensions. A substantial domain might have the kind of prose map, or
\emph{terrier}, that one finds in old deeds (“from the large oak tree, north
120 feet to the river bank, thence \dots{}”), with a notation about the
holder’s obligations to the domain. One imagines such a document proving
valuable to a young heir, new to the management of a domain. But a
proper map seems to have come into use especially when a brisk market in
land developed. The Netherlands was thus a leader in land mapping
because of its early commercialization and because each speculator who
invested in the draining of land by windmill wanted to know in advance
precisely what plot of the newly opened land he would be entitled to.
The map was especially crucial to the new bourgeois owners of landed
estates, for it allowed them to survey a large territory at a glance.
Its miniaturization helped it to serve as an aide-mémoire when the
property consisted of many small parcels or the owner was not intimately
familiar with the terrain.


As early as 1607, an English surveyor, John Norden, sold his services
to the aristocracy on the premise that the map was a substitute for
the tour of inspection: “A plot rightly drawne by true information,
discribeth so the lively image of a manor, and every branch and member
of the same, as the lord sitting in his chayre, may see what he hath,
and where and how he lyeth, and in whole use and occupation of every
particular is upon suddaine view.”\footnote{Quoted in ibid., p. 5.} A national tax administration
requires the same logic: a legible, bureaucratic formula which a new
official can quickly grasp and administer from the documents in his
office.

\subsection{What Is Missing in This Picture?}



\begin{quote}


Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a
drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that
constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross
simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly
empty—that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance
to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant
chains of causes and consequences are short and simple.



\end{quote}


— Herbert Simon


Isaiah Berlin, in his study of Tolstoy, compared the hedgehog, who
knew “one big thing,” to the fox, who knew many things. The scientific
forester and the cadastral official are like the hedgehog. The sharply
focused interest of the scientific foresters in commercial lumber and
that of the cadastral officials in land revenue constrain them to
finding clear-cut answers to one question. The naturalist and the
farmer, on the other hand, are like the fox. They know a great many
things about forests and cultivable land. Although the forester’s and
cadastral official’s range of knowledge is far narrower, we should not
forget that their knowledge is systematic and synoptic, allowing them
to see and understand things a fox would not grasp.\footnote{In a Third World setting, as Peter Vandergeest points out, a cadastral or land-use map using global positioning technology allows experts to formulate landuse policies and rules without having the inconvenience of visiting the terrain itself (“Mapping Resource Claims, or, The Seductive Appeal of Maps: The Use of Maps in the Transformation of Resource Tenure,” paper presented at a meeting of the Association for the Study of Common Property, Berkeley, June 1996).} What I want to
emphasize here, however, is how this knowledge is gained at the
expense of a rather static and myopic view of land tenure.


The cadastral map is very much like a still photograph of the current
in a river. It represents the parcels of land as they were arranged
and owned at the moment the survey was conducted. But the current is
always moving, and in periods of major social upheaval and growth, a
cadastral survey may freeze a scene of great turbulence.\footnote{The land itself occasionally moves, due to landslides, erosion, avulsion, and accretion. For an interesting account of property law as it tries to deal with the “mobility” of its subject, see Theodore Steinberg, \emph{Slide Mountain, or The Folly of Owning Nature} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).} Changes
are taking place on field boundaries; land is being subdivided or
consolidated by inheritance or purchase; new canals, roads, and
railways are being cut; land use is changing; and so forth. Inasmuch
as these particular changes directly affect tax assessments, there are
provisions for recording them on the map or in a title register. The
accumulation of annotations and marginalia at some point render the
map illegible, whereupon a more up-to-date but still static map must
be drawn and the process repeated.


No operating land-revenue system can stop at the mere identification
of parcel and ownership. Other schematic facts, themselves static,
must be created to arrive at some judgment of a sustainable tax
burden. Land may be graded by soil class, how well it is watered, what
crops are grown on it, and its presumed average yield, which is often
checked by sample crop-cuttings. These facts are themselves changing,
or they are averages that may mask great variation. Like the still
photo of the cadastral map, they grow more unrealistic with time and
must be reexamined.


These state simplifications, like all state simplifications, are
always far more static and schematic than the actual social phenomena
they presume to typify. The farmer rarely experiences an average crop,
an average rainfall, or an average price for his crops. Much of the
long history of rural tax revolts in early modern Europe and elsewhere
can be illuminated by the lack of fit between an unyielding fiscal
claim, on one hand, and an often wildly fluctuating capacity of the
rural population to meet that claim, on the other.\footnote{In an earlier work, I examined this problem in some detail in its Southeast Asian context. See Scott, \emph{The Moral Economy of the Peasant}, chap. 4.} And yet, even
the most equitable, wellintentioned cadastral system cannot be
uniformly administered except on the basis of stable units of
measurement and calculation. It can no more reflect the actual
complexity of a farmer’s experience than the scientific forester’s
schemes can reflect the complexity of the naturalist’s forest.\footnote{In 1785 Austria’s Franz Joseph had to choose between using net income or gross income as a basis for land taxation. Gross income was chosen because it was far simpler (e.g., average crop per unit of land × units of land × average grain price = gross income). It was necessary to sacrifice accuracy and fairness to create a procedure that was administratively feasible. See Kain and Biagent, \emph{The Cadastral Map}, p. 193.}


Governed by a practical, concrete objective, the cadastral lens also
ignored anything lying outside its sharply defined field of
vision. This was reflected in a loss of detail in the survey
itself. Surveyors, one recent Swedish study found, made the fields
more geometrically regular than they in fact were. Ignoring small jogs
and squiggles made their job easier and did not materially affect the
outcome.\footnote{Ibid., p. 59.} Just as the commercial forester found it convenient to
overlook minor forest products, so the cadastral official tended to
ignore all but the main commercial use of a field. The fact that a
field designated as growing wheat or hay might also be a significant
source of bedding straw, gleanings, rabbits, birds, frogs, and
mushrooms was not so much unknown as ignored lest it needlessly
complicate a straightforward administrative formula.\footnote{Issue of mineral rights and mineral income from subsoil deposits was a significant exception to this generalization.} The most
significant instance of myopia, of course, was that the cadastral map
and assessment system considered only the dimensions of the land and
its value as a productive asset or as a commodity for sale. Any value
that the land might have for subsistence purposes or for the local
ecology was bracketed as aesthetic, ritual, or sentimental values.

\subsection{Transformation and Resistance}



\begin{quote}


The cadastral map is an instrument of control which both reflects and
consolidates the power of those who commission it.\dots{} The cadastral map
is partisan: where knowledge is power, it provides comprehensive
information to be used to the advantage of some and the detriment of
others, as rulers and ruled were well aware in the tax struggles of
the 18th and 19th centuries. Finally, the cadastral map is active: in
portraying one reality, as in the settlement of the new world or in
India, it helps obliterate the old.



\end{quote}


— Roger J. P. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent, \emph{The Cadastral Map}


The shorthand formulas through which tax officials must apprehend
reality are not mere tools of observation. By a kind of fiscal
Heisenberg principle, they frequently have the power to transform the
facts they take note of.


The door-and-window tax established in France under the Directory and
abolished only in 1917 is a striking case in point.\footnote{Eugen Weber, \emph{Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France}, 1870-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), p. 156.} Its originator must
have reasoned that the number of windows and doors in a dwelling was
proportional to the dwelling’s size. Thus a tax assessor need not enter
the house or measure it but merely count the doors and windows. 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. While the fiscal losses could be recouped by raising the tax
per opening, the long-term effects on the health of the rural population
lasted for more than a century.


The novel state-imposed form of land tenure was far more revolutionary
than a door-and-window tax. It established a whole new institutional
nexus. However simple and uniform the new tenure system was to an
administrator, it flung villagers willy-nilly into a world of title
deeds, land offices, fees, assessments, and applications. They faced
powerful new specialists in the form of land clerks, surveyors,
judges, and lawyers whose rules of procedure and decisions were
unfamiliar.


Where the new tenure system was a colonial imposition—that is, where
it was totally unfamiliar, where it was imposed by alien conquerors
using an unintelligible language and institutional context, and where
local practices bore no resemblance to freehold tenure—the
consequences were far-reaching. The permanent settlement in India, for
example, created a new class who, because they paid the taxes on the
land, became full owners with rights of inheritance and sale where
none had existed earlier.\footnote{For a brilliant analysis of the process of “permanent settlement” in India and its intellectual roots, see Ranajit Guha, \emph{A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement} (Paris: Mouton, 1963). As Guha notes, the existing system of tenure that the British colonial rulers encountered in the eighteenth century was completely mystifying: “At every step they came up against quasi-feudal rights and obligations which defied any attempt at interpretation in familiar western terms. The hieroglyphics of Persian estate-accounts baffled them. It was only a part of the difficulty that they could not easily master the languages in which the ancient and medieval texts relating to the laws of property were written; for tradition recorded only in memory and customs embedded in a variety of local usages wielded an authority equal to that of any written code” (p. 13).} At the same time, literally millions of
cultivators, tenants, and laborers lost their customary rights of
access to the land and its products. Those in the colonies who first
plumbed the mysteries of the new tenure administration enjoyed unique
opportunities. Thus the Vietnamese \emph{secrétaires} and \emph{interprètes} who
served as intermediaries between the French officials in the Mekong
Delta and their Vietnamese subjects were in a position to make great
fortunes. By concentrating on the legal paperwork, such as title
deeds, and the appropriate fees, they occasionally became landlords to
whole villages of cultivators who had imagined they had opened common
land free for the taking. The new intermediaries, of course, might
occasionally use their knowledge to see their compatriots safely
through the new legal thicket. Whatever their conduct, their fluency
in a language of tenure specifically designed to be legible and
transparent to administrators, coupled with the illiteracy of the
rural population to whom the new tenure was indecipherable, brought
about a momentous shift in power relations.\footnote{For a remarkably thoughtful and thorough examination of how the colonial legal code transformed land-dispute settlement, land tenure, and social structure, see Sally Falk Moore, \emph{Social Facts and Fabrications: “Customary” Law on Mount Kilimanjaro, 1880-1980} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).} What was simplifying
to an official was mystifying to most cultivators.


Freehold title and standard land measurement were to central taxation
and the real-estate market what central bank currency was to the
marketplace.\footnote{The combination of a complete cadastral register, freehold tenure, and a national market in land makes for a level of legibility that is as advantageous to the land speculator as it is to the tax collector. Commoditization in general, by denominating all goods and services according to a common currency, makes for what Tilly has called the “visibility [of] a commercial economy.” He writes, “In an economy where only a small share of goods and services are bought and sold, a number of conditions prevail: collectors of revenue are unable to observe or evaluate resources with any accuracy, [and] many people have claims on any particular resource” (\emph{Coercion, Capital, and European States}, pp. 89, 85).} By the same token, they threatened to destroy a great
deal of local power and autonomy. It is no wonder, then, that they
should have been so vigorously resisted. In the eighteenth-century
European context, any general cadastral survey was by definition a
gambit of centralization; the local clergy and nobility were bound to
see both their own taxing powers and the exemptions they enjoyed
menaced. Commoners were likely to see it as a pretext for an additional
local tax. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the great “centralizer” of absolutism,
proposed to conduct a national cadastral survey of France, but he was
thwarted in 1679 by the combined opposition of the aristocracy and
clergy. After the Revolution more than a century later, the radical
François-Noël Babeuf, in his “Projet de cadastre perpetuel,” dreamed of
a perfectly egalitarian land reform in which everyone would get an equal
parcel.\footnote{The equality was, of course, purely areal. See Kain and Biagent, The Cadastral Map, p. 225. Colbert’s Forest Code of 1667 was also the first coherent attempt to codify forest space in France along sharp Cartesian lines. In this connection, see Sahlins, \emph{Forest Rites}, p. 14.} He too was thwarted.


We must keep in mind not only the capacity of state simplifications to
transform the world but also the capacity of the society to modify,
subvert, block, and even overturn the categories imposed upon it. Here
it is useful to distinguish what might be called facts on paper from
facts on the ground. As Sally Falk Moore and many others have
emphasized, the land-office records may serve as the basis for
taxation, but they may have little to do with the actual rights to the
land. Paper owners may not be the effective owners.\footnote{In Malaysia, Chinese are legally barred from owning certain kinds of agricultural land. To get around this barrier, a Chinese man will register land in the name of a Malay confederate. To ensure that the confederate does not attempt to exercise his formal property rights, he will simultaneously sign loan papers worth far more than the property, with the Chinese man named as creditor.} Russian
peasants, as we saw, might register a “paper” consolidation while
continuing to interstrip.  Land invasions, squatting, and poaching, if
successful, represent the exercise of de facto property rights which
are not represented on paper.  Certain land taxes and tithes have been
evaded or defied to the point where they have become dead letters.\footnote{Revolutionary legislation in France, rather than abolishing tithes outright, attempted to phase them out with temporary “tithe redemption payments.” Popular defiance was so massive and intractable that the payments were finally abandoned. See James C. Scott, “Resistance Without Protest and Without Organization: Peasant Opposition to the Islamic \emph{Zakat} and the Christian Tithe,” \emph{Comparative Study in Society and History} 29, no. 3 (1987): 417-52.}
The gulf between land tenure facts on paper and facts on the ground is
probably greatest at moments of social turmoil and revolt. But even in
more tranquil times, there will always be a shadow land-tenure system
lurking beside and beneath the official account in the land-records
office. We must never assume that local practice conforms with state
theory.


All centralizing states recognized the value of a uniform, comprehensive
cadastral map. Carrying out the mapmaking, however, was another matter.
As a rule of thumb, cadastral mapping was earlier and more comprehensive
where a powerful central state could impose itself on a relatively weak
civil society. Where, by contrast, civil society was well organized and
the state relatively weak, cadastral mapping was late, often voluntary,
and fragmentary. Thus Napoleonic France was mapped much earlier than
England, where the legal profession managed for a long time to stymie
this threat to its local, income-earning function. It followed from the
same logic that conquered colonies ruled by fiat would often be
cadastrally mapped before the metropolitan nation that ordered it.
Ireland may have been the first. After Cromwell’s conquest, as Ian
Hacking notes, “Ireland was completely surveyed for land, buildings,
people, and cattle under the directorship of William Petty, in order to
facilitate the rape of that nation by the English in 1679.”\footnote{Ian Hacking, \emph{The Taming of Chance} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 17. Petty, a student of Hobbes, conducted the survey with an eye to accurate assessments of value and productivity. His theory of political economy can be found in \emph{Political Arithmetik, or A Discourse Concerning the Value of Lands, People, Buildings\dots{}} (1691).}


Where the colony was a thinly populated settler-colony, as in North
America or Australia, the obstacles to a thorough, uniform cadastral
grid were minimal. There it was a question less of mapping preexisting
patterns of land use than of surveying parcels of land that would be
given or sold to new arrivals from Europe and of ignoring indigenous
peoples and their common-property regimes.\footnote{The fiction that North American and Australian landscapes were essentially empty, which in turn meant that they were not being used as a factor of production in market exchange, was the basis on which such lands were “redesignated.” This is a fiction that joins the Highland Clearances and the expropriation of land from Native Americans, New Zealand Maoris, Australian native peoples, Argentine indigenous peoples, and so on.} Thomas Jefferson, with
an eye trained by Enlightenment rationalism, imagined dividing the
United States west of the Ohio River into “hundreds”—squares measuring
ten miles by ten miles—and requiring settlers to take the parcels of
land as so designated.


The geometrical clarity of Jefferson’s proposal was not merely an
aesthetic choice; he claimed that irregular lots facilitated fraud. To
reinforce his case, he cited the experience of Massachusetts, where
actual landholdings were 10 percent to 100 percent greater than what
had been granted by deed.\footnote{Heilbron, introduction to \emph{The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century}, p. 17.} Not only did the regularity of the grid
create legibility for the taxing authority, but it was a convenient
and cheap way to package land and market it in homogeneous units. The
grid facilitated the commoditization of land as much as the
calculation of taxes and boundaries. Administratively, it was also
disarmingly simple.  Land could be registered and titled from a
distance by someone who possessed virtually no local knowledge.\footnote{Theodore M. Porter, \emph{Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 22. Porter shows convincingly how “mechanical objectivity” has served as a means for bureaucracies, especially in democracies where expert judgment and expertise are always suspected of masking self-serving motives, to create an impersonal set of decision rules at once seemingly democratic and neutral.}
Once it was in place, the scheme had some of the impersonal,
mechanical logic of the foresters’ tables. But in practice, land
titling in Jefferson’s plan (which was modified by Congress to provide
for rectangular lots and townships that were thirtysix square miles)
did not always follow the prescribed pattern.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-8.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 7. The survey landscape, Castleton, North Dakota}
\end{figure}


The Torrens system of land titling, developed in Australia and New
Zealand in the 1860s, provided a lithographed, presurveyed grid
representing allotments that were registered to settlers on a
first-come, first-served basis. It was the quickest and most
economical means yet devised to sell land, and it was later adopted in
many British colonies. The more homogeneous and rigid the geometric
grid, however, the more likely it was to run afoul of the natural
features of the nonconforming landscape. The possibilities for
surprises was nicely captured in this satirical verse from New Zealand.



\begin{verse}
Now the road through Michael’s section \\{}
~~though it looked well on the map \\{}
For the use it was intended \\{}
~~wasn’t really was a rap \\{}
And at night was not unlikely \\{}
~~to occasion some mishap

It was nicely planned on paper \\{}
~~and was ruled without remorse \\{}
Over cliffs, and spurs and gullies \\{}
~~with a straight and even course \\{}
Which precluded locomotion \\{}
~~on part of man or horse\footnote{Quoted in Kain and Biagent, \emph{The Cadastral Map}, p. 320.}
\end{verse}


The cadastral survey was but one technique in the growing armory of
the utilitarian modern state.\footnote{Students of these matters will perhaps wonder why I have not dealt with the simplification of time. The rationalization and commoditization of linear time in work and administration do indeed form a companion story, which I did not take up here because it would have made this chapter too long and because it has already been imaginatively treated by, among others, E. P. Thompson in “Time, Work, Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” \emph{Past and Present} 38 (December 1967). For a fine survey, see Ronald Aminzade, “Historical Sociology and Time,” \emph{Sociological Methods and Research} 20, no. 3 (May 1992): 456-80.} Where the premodern state was
content with a level of intelligence sufficient to allow it to keep
order, extract taxes, and raise armies, the modern state increasingly
aspired to “take in charge” the physical and human resources of the
nation and make them more productive. These more positive ends of
statecraft required a much greater knowledge of the society. And an
inventory of land, people, incomes, occupations, resources, and
deviance was the logical place to begin. “The need for the
increasingly bureaucratic state to organize itself and control its
resources gave an impulse to the collection of vital and other
statistics; to forestry and rational agriculture; to surveying and
exact cartography; and to public hygiene and climatology.”\footnote{Heilbron, introduction to \emph{The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century}, pp. 22-23.}


Although the purposes of the state were broadening, what the state
wanted to know was still directly related to those purposes. The
nineteenth-century Prussian state, for example, was very much
interested in the ages and sexes of immigrants and emigrants but not
in their religions or races; what mattered to the state was keeping
track of possible draft dodgers and maintaining a supply of men of
military age.\footnote{Hacking, \emph{The Taming of Chance}, p. 145. Napoleon avoided conducting a census after 1806 for fear that its results would show the catastrophic impact that his wars had had on the French population.} 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.

\chapter{Chapter 2. Cities, People, and Language}



\begin{quote}


And the Colleges of the Cartographers set up a Map of the Empire which
had the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point by
point.\dots{} Succeeding generations understood that this Widespread Map was
Useless, and not without Impiety they abandoned it to the Inclemencies
of the Sun and the Winters.



\end{quote}


— Suarez Miranda, \emph{Viajes de varones prudentes (1658)}


An aerial view of a town built during the Middle Ages or the oldest
quarters (\emph{medina}) of a Middle Eastern city that has not been greatly
tampered with has a particular look. It is the look of disorder. Or,
to put it more precisely, the town conforms to no overall abstract
form.  Streets, lanes, and passages intersect at varying angles with a
density that resembles the intricate complexity of some organic
processes. In the case of a medieval town, where defense needs
required walls and perhaps moats, there may be traces of inner walls
superseded by outer walls, much like the growth rings of a tree. A
representation of Bruges in about 1500 illustrates the pattern
(figure 8). What definition there is to the city is provided by the
castle green, the marketplace, and the river and canals that were
(until they silted up) the lifeblood of this textile-trading city.


The fact that the layout of the city, having developed without any
overall design, lacks a consistent geometric logic does not mean that
it was at all confusing to its inhabitants. One imagines that many of
its cobbled streets were nothing more than surfaced footpaths traced
by repeated use. For those who grew up in its various quarters, Bruges
would have been perfectly familiar, perfectly legible. Its very alleys
and lanes would have closely approximated the most common daily
movements. For a stranger or trader arriving for the first time,
however, the town was almost certainly confusing, simply because it
lacked a repetitive, abstract logic that would allow a newcomer to
orient herself. The cityscape of Bruges in 1500 could be said to
privilege local knowledge over outside knowledge, including that of
external political authorities.\footnote{As one might expect, independent towns were likely to privilege local knowledge far more than royal towns, which were designed with administrative and military order in mind.} It functioned spatially in much
the same way a difficult or unintelligible dialect would function
linguistically. As a semipermeable membrane, it facilitated
communication within the city while remaining stubbornly unfamiliar to
those who had not grown up speaking this special geographic dialect.


Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban
neighborhoods (or of their rural analogues, such as hills, marshes,
and forests) has provided a vital margin of political safety from
control by outside elites. A simple way of determining whether this
margin exists is to 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. Coupled
with patterns of local solidarity, this insulation has proven
politically valuable in such disparate contexts as eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century urban riots over bread prices in Europe, the
Front de Libération Nationale’s tenacious resistance to the French in
the Casbah of Algiers,\footnote{The Casbah’s illegibility, however, was not insurmountable. The FLN’s resistance there was eventually broken, although at great long-run political cost, by determined police work, torture, and networks of local informers.} and the politics of the bazaar that helped
to bring down the Shah of Iran. Illegibility, then, has been and
remains a reliable resource for political autonomy.\footnote{The inability of many U.S. municipal authorities to effectively govern inner cities has prompted attempts to bring back the “cop on the beat” in the form of “community policing.” The purpose of community policing is to create a cadre of local police who are intimately familiar with the physical layout of the community and especially the local population, whose assistance is now judged vital to effective police work. Its aim is to turn officials who had come to be seen as outsiders into insiders.}


Stopping short of redesigning cities in order to make them more
legible (a subject that we shall soon explore), state authorities
endeavored to map complex, old cities in a way that would facilitate
policing and control. Most of the major cities of France were thus the
subject of careful military mapping (\emph{reconnaissances militaires}),
particularly after the Revolution. When urban revolts occurred, the
authorities wanted to be able to move quickly to the precise locations
that would enable them to contain or suppress the rebellions
effectively.\footnote{I am grateful to Ron Aminzade for sending me the explanatory notes (\emph{mémoires}) meant to accompany two of the maps the military officials had prepared as part of this \emph{haute reconnaissance} in the city of Toulouse in 1843. They come from the \emph{Archives de l’Année, Paris}, dossier MR 1225. They note the streets or terrain that would be difficult to traverse, watercourses that might impede military movement, the attitude of the local population, the difficulty of their accents, the locations of markets, and so on.}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-9.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 8. Bruges circa 1500, from a painting in the Town Hall, Bruges}
\end{figure}


States and city planners have striven, as one might expect, to
overcome this spatial unintelligibility and to make urban geography
transparently legible from without. Their attitude toward what they
regarded as the higgledy-piggledy profusion of unplanned cities was
not unlike the attitude of foresters to the natural profusion of the
unplanned forest.  The origin of grids or geometrically regular
settlements may lie in a straightforward military logic. A square,
ordered, formulaic military camp on the order of the Roman \emph{castra}
has many advantages. Soldiers can easily learn the techniques of
building it; the commander of the troops knows exactly in which
disposition his subalterns and various troops lie; and any Roman
messenger or officer who arrives at the camp will know where to find
the officer he seeks. On a more speculative note, a far-flung,
polyglot empire may find it symbolically useful to have its camps and
towns laid out according to formula as a stamp of its order and
authority. Other things being equal, the city laid out according to a
simple, repetitive logic will be easiest to administer and to police.


Whatever the political and administrative conveniences of a geometric
cityscape, the Enlightenment fostered a strong aesthetic that looked
with enthusiasm on straight lines and visible order. No one expressed
the prejudice more clearly than Descartes: “These ancient cities that
were once mere \emph{straggling} villages and have become in the course of
time great cities are commonly quite \emph{poorly laid out} compared to
those \emph{well-ordered towns that an engineer lays out on a vacant plane}
as it suits his fancy. And although, upon considering one-by-one the
buildings in the former class of towns, one finds as much art or more
than one finds in the latter class of towns, still, upon seeing how
the buildings are arranged—\emph{here a large one, there a small one}—and
how \emph{they make the streets crooked and uneven}, one will say that \emph{it
is chance more than the will of some men using their reason that has
arranged them thus}.”\footnote{René Descartes, \emph{Discourse on Method}, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), p. 6, quoted in Harrison, Forests, pp. 111-12.}


Descartes’s vision conjures up the urban equivalent of the scientific
forest: streets laid out in straight lines intersecting at right
angles, buildings of uniform design and size, the whole built
according to a single, overarching plan.


The elective affinity between a strong state and a uniformly laid out
city is obvious. Lewis Mumford, the historian of urban form, locates
the modern European origin of this symbiosis in the open, legible
baroque style of the Italian city-state. He claims, in terms that
Descartes would have found congenial, “It was one of the triumphs of
the baroque mind to organize space, to make it continuous, reduce it
to measure and order.”\footnote{Lewis Mumford, \emph{The City in History}: \emph{Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects} (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), p. 364.} More to the point, the baroque redesigning
of medieval cities—with its grand edifices, vistas, squares, and
attention to uniformity, proportion, and perspective—was intended to
reflect the grandeur and awesome power of the prince. Aesthetic
considerations frequently won out over the existing social structure
and the mundane functioning of the city. “Long before the invention of
bulldozers,” Mumford adds, “the Italian military engineer developed,
through his professional specialization in destruction, a bulldozing
habit of mind: one that sought to clear the ground of encumbrances, so
as to make a clear beginning on its own inflexible mathematical
lines.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 387.}


The visual power of the baroque city was underwritten by scrupulous
attention to the military security of the prince from internal as well
as external enemies. Thus both Alberti and Palladio thought of main
thoroughfares as military roads (\emph{viae militaires}). Such roads had to
be straight, and, in Palladio’s view, “the ways will be more
convenient if they are made everywhere equal: that is to say that
there will be \emph{no part in them where armies may not easily
march}.”\footnote{Quoted in ibid., p. 369.}


There are, of course, many cities approximating Descartes’s model. For
obvious reasons, most have been planned from the ground up as new,
often utopian cities.\footnote{Thomas More’s utopian cities, for example, were to be perfectly uniform, so that “he who knows one of the cities will know them all, so exactly alike are they, except where the nature of the ground prevents” (More’s \emph{Utopia}, quoted in ibid., p. 327).} Where they have not been built by imperial
decrees, they have been designed by their founding fathers to
accommodate more repetitive and uniform squares for future
settlement.\footnote{Saint Petersburg is the most striking example of the planned utopian capital, a metropolis that Dostoyevsky called the “most abstract and premeditated city in the world.” See Marshall Berman, \emph{All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity} (New York: Penguin, 1988), chap. 4. The Babylonians, Egyptians, and, of course, the Romans built “grid-settlements” Long before the Enlightenment, right angles were seen as evidence of cultural superiority. As Richard Sennett writes, “Hippodamus of Miletus is conventionally thought the first city builder to conceive of these grids as expressions of culture; the grid expressed, he believed, the rationality of civilized life. In their military conquests the Romans elaborated the contrast between the rude and formless camps of the barbarians and their own military forts, or castra” (\emph{The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities} [New York: Norton, 1990], p. 47).} A bird’s-eye view of central Chicago in the late
nineteenth century (William Penn’s Philadelphia or New Haven would do
equally well) serves as an example of the grid city (figure 9).


From an administrator’s vantage point, the ground plan of Chicago is
nearly utopian. It offers a quick appreciation of the ensemble, since
the entirety is made up of straight lines, right angles, and
repetitions.\footnote{Well, almost. There are a few streets—among them Lincoln, Archer, and Blue Island—that follow old Indian trails and thus deviate from the geometric logic.} Even the rivers seem scarcely to interrupt the
city’s relentless symmetry. For an outsider—or a policeman—finding an
address is a comparatively simple matter; no local guides are
required. The knowledge of local citizens is not especially privileged
vis-à-vis that of outsiders. If, as is the case in upper Manhattan,
the cross streets are consecutively numbered and are intersected by
longer avenues, also consecutively numbered, the plan acquires even
greater transparency.\footnote{It may have occurred to the reader that certain grid sections of upper Manhattan and Chicago are, despite their formal order, essentially ungoverned and dangerous. No amount of formal order can overcome massive countervailing factors such as poverty, crime, social disorganization, or hostility toward officials. As a sign of the illegibility of such areas, the Census Bureau acknowledges that the number of uncounted African-Americans was six times the number of uncounted whites. The undercount is politically volatile since census figures determine the number of congressional seats to which a state is entitled.} The aboveground order of a grid city
facilitates its underground order in the layout of water pipes, storm
drains, sewers, electric cables, natural gas lines, and subways—an
order no less important to the administrators of a city. Delivering
mail, collecting taxes, conducting a census, moving supplies and
people in and out of the city, putting down a riot or insurrection,
digging for pipes and sewer lines, finding a felon or conscript
(providing he is at the address given), and planning public
transportation, water supply, and trash removal are all made vastly
simpler by the logic of the grid.


Three aspects of this geometric order in human settlement bear emphasis.
The first is that the order in question is most evident, not at street
level, but rather from above and from outside. Like a marcher in a
parade or like a single riveter in a long assembly line, a pedestrian in
the middle of this grid cannot instantly perceive the larger design of
the city. The symmetry is either grasped from a representation—it is in
fact what one would expect if one gave a schoolchild a ruler and a blank
piece of paper—or from the vantage point of a helicopter hovering far
above the ground: in short, a God’s-eye view, or the view of an absolute
ruler. This spatial fact is perhaps inherent in the process of urban or
architectural planning itself, a process that involves miniaturization
and scale models upon which patron and planner gaze down, exactly as if
they were in a helicopter.\footnote{See the mind-opening book by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, \emph{Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).} There is, after all, no other way of
visually imagining what a large-scale construction project will look
like when it is completed except by a miniaturization of this kind. It
follows, I believe, that such plans, which have the scale of toys, are
judged for their sculptural properties and visual order, often from a
perspective that no or very few human observers will ever replicate.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-10.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 9. Map of downtown Chicago, circa 1893}
\end{figure}


The miniaturization imaginatively achieved by scale models of cities
or landscapes was practically achieved with the airplane. The mapping
tradition of the bird’s-eye view, evident in the map of Chicago, was
no longer a mere convention. By virtue of its great distance, an
aerial view resolved what might have seemed ground-level confusion
into an apparently vaster order and symmetry. It would be hard to
exaggerate the importance of the airplane for modernist thought and
planning. By offering a perspective that flattened the topography as
if it were a canvas, flight encouraged new aspirations to “synoptic
vision, rational control, planning, and spatial order.”\footnote{Denis Cosgrove, “The Measure of America,” in James Corner and Alex S. MacLean, eds., \emph{Taking Measures Across the American Landscape} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 4. Mercator maps had, of course, accustomed people to the projection of vast, miniaturized landscapes on a flat plane.}


A second point about an urban order easily legible from outside is
that the grand plan of the ensemble has no necessary relationship to
the order of life as it is experienced by its residents. Although
certain state services may be more easily provided and distant
addresses more easily located, these apparent advantages may be
negated by such perceived disadvantages as the absence of a dense
street life, the intrusion of hostile authorities, the loss of the
spatial irregularities that foster coziness, gathering places for
informal recreation, and neighborhood feeling. The formal order of a
geometrically regular urban space is just that: formal order. Its
visual regimentation has a ceremonial or ideological quality, much
like the order of a parade or a barracks. The fact that such order
works for municipal and state authorities in administering the city is
no guarantee that it works for citizens. Provisionally, then, we must
remain agnostic about the relation between formal spatial order and
social experience.


The third notable aspect of homogeneous, geometrical, uniform property
is its convenience as a standardized commodity for the market. Like
Jefferson’s scheme for surveying or the Torrens system for titling
open land, the grid creates regular lots and blocks that are ideal for
buying and selling. Precisely because they are abstract units detached
from any ecological or topographical reality, they resemble a kind of
currency which is endlessly amenable to aggregation and
fragmentation. This feature of the grid plan suits equally the
surveyor, the planner, and the real-estate speculator. Bureaucratic
and commercial logic, in this instance, go hand in hand. As Mumford
notes, “The beauty of this mechanical pattern, from the commercial
standpoint, should be plain.  This plan offers the engineer none of
those special problems that irregular parcels and curved boundary
lines present. An office boy could figure out the number of square
feet involved in a street opening or in a sale of land: even a
lawyer’s clerk could write a description of the necessary deed of
sale, merely by filling in with the proper dimensions the standard
document. With a T-square and a triangle, finally, the municipal
engineer could, without the slightest training as either an architect
or a sociologist, ‘plan’ a metropolis, with its standard lots, its
standard blocks, its standard width streets\dots{} The very absence of
more specific adaptation to landscape or to human purpose only
increased, by its very indefiniteness, \emph{its general usefulness for
exchange}.”\footnote{Mumford, \emph{The City in History}, p. 422.}


The vast majority of Old World cities are, in fact, some historical
amalgam of a Bruges and a Chicago. Although more than one politician,
dictator, and city planner have devised plans for the total recasting
of an existing city, these dreams came at such cost, both financial
and political, that they have rarely left the drawing
boards. Piecemeal planning, by contrast, is far more common. The
central, older core of many cities remains somewhat like Bruges,
whereas the newer outskirts are more likely to exhibit the marks of
one or more plans. Sometimes, as in the sharp contrast between old
Delhi and the imperial capital of New Delhi, the divergence is
formalized.


Occasionally, authorities have taken draconian steps to retrofit an
existing city. The redevelopment of Paris by the prefect of the Seine,
Baron Haussmann, under Louis Napoleon was a grandiose public works
program stretching from 1853 to 1869. Haussmann’s vast scheme absorbed
unprecedented amounts of public debt, uprooted tens of thousands of
people, and could have been accomplished only by a single executive
authority not directly accountable to the electorate.


The logic behind the reconstruction of Paris bears a resemblance to
the logic behind the transformation of old-growth forests into
scientific forests designed for unitary fiscal management. There was
the same emphasis on simplification, legibility, straight lines,
central management, and a synoptic grasp of the ensemble. As in the
case of the forest, much of the plan was achieved. One chief
difference, however, was that Haussmann’s plan was devised less for
fiscal reasons than for its impact on the conduct and sensibilities of
Parisians. While the plan did create a far more legible fiscal space
in the capital, this was a byproduct of the desire to make the city
more governable, prosperous, healthy, and architecturally
imposing.\footnote{The plan created not only a more legible fiscal space but also the fortunes of the small coterie who used their inside knowledge of the plan to profit from real-estate speculation.} The second difference was, of course, that those
uprooted by the urban planning of the Second Empire could, and did,
strike back. As we shall see, the retrofitting of Paris foreshadows
many of the paradoxes of authoritarian high-modernist planning that we
will soon examine in greater detail.


The plan reproduced in figure 10 shows the new boulevards constructed
to Haussmann’s measure as well as the prerevolutionary inner
boulevards, which were widened and straightened.\footnote{There was an older, quasi-planned, baroque city bequeathed to Paris by her absolutist rulers, especially those prior to Louis XIV, who for his part chose to lavish his planning on a “new space,” Versailles.} But the
retrofit, seen merely as a new street map, greatly underestimates the
transformation. For all the demolition and construction required, for
all the new legibility added to the street plan, the new pattern bore
strong traces of an accommodation with “old-growth” Paris. The outer
boulevards, for example, follow the line of the older customs
(\emph{octroi}) wall of 1787. But Haussmann’s scheme was far more than a
traffic reform. The new legibility of the boulevards was accompanied
by changes that revolutionized daily life: new aqueducts, a much more
effective sewage system, new rail lines and terminals, centralized
markets (Les Halles), gas lines and lighting, and new parks and public
squares.\footnote{As Mark Girouard notes, the plan included public facilities and institutions such as parks (notably the huge Bois de Boulogne), hospitals, schools, colleges, barracks, prisons, and a new opera house (\emph{Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History} [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985], p. 289). Roughly a century later, against greater odds, Robert Moses would undertake a similar retrofit of New York City.} The new Paris created by Louis Napoleon became, by the
turn of the century, a widely admired public works miracle and shrine
for would-be planners from abroad.


At the center of Louis Napoleon’s and Haussmann’s plans for Paris lay
the military security of the state. The redesigned city was, above
all, to be made safe against popular insurrections. As Haussmann
wrote, “The order of this Queen-city is one of the main pre-conditions
of general [public] security.”\footnote{Quoted in John Merriman, “Baron Haussmann’s Two Cities” (typescript, p. 8), later published in French as chap. 9 of Merriman’s \emph{Aux marges de la ville: Fauhourgs et banlieues en France, 1815-1871} (Paris: Seuil, 1994). This part of my discussion is greatly indebted to Merriman’s careful account. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.} Barricades had gone up nine times
in the twenty-five years before 1851. Louis Napoleon and Haussmann had
seen the revolutions of 1830 and 1848; more recently, the June Days
and resistance to Louis Napoleon’s coup represented the largest
insurrection of the century. Louis Napoleon, as a returned exile, was
well aware of how tenuous his hold on power might prove.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-11.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 10. Map of Paris, 1870, showing the principal new streets built between 1850 and 1870}
\end{figure}


The geography of insurrection, however, was not evenly distributed
across Paris. Resistance was concentrated in densely packed,
working-class \emph{quartiers}, which, like Bruges, had complex, illegible
street plans.\footnote{Mumford writes, “Were not the ancient medieval streets of Paris one of the last refuges of urban liberties? No wonder that Napoleon III sanctioned the breaking through of narrow streets and culs-de-sac and the razing of whole quarters to provide wide boulevards. It was the best possible protection against assault from within” (\emph{The City in History}, pp. 369-70).} The 1860 annexation of the “inner suburbs” (located
between the customs wall and the outer fortifications and containing
240,000 residents) was explicitly designed to gain mastery over a
\emph{ceinture sauvage} that had thus far escaped police control. Haussmann
described this area as a “dense belt of suburbs, given over to twenty
different administrations, built at random, covered by an inextricable
network of narrow and tortuous public ways, alleys, and dead-ends,
where a nomadic population without any real ties to the land
[property] and without any effective surveillance, grows at a
prodigious speed.”\footnote{Quoted in Louis Girard, \emph{Nouvelle histoire de Paris: La deuxième république et le second empire, 1848-1870} (Paris, 1981), p. 126. Cited in Merriman, Aux rnarges de la ville, p. 15. The parallels with the later \emph{ceinture rouge}, the leftist working-class suburbs ringing Paris, are striking. Soweto and other black townships in South Africa under apartheid, although established explicitly for the purposes of segregation, also became illegible, subversive spaces from the perspective of the authorities.} Within Paris itself, there were such
revolutionary \emph{foyers} as the Marais and especially the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine, both of which had been determined centers of resistance
to Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état.


The military control of these insurrectionary spaces—spaces that had
not yet been well mapped—was integral to Haussmann’s plan.\footnote{Since the planners lacked a reliable map of the city, the first step was to build temporary wooden towers in order to achieve the triangulation necessary for an accurate map. See David H. Pinkney, \emph{Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), p. 5.} A
series of new avenues between the inner boulevards and the customs
wall was designed to facilitate movement between the barracks on the
outskirts of the city and the subversive districts. As Haussmann saw
it, his new roads would ensure multiple, direct rail and road links
between each district of the city and the military units responsible
for order there.\footnote{Quoted in Jeanne Gaillard, \emph{Paris, la ville}, 1852-1870 (Paris, 1979), p. 38, cited in Merriman, \emph{Aux marges de la ville}, p. 10.} Thus, for example, new boulevards in
northeastern Paris allowed troops to rush from the Courbevoie barracks
to the Bastille and then to subdue the turbulent Faubourg
Saint-Antoine.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 8-9.} Many of the new rail lines and stations were
located with similar strategic goals in mind. Where possible,
insurrectionary quartiers were demolished or broken up by new roads,
public spaces, and commercial development. Explaining the need for a
loan of 50 million francs to begin the work, Léon Faucher emphasized
state security needs: “The interests of public order, no less than
those of salubrity, demand that a wide swath be cut as soon as
possible across this district of barricades.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 9. Translation by Merriman.}


The reconstruction of Paris was also a necessary public-health measure.
And here the steps that the hygienists said would make Paris
more healthful would at the same time make it more efficient
economically and more secure militarily. Antiquated sewers and
cesspools, the droppings of an estimated thirty-seven thousand horses
(in 1850), and the unreliable water supply made Paris literally
pestilential. The city had the highest death rate in France and was
most susceptible to virulent epidemics of cholera; in 1831, the
disease killed 18,400 people, including the prime minister. And it was
in those districts of revolutionary resistance where, because of
crowding and lack of sanitation, the rates of mortality were
highest.\footnote{Pinkney, \emph{Napoleon III}, p. 23. A commonplace of demographic history has been that urban populations in Western Europe, beset with epidemics and generally high mortality, did not successfully reproduce themselves until well into the nineteenth century; the growth of cities came largely from in-migration from the healthier countryside. Although this position has been challenged, the evidence for it is still convincing. See the judicious synthesis and assessment by Jan de Vries, \emph{European Urbanization}, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 175-200.} Haussmann’s Paris was, for those who were not expelled,
a far healthier city; the greater circulation of air and water and the
exposure to sunlight reduced the risk of epidemics just as the
improved circulation of goods and labor (healthier labor, at that)
contributed to the city’s economic well-being. A utilitarian logic of
labor productivity and commercial success went hand in hand with
strategic and public-health concerns.


The politico-aesthetic tastes of the driving force behind the
transformation of Paris, Louis Napoleon himself, were also decisive.
When Haussmann was appointed prefect of the Seine, Louis Napoleon
handed him a map that provided for the central market, the Bois de
Bologne, and many of the streets eventually built. There is no doubt
that Louis Napoleon’s plans drew heavily from the ideas of the Saint
Simonists in their visionary journal \emph{Le globe} and from the model
urban communities sketched by Fourier and Cabet.\footnote{Pinkney, \emph{Napoleon III}, chap. 2.} Their grandiose
designs appealed to his own determination to have the new grandeur of
the capital city serve as testimony to the grandeur of the regime.


As happens in many authoritarian modernizing schemes, the political
tastes of the ruler occasionally trumped purely military and
functional concerns. Rectilinear streets may have admirably assisted
the mobilization of troops against insurgents, but they were also to
be flanked by elegant facades and to terminate in imposing buildings
that would impress visitors.\footnote{Merriman, \emph{Aux marges de la ville}, pp. 7-8. See also T. J. Clark, \emph{The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 35. Louis Napoleon’s and Haussmann’s mania for straight lines was the butt of many jokes. A character in a play by Edmond About, for instance, dreams of the day when the Seine itself will be straightened, because, as he says, “its irregular curve is really rather shocking” (quoted in Clark, \emph{The Painting of Modern Life}, p. 35).} Uniform modern buildings along the
new boulevards may have represented healthier dwellings, but they were
often no more than facades. The zoning regulations were almost
exclusively concerned with the visible surfaces of buildings, but
behind the facades, builders could build crowded, airless tenements,
and many of them did.\footnote{Pinkney, \emph{Napoleon III}, p. 93.}


The new Paris, as T. J. Clark has observed, was intensely visualized:
“Part of Haussmann’s purpose was to give modernity a shape, and he
seemed at the time to have a measure of success in doing so; he built
a set of forms in which the city appeared to be visible, even
intelligible: Paris, to repeat the formula, was becoming a
spectacle.”\footnote{Clark, \emph{The Painting of Modern Life}, p. 66. For a superb analysis of how tidy Orientalist expositions depicting Old Cairo, the peasant village, and so on gave Arab visitors to Paris a completely new way of seeing their society, see Timothy Mitchell, \emph{Colonizing Egypt} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), especially chaps. 1-3.}


Legibility, in this case, was achieved by a much more pronounced
segregation of the population by class and function. Each fragment of
Paris increasingly took on a distinctive character of dress, activity,
and wealth—bourgeois shopping district, prosperous residential
quarter, industrial suburb, artisan quarter, bohemian quarter. It was
a more easily managed and administered city and a more “readable” city
because of Haussmann’s heroic simplifications.


As in most ambitious schemes of modern order, there was a kind of evil
twin to Haussmann’s spacious and imposing new capital. The hierarchy
of urban space in which the rebuilt center of Paris occupied pride of
place presupposed the displacement of the urban poor toward the
periphery.\footnote{Gaillard, Paris, \emph{la ville}, p. 568, quoted in Merriman, Aux marges de la ville, p. 20.} Nowhere was this more true than in Belleville, a
popular working-class quarter to the northeast which grew into a town
of sixty thousand people by 1856. Many of its residents had been
disinherited by Haussmann’s demolitions; some called it a community of
outcasts. By the 1860s, it had become a suburban equivalent of what
the Faubourg Saint-Antoine had been earlier-an illegible,
insurrectionary \emph{foyer}. “The problem was not that Belleville was not a
community, but that it became the sort of community which the
bourgeoisie feared, which the police could not penetrate, which the
government could not regulate, where the popular classes, with all
their unruly passions and political resentments, held the upper
hand.”\footnote{David Harvey, \emph{Consciousness and the Urban Experience} (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 165, quoted in Merriman, \emph{Aux marges de la ville}, p. 12. See also David Harvey, \emph{The Urban Experience} (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), which covers much of the same ground.} If, as many claim, the Commune of Paris in 1871 was partly
an attempt to reconquer the city (“la reconquete de la Ville par la
Ville”)\footnote{Jacques Rougerie, \emph{Paris libre, 1871} (Paris, 1971), p. 19, quoted in Merriman, \emph{Aux inarges de la ville}, p. 27.} by those exiled to the periphery by Haussmann, then
Belleville was the geographical locus of that sentiment. The
Communards, militarily on the defensive in late May 1871, retreated
toward the northeast and Belleville, where, at the Belleville town
hall, they made their last stand. Treated as a den of revolutionaries,
Belleville was subjected to a brutal military occupation.


Two diagnostic ironies marked the suppression of the Commune. The first
was that the strategic design of Haussmann was triumphant. The
boulevards and rail lines that the Second Empire had hoped would foil a
popular insurrection had proved their value. “Thanks to Haussmann, the
Versailles army could move in one fell swoop from the Place du Chateau
d’eau to Belleville.”\footnote{Merriman, \emph{Aux marges de la ville}, p. 28.} The second irony was that, just as the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine had been effaced by Haussmann’s demolitions, so too was
much of the newly offending quarter obliterated by the building of the
Eglise Sacré Coeur, built “in the guilty town \dots{} as restitution made on
the site of the crime.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 30.}

\section{The Creation of Surnames}


Some of the categories that we most take for granted and with which we
now routinely apprehend the social world had their origin in state
projects of standardization and legibility. Consider, for example,
something as fundamental as permanent surnames.


A vignette from the popular film \emph{Witness} illustrates how, when among
strangers, we do rely on surnames as key navigational aids.\footnote{I owe this astute observation about \emph{The Witness} to Benedict Anderson. More generally, his analysis of the census and the map as totalizing classificatory grids, particularly in colonial settings, has greatly influenced my thinking here. See Anderson, \emph{Imagined Comunities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism} (London: Verso, 1983), and also the remarkable book by Thongchai Winichakul, \emph{Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation} (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).} The
detective in the film is attempting to locate a young Amish boy who
may have witnessed a murder. Although the detective has a surname to
go on, he is thwarted by several aspects of Amish traditionalism,
including the antique German dialect spoken by the Amish. His first
instinct is, of course, to reach for the telephone book—a list of
proper names and addresses—but the Amish don’t have
telephones. Furthermore, he learns, the Amish have a very small number
of last names. His quandary reminds us that the great variety of
surnames and given names in the United States allows us to identify
unambiguously a large number of individuals whom we may never have
met. A world without such names is bewildering; indeed, the detective
finds Amish society so opaque that he needs a native tracker to find
his way.


Customary naming practices throughout much of the world are enormously
rich. Among some peoples, it is not uncommon for individuals to have
different names during different stages of life (infancy, childhood,
adulthood) and in some cases after death; added to these are names used
for joking, rituals, and mourning and names used for interactions with
same-sex friends or with in-laws. Each name is specific to a certain
phase of life, social setting, or interlocutor. A single individual will
frequently be called by several different names, depending on the stage
of life and the person addressing him or her. To the question “What is
your name?” which has a more unambiguous answer in the contemporary
West, the only plausible answer is “It depends.”\footnote{See, for example, William E. Wormsley, “Traditional Change in Imbonggu Names and Naming Practices,” \emph{Names} 28 (1980): 183-94.}


For the insider who grows up using these naming practices, they are
both legible and clarifying. Each name and the contexts of its use
convey important social knowledge. Like the network of alleys in
Bruges, the assortment of local weights and measures, and the
intricacies of customary land tenure, the complexity of naming has
some direct and often quite practical relations to local purposes. For
an outsider, however, this byzantine complexity of names is a
formidable obstacle to understanding local society. Finding someone,
let alone situating him or her in a kinship network or tracing the
inheritance of property, becomes a major undertaking. If, in addition,
the population in question has reason to conceal its identity and its
activities from external authority, the camouflage value of such
naming practices is considerable.


The invention of permanent, inherited patronyms was, after the
administrative simplification of nature (for example, the forest) and
space (for example, land tenure), the last step in establishing the
necessary preconditions of modern statecraft. In almost every case it
was a state project, designed to allow officials to identify,
unambiguously, the majority of its citizens. When successful, it went
far to create a legible people.\footnote{The adoption of permanent, inherited patronyms went far, but not the whole way. How is a state to associate a name, however unique and unambiguous, with an individual? Like identity cards, social security numbers, and pass systems, names require that the citizenry cooperate by carrying them and producing them on the demand of an official. Cooperation is secured in most modern state systems by making a clear identity a prerequisite for receiving entitlements; in more coercive systems, harsh penalties are exacted for failure to carry identification documents. If, however, there is widespread defiance, individuals will either fail to identify themselves or use false identities. The ultimate identity card, then, is an ineradicable mark on the body: a tattoo, a fingerprint, a DNA “signature.”} Tax and tithe rolls, property
rolls, conscription lists, censuses, and property deeds recognized in
law were inconceivable without some means of fixing an individual’s
identity and linking him or her to a kin group. Campaigns to assign
permanent patronyms have typically taken place, as one might expect,
in the context of a state’s exertions to put its fiscal system on a
sounder and more lucrative footing. Fearing, with good reason, that an
effort to enumerate and register them could be a prelude to some new
tax burden or conscription, local officials and the population at
large often resisted such campaigns.


If permanent surnames were largely a project of official legibility,
then they should have appeared earliest in those societies with
precocious states. China provides a striking example.\footnote{I am especially grateful to Bill Jenner and Ian Wilson of the Australian National University and to Paul Smith of Haverford College for their generous advice about China. The Qin and Han administrative plans for population registration were ambitious, but how completely their goals were realized in practice remains an important question. Jenner contends that the goals were largely realized, whereas Alexander Woodside claims that slippage must have been considerable.} By roughly
the fourth century B.C. (although the exact timing and
comprehensiveness are in dispute), the Qin dynasty had apparently
begun imposing surnames on much of its population and enumerating them
for the purposes of taxes, forced labor, and conscription.\footnote{See, for example, W. J. F. Jenner, “Freedom and Backwardness: Europe and China,” paper delivered at “Ideas of Freedom in Asia,” Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, July 4-6, 1994; and Patricia Ebrey, “The Chinese Family and the Spread of Confucian Values,” in Gilbert Rozman, ed., \emph{The East Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and Its Modern Adaptation} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 45-83.} This
initiative may well have been the origin of the term “laobaixing,”
meaning, literally, “the old one hundred surnames,” which in modern
China has come to mean “the common people.” Before this, the fabled
Chinese patrilineage, while established among ruling houses and
related lines, was absent among commoners. They did not have surnames,
nor did they even imitate elite practices in this respect. The
assigning of patronyms by family was integral to state policy
promoting the status of (male) family heads, giving them legal
jurisdiction over their wives, children, and juniors and, not
incidentally, holding them accountable for the fiscal obligations of
the entire family.\footnote{Ebrey, “The Chinese Family,” pp. 55-57.} This (Qin) policy required registering the
entire population, after which the “hodgepodge of terms by which
people were called were all classified as \emph{hsing} [surname], to be
passed down to their patrilineal descendants indefinitely.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 59.} On
this account, both the establishment of permanent patronyms and the
creation of the patrilineal family itself can be attributed to early
state simplification.


Until at least the fourteenth century, the great majority of Europeans
did not have permanent patronymics.\footnote{To my knowledge, Iceland is the only European nation that had not adopted permanent surnames by the late twentieth century.} 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.


We can learn something about the creation of permanent patronyms in
Europe by the documentation left behind from the failed census
(\emph{catasto}) of the Florentine state in 1427.\footnote{This account of the Florentine census is drawn entirely from David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, \emph{Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).} The catasto was an
audacious attempt to rationalize the state’s revenues and military
strength by specifying its subjects and their wealth, residences,
landholdings, and ages.\footnote{The matter of age, like the matter of landholding, was a vastly different concept in the state’s hands than it was in popular practice. See ibid., pp. 162-69. In local practice, exact ages were unimportant. Approximate ages and birth order (e.g., oldest son, youngest son) were more useful; in the catasto this is reflected by the tendency to declare ages in units of five or ten years (e.g., thirty-five, forty, fortyfive, fifty, and sixty years). For the state, however, exact age was important for several reasons. The age of “fiscal adulthood” as well as liability for conscription was eighteen, and, beyond age sixty, one was no longer responsible for capitation taxes. As one might expect, there was a demographically improbable clustering of declarations just below age eighteen and just above sixty. Like the surname, the designation of age, in the strict, linear, chronological sense, originates as a state project.} Close study of these records
demonstrates, first, that, as in the Chinese case, state initiative
created new surnames rather than simply recording existing
surnames. It is thus often impossible to know whether a state-recorded
surname has any social existence outside the role of the text in which
it is inscribed. Second, the variable imposition of permanent surnames
within a territory—in this case Tuscany—serves as a rough-and-ready
gauge of state capacity.


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. Beyond this narrow
segment of society and a small urban patriciate that copied its
practices, there were no permanent family names.


How, in this case, was the catasto office to pinpoint and register an
individual, let alone his location, his property, and his age? When
making his declaration, a typical Tuscan provided not only his own
given name but those of his father and perhaps his grandfather as
well, in quasi-biblical fashion (Luigi, son of Giovanni, son of
Paolo). Given the limited number of baptismal names and the tendency
of many families to repeat names in alternate generations, even this
sequence might not suffice for unambiguous identification. The subject
might then add his profession, his nickname, or a personal
characteristic. There is no evidence that any of these designations
was a permanent patronym, although this exercise and others like it
might have eventually served to crystallize surnames, at least for
documentary purposes. In the final analysis, the Florentine state was
inadequate to the administrative feat intended by the catasto. Popular
resistance, the noncompliance of many local elites, and the
arduousness and cost of the census exercise doomed the project, and
officials returned to the earlier fiscal system.


What evidence we have suggests that second names of any kind became
rarer as distance from the state’s fiscal reach increased. Whereas
one-third of the households in Florence declared a second name, the
proportion dropped to one-fifth for secondary towns and to one-tenth
in the countryside. It was not until the seventeenth century that
family names crystallized in the most remote and poorest areas of
Tuscany—the areas that would have had the least contact with
officialdom.


A comparable connection between state building and the invention of
permanent patronyms exists for fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
England. As in Tuscany, in England only wealthy aristocratic families
tended to have fixed surnames. In the English case such names referred
typically to families’ places of origin in Normandy (for example,
Baumont, Percy, Disney) or to the places in England that they held in
fief from William the Conqueror (for example, Gerard de Sussex). For
the rest of the male population, the standard practice of linking only
father and son by way of identification prevailed.\footnote{In the West, women, domestic servants, and tied laborers were typically the last to adopt surnames (and to be given the vote), because they were legally subsumed as minors in the charge of the male head of family.} Thus, 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). Note that the grandson’s name, by itself, bore no
evidence of his grandfather’s identity, complicating the tracing of
descent through names alone. 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).\footnote{Other surnames referring to fathers are not quite so obvious. Thus the name “Victor Hugo” would originally have meant simply “Victor, son of Hugo.”} At the time
of their establishment, last names often had a kind of local logic to
them: John who owned a mill became John Miller; John who made cart
wheels became John Wheelwright; John who was physically small became
John Short. As their male descendants, whatever their occupations or
stature, retained the patronyms, the names later assumed an arbitrary
cast.


The development of the personal surname (literally, a name added to
another name, and not to be confused with a permanent patronym) went
hand in hand with the development of written, official documents such
as tithe records, manorial dues rolls, marriage registers, censuses,
tax records, and land records.\footnote{I am indebted to Kate Stanton, an astute research assistant, for her background research on this issue.} They were necessary to the
successful conduct of any administrative exercise involving large
numbers of people who had to be individually identified and who were
not known personally by the authorities. Imagine the dilemma of a
tithe or capitation-tax collector faced with a male population,
90 percent of whom bore just six Christian names (John, William,
Thomas, Robert, Richard, and Henry).  Some second designation was
absolutely essential for the records, and, if the subject suggested
none, it was invented for him by the recording clerk. These second
designations and the rolls of names that they generated were to the
legibility of the population what uniform measurement and the
cadastral map were to the legibility of real property. While the
subject might normally prefer the safety of anonymity, once he was
forced to pay the tax, it was then in his interest to be accurately
identified in order to avoid paying the same tax twice. Many of these
fourteenth-century surnames were clearly nothing more than
administrative fictions designed to make a population fiscally
legible. Many of the subjects whose “surnames” appear in the documents
were probably unaware of what had been written down, and, for the
great majority, the surnames had no social existence whatever outside
the document.\footnote{See C. M. Matthews, \emph{English Surnames} (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), pp. 35-48.} Only on very rare occasions does one encounter an
entry, such as “William Carter, tailor,” that implies that we may be
dealing with a permanent patronym.


The increasing intensity of interaction with the state and statelike
structures (large manors, the church) exactly parallels the
development of permanent, heritable patronyms. Thus, when Edward I
clarified the system of landholding, establishing primogeniture and
hereditary copyhold tenure for manorial land, he provided a powerful
incentive for the adoption of permanent patronyms. Taking one’s
father’s surname became, for the eldest son at least, part of a claim
to the property on the father’s death.\footnote{As Matthews notes, “The humble peasant with only one virgate of land was as anxious to claim it by right of being his father’s eldest son as the rich man inheriting a large estate. The land could be claimed and awarded only at the Manorial Court, being held ‘by copy of the Court Roll’ [that is, being a copyhold], which meant that the life tenant’s name was inscribed there on permanent record. This system provided a direct incentive to men to keep the same surname that had been put down on the roll for their father and grandfather” (ibid., p. 44). And given the vagaries of the mortality rate in fourteenth-century England, younger sons might want to keep the name as well, just in case.} Now that property claims
were subject to state validation, surnames that had once been mere
bureaucratic fantasies took on a social reality of their own. One
imagines that for a long time English subjects had in effect two
names—their local name and an “official,” fixed patronym. As the
frequency of interaction with impersonal administrative structures
increased, the official name came to prevail in all but a man’s
intimate circle. Those subjects living at a greater distance, both
socially and geographically, from the organs of state power, as did
the Tuscans, acquired permanent patronyms much later. The upper
classes and those living in the south of England thus acquired
permanent surnames before the lower classes and those living in the
north did. The Scottish and Welsh acquired them even later.\footnote{In historical documents one can occasionally glimpse a moment when a permanent surname seems to gel. Under Henry VIII in the early sixteenth century, for example, a Welshman who appeared in court was asked for his name, and he answered, in the Welsh fashion, “Thomas Ap [son of] William, Ap Thomas, Ap Richard, Ap Hoel, Ap Evan Vaughan.” He was scolded by the judge, who instructed him to “leave the old manner\dots{} whereupon he after called himself Moston, according to the name of his principal house, and left that name to his posteritie” (William Camden, \emph{Remains Concerning Britain}, ed. R. D. Dunn [1605; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984], p. 122). This “administrative” last name almost certainly remained unknown to Thomas’s neighbors.}


State naming practices, like state mapping practices, were inevitably
associated with taxes (labor, military service, grain, revenue,) and
hence aroused popular resistance. The great English peasant rising of
1381 (often called the Wat Tyler Rebellion) is attributed to an
unprecedented decade of registrations and assessments of poll
taxes.\footnote{See the classic study by Rodney Hilton, \emph{Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381} (New York: Viking Press, 1977), pp. 160-64.} For English as well as for Tuscan peasants, a census of
all adult males could not but appear ominous, if not ruinous.


The imposition of permanent surnames on colonial populations offers us
a chance to observe a process, telescoped into a decade or less, that
in the West might have taken several generations. Many of the same
state objectives animate both the European and the colonial exercises,
but in the colonial case, the state is at once more bureaucratized and
less tolerant of popular resistance. The very brusqueness of colonial
naming casts the purposes and paradoxes of the process in sharp
relief.


Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the Philippines under the
Spanish.\footnote{I am particularly grateful to Rosanne Ruttan, Otto van den Muijzenberg, Harold Conklin, and Charles Bryant for putting me on the track of the Philippine case. The key document is Domingo Abella, ed., \emph{Catalogo alfabetico de Apellidos} (Manila: National Archives, 1973). See also the short account in O. D. Corpuz, \emph{The Roots of the Filipino Nation}, vol. 1 (Quezon City: Aklahi Foundation, 1989), pp. 479-80. For a perceptive analysis of naming and identity formation among the Karo-Batak of colonial East Sumatra, see Mary Margaret Steedly, “The Importance of Proper Names: Language and ‘National’ Identity in Colonial Karoland,” \emph{American Ethnologist} 23, no. 3 (1996): 447-75.} Filipinos were instructed by the decree of November 21,
1849, to take on permanent Hispanic surnames. The author of the decree
was Governor (and Lieutenant General) Narciso Claveria y Zaldua, a
meticulous administrator as determined to rationalize names as he had
been determined to rationalize existing law, provincial boundaries,
and the calendar.\footnote{For nearly three hundred years, the Spanish calendar for the Philippines had been one day ahead of the Spanish calendar, because Magellan’s expedition had not, of course, adjusted for their westward travel halfway around the globe.} He had observed, as his decree states, that
Filipinos generally lacked individual surnames, which might
“distinguish them by families,” and that their practice of adopting
baptismal names drawn from a small group of saints’ names resulted in
great “confusion.” The remedy was the \emph{catalogo}, a compendium not
only of personal names but also of nouns and adjectives drawn from
flora, fauna, minerals, geography, and the arts and intended to be
used by the authorities in assigning permanent, inherited
surnames. Each local official was to be given a supply of surnames
sufficient for his jurisdiction, “taking care that the distribution be
made by letters [of the alphabet].”\footnote{Abella, \emph{Catalogo alfabetico de Apellidos}, p. viii.} In practice, each town was
given a number of pages from the alphabetized catalogo, producing
whole towns with surnames beginning with the same letter. In
situations where there has been little in-migration in the past 150 years,
the traces of this administrative exercise are still perfectly
visible across the landscape: “For example, in the Bikol region, the
entire alphabet is laid out like a garland over the provinces of
Albay, Sorsogon, and Catanduanes which in 1849 belonged to the single
jurisdiction of Albay.  Beginning with \emph{A} at the provincial capital,
the letters \emph{B} and \emph{C} mark the towns along the coast beyond Tabaco
to Tiwi. We return and trace along the coast of Sorsogon the letters
\emph{E} to \emph{L}; then starting down the Iraya Valley at Daraga with \emph{M}, we
stop with \emph{S} to Polangui and Libon, and finish the alphabet with a
quick tour around the island of Catanduanes.”\footnote{Ibid., p. vii.}


The confusion for which the decree is the antidote is largely that of
the administrator and the tax collector. Universal last names, they
believe, will facilitate the administration of justice, finance, and
public order as well as make it simpler for prospective marriage
partners to calculate their degree of consanguinity.\footnote{As if the Filipinos did not have perfectly adequate oral and written genealogical schemes to achieve the same end.} For a
utilitarian state builder of Claveria’s temper, however, the ultimate
goal was a complete and legible list of subjects and taxpayers. This
is abundantly clear from the short preamble to the decree: “In view of
the extreme usefulness and practicality of this measure, the time has
come to issue a directive for the formation of a civil register
[formerly a clerical function], which may not only fulfill and ensure
the said objectives, but may also serve as a basis for the statistics
of the country, guarantee the collection of taxes, the regular
performance of personal services, and the receipt of payment for
exemptions. It likewise provides exact information of the movement of
the population, thus avoiding unauthorized migrations, hiding
taxpayers, and other abuses.”\footnote{Abella, \emph{Catalogo alfabetico de Apellidos}, p. viii.}


Drawing on the accurate lists of citizens throughout the colony,
Claveria envisioned each local official constructing a table of eight
columns specifying tribute obligations, communal labor obligations,
first name, surname, age, marital status, occupation, and
exemptions. A ninth column, for updating the register, would record
alterations in status and would be submitted for inspection every
month. Because of their accuracy and uniformity, these registers would
allow the state to compile the precise statistics in Manila that would
make for fiscal efficiency. The daunting cost of assigning surnames to
the entire population and building a complete and discriminating list
of taxpayers was justified by forecasting that the list, while it
might cost as much as twenty thousand pesos to create, would yield one
hundred thousand or two hundred thousand pesos in continuing annual
revenue.


What if the Filipinos chose to ignore their new last names? This
possibility had already crossed Claveria’s mind, and he took steps to
make sure that the names would stick. Schoolteachers were ordered to
forbid their students to address or even know one another by any name
except the officially inscribed family name. Those teachers who did
not apply the rule with enthusiasm were to be punished. More
efficacious perhaps, given the minuscule school enrollment, was the
proviso that forbade priests and military and civil officials from
accepting any document, application, petition, or deed that did not
use the official surnames. All documents using other names would be
null and void.


Actual practice, as one might expect, fell considerably short of
Claveria’s administrative utopia of legible and regimented taxpayers.
The continued existence of such non-Spanish surnames as Magsaysay or
Macapagal suggests that part of the population was never mustered for
this exercise. Local officials submitted incomplete returns or none at
all. And there was another serious problem, one that Claveria had
foreseen but inadequately provided for. The new registers rarely
recorded, as they were supposed to, the previous names used by the
registrants. This meant that it became exceptionally difficult for
officials to trace back property and taxpaying to the period before
the transformation of names. The state had in effect blinded its own
hindsight by the very success of its new scheme.


With surnames, as with forests, land tenure, and legible cities,
actual practice never achieved anything like the simplified and
uniform perfection to which its designers had aspired. As late as
1872, an attempt at taking a census proved a complete fiasco, and it
was not tried again until just before the revolution of
1896. Nevertheless, by the twentieth century, the vast majority of
Filipinos bore the surnames that Claveria had dreamed up for them. The
increasing weight of the state in people’s lives and the state’s
capacity to insist on its rules and its terms ensured that.


Universal last names are a fairly recent historical
phenomenon. 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. While
the utilitarian state was committed to a complete inventory of its
population, liberal ideas of citizenship, which implied voting rights
and conscription, also contributed greatly to the standardization of
naming practices. The legislative imposition of permanent surnames is
particularly clear in the case of Western European Jews who had no
tradition of last names. A Napoleonic decree “concernant les Juifs qui
n’ont pas de nom de famille et de prenoms fixes,” in 1808, mandated
last names.\footnote{For the best treatment of permanent patronyms in France and their relation to state-building, see the insightful book by Anne Lefebvre-Teillard, \emph{Le nom: Droit et histoire} (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990). She examines the process whereby state officials, both administrative and judicial, gradually authorized certain naming practices and limited the conditions under which names might be changed. The civil registers, along with the \emph{livret de famille} (family pass book), established toward the end of the nineteenth century, became important tools for police administration, conscription, civil and criminal justice, and elections monitoring. The standard opening line of an encounter between a policeman and a civilian—“Vos papiers, Monsieur”—dates from this period. Having experienced the “blinding” of the administration caused by the destruction of civil registers in the burning of the Hôtel de Ville (city hall) and the Palais de Justice at the end of the Commune in 1871, officials took care to keep duplicate registers.} Austrian legislation of 1787, as part of the
emancipation process, required Jews to choose last names or, if they
refused, to have fixed last names chosen for them. In Prussia the
emancipation of the Jews was contingent upon the adoption of
surnames.\footnote{Robert Chazon, “Names: Medieval Period and Establishment of Surnames,” \emph{Encyclopedia Judaica} (Jerusalem and Philadelphia: Keter Publishers and Coronet Books, 1982), 12:809-13. In the 1930s the Nazis passed a series of “name decrees” whose sole purpose was to distinguish what they had determined as the Jewish population from the Gentile population. Jews who had Aryan-sounding names were required to change them (or to add “Israel” or “Sarah”), as were Aryans who had Jewish-sounding names. Lists of approved names were compiled, and contested cases were submitted to the Reich Office for Genealogical Research. Once the administrative exercise was complete, a person’s name alone could single out him or her for deportation or execution. See Robert M. Rennick, “The Nazi Name Decrees of the Nineteen Thirties,” \emph{Journal of the American Name Society} 16 (1968): 65-88.} Many of the immigrants to the United States, Jews and
non-Jews alike, had no permanent surnames when they set sail. Very
few, however, made it through the initial paperwork without an
official last name that their descendants carry still.


The process of creating fixed last names continues in much of the
Third World and on the “tribal frontiers” of more developed
countries.\footnote{Turkey, for example, adopted surnames only in the 1920s as a part of Ataturk’s modernization campaign. Suits, hats (rather than fezzes), permanent last names, and modern nationhood all fit together in Ataturk’s scheme. Reze Shah, the father of the deposed Shah, ordered all Iranians to take the last name of their town of residence in order to rationalize the country’s family names. Ali Akbar Rafsan jani thus means All Akbar from Rafsanjan. Although this system has the advantage of designating the homes of the generation that adopted it, it certainly doesn’t clarify much locally in Rafsanjan. It may well be that the state is particularly concerned with monitoring those who are mobile or “out of place.”} Today, of course, there are now many other
state-impelled standard designations that have vastly improved the
capacity of the state to identify an individual. 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. But the surname was a first and
crucial step toward making individual citizens officially legible, and
along with the photograph, it is still the first fact on documents of
identity.

\section{The Directive for a Standard, Official Language}


The great cultural barrier imposed by a separate language is perhaps
the most effective guarantee that a social world, easily accessible to
insiders, will remain opaque to outsiders.\footnote{Dietary laws that all but preclude commensality are also powerful devices for social exclusion. If one were designating a set of cultural rules in order to wall off a group from surrounding groups, making sure its members cannot easily speak to or eat with others is a splendid beginning.} Just as the stranger
or state official might need a local guide to find his way around
sixteenthcentury Bruges, he would need a local interpreter in order to
understand and be understood in an unfamiliar linguistic
environment. A distinct language, however, is a far more powerful
basis for autonomy than a complex residential pattern. It is also the
bearer of a distinctive history, a cultural sensibility, a literature,
a mythology, a musical past.\footnote{This is true despite the fact, as Benedict Anderson insightfully points out, that the “national past” is so often fitted with a bogus pedigree.} In this respect, a unique language
represents a formidable obstacle to state knowledge, let alone
colonization, control, manipulation, instruction, or propaganda.


Of all state simplifications, then, the imposition of a single,
official language may be the most powerful, and it is the precondition
of many other simplifications. This process should probably be viewed,
as Eugen Weber suggests in the case of France, as one of domestic
colonization in which various foreign provinces (such as Brittany and
Occitanie) are linguistically subdued and culturally
incorporated.\footnote{Eugen Weber, \emph{Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914} (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), chap. 6. Weber points out that in the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century, fully half of the Frenchmen reaching adulthood had a native tongue other than French. See Peter Sahlins’s remarkable book \emph{Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) for a discussion of French language policy at its periphery. Although administrative official languages have a lineage that goes back to at least the sixteenth century, the imposition of a national language in other spheres comes in the mid-nineteenth century at the earliest.} In the first efforts made to insist on the use of
French, it is clear that the state’s objective was the legibility of
local practice. Officials insisted that every legal document—whether a
will, document of sale, loan instrument, contract, annuity, or
property deed—be drawn up in French. As long as these documents
remained in local vernaculars, they were daunting to an official sent
from Paris and virtually impossible to bring into conformity with
central schemes of legal and administrative standardization. The
campaign of linguistic centralization was assured of some success
since it went hand in hand with an expansion of state power. By the
late nineteenth century, dealing with the state was unavoidable for
all but a small minority of the population. Petitions, court cases,
school documents, applications, and correspondence with officials were
all of necessity written in French. One can hardly imagine a more
effective formula for immediately devaluing local knowledge and
privileging all those who had mastered the official linguistic
code. It was a gigantic shift in power. Those at the periphery who
lacked competence in French were rendered mute and marginal. They were
now in need of a local guide to the new state culture, which appeared
in the form of lawyers, \emph{notaires}, schoolteachers, clerks, and
soldiers.\footnote{For an illuminating analytical account of this process, see Abram de Swaan, \emph{In Care of the State} (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988), especially chap. 3, “The Elementary Curriculum as a National Communication Code,” pp. 52-117.}


A cultural project, as one might suspect, lurked behind the linguistic
centralization. French was seen as the bearer of a national civilization;
the purpose of imposing it was not merely to have provincials
digest the Code Napoleon but also to bring them Voltaire, Racine,
Parisian newspapers, and a national education. As Weber provocatively
puts it, “There can be no clearer expression of imperialist sentiment,
a white man’s burden of Francophony, whose first conquests were to be
right at home.”\footnote{Weber, \emph{Peasants into Frenchmen}, p. 73.} Where the command of Latin had once defined
participation in a wider culture for a small elite, the command of
standard French now defined full participation in French culture. The
implicit logic of the move was to define a hierarchy of cultures,
relegating local languages and their regional cultures to, at best, a
quaint provincialism. At the apex of this implicit pyramid was Paris
and its institutions: ministries, schools, academies (including the
guardian of the language, l’Académie Française). The relative success
of this cultural project hinged on both coercion and inducements. “It
was centralization,” says Alexandre Sanguinetti, “which permitted the
making of France despite the French, or in the midst of their
indifference\dots{}  France is a deliberate political construction for
whose creation the central power has never ceased to fight.”\footnote{Quoted in ibid., p. 113.}
Standard (Parisian) French and Paris were not only focal points of
power; they were also magnets.  The growth of markets, physical
mobility, new careers, political patronage, public service, and a
national educational system all meant that facility in French and
connections to Paris were the paths of social advancement and material
success. It was a state simplification that promised to reward those
who complied with its logic and to penalize those who ignored it.

\section{The Centralization of Traffic Patterns}


The linguistic centralization impelled by the imposition of Parisian
French as the official standard was replicated in a centralization of
traffic. Just as the new dispensation in language made Paris the hub
of communication, so the new road and rail systems increasingly
favored movement to and from Paris over interregional or local
traffic. State policy resembled, in computer parlance, a “hardwiring”
pattern that made the provinces far more accessible, far more legible,
to central authorities than even the absolutist kings had imagined.


Let us contrast, in an overly schematic way, a relatively
uncentralized network of communication, on one hand, with a relatively
centralized network, on the other. If mapped, the uncentralized
pattern would be the physical image of the actual movements of goods
and people along routes \emph{not} created by administrative fiat. Such
movements would not be random; they would reflect both the ease of
travel along valleys, by watercourses, and around defiles and also the
location of important resources and ritual sites. Weber captures the
wealth of human activities that animate these movements across the
landscape: “They served professional pursuits, like the special trails
followed by glassmakers, carriers or sellers of salt, potters, or
those that led to forges, mines, quarries, and hemp fields, or those
along which flax, hemp, linen, and yarn were taken to market. There
were pilgrimage routes and procession trails.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 197.}


If we can imagine, for the sake of argument, a place where physical
resources are evenly distributed and there are no great physical
barriers to movement (such as mountains or swamps), then a map of
paths in use might form a network resembling a dense concentration of
capillaries (figure 11). The tracings would, of course, never be
entirely random. Market towns based on location and resources would
constitute small hubs, as would religious shrines, quarries, mines,
and other important sites.\footnote{For a careful depiction of the geography of standard market areas, see G. William Skinner, \emph{Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China} (Tucson: Association of Asian Studies, 1975).} In the French case as well, the
network of roads would have long reflected the centralizing ambitions
of local lords and the nation’s monarchs. The point of this
illustrative idealization, however, is to depict a landscape of
communication routes that is only lightly marked by state
centralization. It would resemble in many ways the cityscape of late
fourteenth-century Bruges, shown earlier.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-12.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 11. Paths created by use and topography}
\end{figure}


Beginning with Colbert, the state-building modernizers of France were
bent on superimposing on this pattern a carefully planned grid of
administrative centralization.\footnote{Much of the following material on the centralization of transport in France comes from the fine survey by Cecil O. Smith, Jr., “The Longest Run: Public Engineers and Planning in France,” American Historical Review 95, no. 3 (June 1990): 657-92. See also the excellent discussion and comparison of the Corps des Ponts et des Chaussees with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Theodore Porter, \emph{Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), chap. 6.} Their scheme, never entirely
realized, was to align highways, canals, and ultimately rail lines to
radiate out from Paris like the spokes of a wheel (figure 12). The
similarity between this grid and the \emph{tire-aire} of the well-managed
state forest as conceived by Colbert was not accidental. They were
both devised to maximize access and to facilitate central control. And
the kind of simplification involved was, again, entirely relative to
location. For an official at the hub, it was now much easier to go to
\emph{A} or to \emph{B} along the new routes. The layout was designed “to serve
the government and the cities and lacking a network of supporting
thoroughfares had little to do with popular habit or
need. Administrative highways, a historian of the center called them,
[were] made for troops to march on and for tax revenues to reach the
treasury.”\footnote{Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, p. 195.} For anyone wanting to travel or move goods between \emph{A}
and \emph{B}, however, things were not so simple. Just as all documents had
to “pass through” the official legal language, so too did much of the
commercial traffic have to pass through the capital.


The driving intellectual force behind this \emph{esprit géométrique} was,
and has remained, the renowned engineers of the Corps des Ponts et
Chaussées.\footnote{There were continual debates over various plans: their cost, their commercial viability, and their military efficacy. Some of this history can be found in Francois Caron, \emph{Histoire de l’exploitation d’un grand reseau: La compagnie des chemins de fer du Nord} (Paris: Mouton, 1973), and Louis-Maurice Jouffroy, \emph{L’ère du rail} (Paris: A. Colin, 1953). I thank Ezra Suleiman for his bibliographical help.} Victor Legrand, the director of Ponts et des
Chaussees, was the originator of the \emph{belle idée} of seven grand lines
of junction linking Paris to points from the Atlantic to the
Mediterranean. His plan became known as the Legrand Star and was
proposed first for canals and then, with greater effect, for railroads
(among them the Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est).\footnote{The technical affinity of rail travel to straight lines and exact timetables becomes, along with “streamlining,” an important aesthetic in modernism generally.}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-13.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 12. Centralized traffic hub}
\end{figure}


As a centralizing aesthetic, the plan defied the canons of commercial
logic or cost-effectiveness. The first phase of the grid, the line
from Paris east to Strasbourg and the frontier, ran straight through
the plateau of Brie rather than following the centers of population
along the Marne. By refusing to conform to the topography in its quest
of geometric perfection, the railway line was ruinously expensive
compared to English or German railroads. The army had also adopted the
Ponts et Chaussees logic, believing that direct rail lines to the
borders would be militarily advantageous. They were proven tragically
wrong in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.\footnote{Smith, “The Longest Run.” pp. 685-71. Smith claims that the Legrand Star meant that many reservists being mustered for World War I had to funnel through Paris, whereas, under a more decentralized rail plan, there would have been far more direct routes to the front: “Some reservists in Strasbourg [were] journeying via the capital to don their uniforms in Bordeaux before returning to fight in Alsace.” General Von Möltke observed that he had six different rail lines for moving troops from the North German Confederation to the war zone between the Moselle and the Rhine, while French troops coming to the front had to detrain at Strasbourg or Metz, with the Vosges mountains in between. Finally, and perhaps most important, once Paris was surrounded, the Legrand Star was left headless. After the war, the high command insisted on building more transverse lines to correct the deficiency.}


This retrofitting of traffic patterns had enormous consequences, most
of which were intended: linking provincial France and provincial
French citizens to Paris and to the state and facilitating the
deployment of troops from the capital to put down civil unrest in any
department in the nation. It was aimed at achieving, for the military
control of the nation, what Haussmann had achieved in the capital
itself. It thus empowered Paris and the state at the expense of the
provinces, greatly affected the economics of location, expedited
central fiscal and military control, and severed or weakened lateral
cultural and economic ties by favoring hierarchical links. At a
stroke, it marginalized outlying areas in the way that official French
had marginalized local dialects.

\section{Conclusion}


Officials of the modern state are, of necessity, at least one step—and
often several steps—removed from the society they are charged with
governing. They assess the life of their society by a series of
typifications that are always some distance from the full reality
these abstractions are meant to capture. Thus the foresters’ charts
and tables, despite their synoptic power to distill many individual
facts into a larger pattern, do not quite capture (nor are they meant
to) the real forest in its full diversity. Thus the cadastral survey
and the title deed are a rough, often misleading representation of
actual, existing rights to land use and disposal. The functionary of
any large organization “sees” the human activity that is of interest
to him largely through the simplified approximations of documents and
statistics: tax proceeds, lists of taxpayers, land records, average
incomes, unemployment numbers, mortality rates, trade and productivity
figures, the total number of cases of cholera in a certain district.


These typifications are indispensable to statecraft. State
simplifications such as maps, censuses, cadastral lists, and standard
units of measurement represent techniques for grasping a large and
complex reality; in order for officials to be able to comprehend
aspects of the ensemble, that complex reality must be reduced to
schematic categories. The only way to accomplish this is to reduce an
infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate
summary descriptions, comparisons, and aggregation. The invention,
elaboration, and deployment of these abstractions represent, as
Charles Tilly has shown, an enormous leap in state capacity—a move
from tribute and indirect rule to taxation and direct rule. Indirect
rule required only a minimal state apparatus but rested on local
elites and communities who had an interest in withholding resources
and knowledge from the center.  Direct rule sparked widespread
resistance and necessitated negotiations that often limited the
center’s power, but for the first time, it allowed state officials
direct knowledge of and access to a previously opaque society.


Such is the power of the most advanced techniques of direct rule, that
it discovers new social truths as well as merely summarizing known
facts. The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta is a striking case in
point. Its network of sample hospitals allowed it to first
“discover”—in the epidemiological sense—such hitherto unknown diseases
as toxic shock syndrome, Legionnaires’ disease, and AIDS. Stylized
facts of this kind are a powerful form of state knowledge, making it
possible for officials to intervene early in epidemics, to understand
economic trends that greatly affect public welfare, to gauge whether
their policies are having the desired effect, and to make policy with
many of the crucial facts at hand.\footnote{See Ian Hacking, \emph{The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas About Probability, Induction, and Statistical Inference} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).} These facts permit
discriminating interventions, some of which are literally lifesaving.


The techniques devised to enhance the legibility of a society to its
rulers have become vastly more sophisticated, but the political
motives driving them have changed little. Appropriation, control, and
manipulation (in the nonpejorative sense) remain the most
prominent. If we imagine a state that has no reliable means of
enumerating and locating its population, gauging its wealth, and
mapping its land, resources, and settlements, we are imagining a state
whose interventions in that society are necessarily crude. 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 (per sonal income taxes). The interventions
it does experience will typically be mediated by local trackers who
know the society from inside and who are likely to interpose their own
particular interests. Without this mediation—and often with it—state
action is likely to be inept, greatly overshooting or undershooting
its objective.


An illegible society, then, is a hindrance to any effective
intervention by the state, whether the purpose of that intervention is
plunder or public welfare. As long as the state’s interest is largely
confined to grabbing a few tons of grain and rounding up a few
conscripts, the state’s ignorance may not be fatal. When, however, the
state’s objective requires changing the daily habits (hygiene or
health practices) or work performance (quality labor or machine
maintenance) of its citizens, such ignorance can well be disabling. A
thoroughly legible society eliminates local monopolies of information
and creates a kind of national transparency through the uniformity of
codes, identities, statistics, regulations, and measures. At the same
time it is likely to create new positional advantages for those at the
apex who have the knowledge and access to easily decipher the new
state-created format.


The discriminating interventions that a legible society makes possible
can, of course, be deadly as well. A sobering instance is wordlessly
recalled by a map produced by the City Office of Statistics of
Amsterdam, then under Nazi occupation, in May 1941 (figure 13).\footnote{I am extraordinarily grateful to the City Museum of Amsterdam for providing a copy of the map reproduced in this book as figure 13 and, above all, for staging the fine and unsparing exhibition “Hungerwinter and Liberation in Amsterdam” and the accompanying catalogue, \emph{Here, back when} \dots{} (Amsterdam: City Museum, 1995).}
Along with lists of residents, the map was the synoptic representation
that guided the rounding up of the city’s Jewish population,
sixty-five thousand of whom were eventually deported.


The map is titled “The Distribution of Jews in the Municipality.” Each
dot represents ten Jews, a scheme that makes the heavily Jewish
districts readily apparent. The map was compiled from information
obtained not only through the order for people of Jewish extraction to
register themselves but also through the population registry
(“exceptionally comprehensive in the Netherlands”)\footnote{Here, \emph{back when} \dots{}, p. 10.} and the
business registry. If one reflects briefly on the kind of detailed
information on names, addresses, and ethnic backgrounds (determined
perhaps by names in the population registry or by declaration) and the
cartographic exactitude required to produce this statistical
representation, the contribution of legibility to state capacity is
evident. The Nazi authorities, of course, supplied the murderous
purpose behind the exercise, but the legibility provided by the Dutch
authorities supplied the means to its efficient implementation.\footnote{Since, as we know best from the case of Anne Frank, a good many citizens were willing to hide Jews in the city and the countryside, deportation as a systematic administrative exercise eventually failed. As the Jewish population became increasingly opaque to the authorities, they were increasingly forced to rely on Dutch collaborators who became their local trackers.}
That legibility, I should emphasize, merely amplifies the capacity of
the state for discriminating interventions—a capacity that in
principle could as easily have been deployed to feed the Jews as to
deport them.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-14.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 13. Map produced by the City Office of Statistics of Amsterdam and entitled “The Distribution of Jews in the Municipality (May 1941)”}
\end{figure}


Legibility implies a viewer whose place is central and whose vision is
synoptic. State simplifications of the kind we have examined are
designed to provide authorities with a schematic view of their
society, a view not afforded to those without authority. Rather like
U.S. highway patrolmen wearing mirrored sunglasses, the authorities
enjoy a quasimonopolistic picture of selected aspects of the whole
society. This privileged vantage point is typical of all institutional
settings where command and control of complex human activities is
paramount. The monastery, the barracks, the factory floor, and the
administrative bureaucracy (private or public) exercise many statelike
functions and often mimic its information structure as well.


State simplifications can be considered part of an ongoing “project of
legibility,” a project that is never fully realized. The data from
which such simplifications arise are, to varying degrees, riddled with
inaccuracies, omissions, faulty aggregations, fraud, negligence,
political distortion, and so on. A project of legibility is immanent
in any statecraft that aims at manipulating society, but it is
undermined by intrastate rivalries, technical obstacles, and, above
all, the resistance of its subjects.


State simplifications have at least five characteristics that deserve
emphasis. Most obviously, state simplifications are observations of
only those aspects of social life that are of official interest. They
are \emph{interested}, utilitarian facts. Second, they are also nearly
always written (verbal or numerical) \emph{documentary} facts. Third, they
are typically \emph{static} facts.\footnote{Even when these facts appear dynamic, they are usually the result of multiple static observations through time that, through a “connect the dots” process, give the appearance of continuous movement. In fact, what actually happened between, say, observation A and observation B remains a mystery, which is glossed over by the convention of merely drawing a straight line between the two data points.} Fourth, most stylized state facts
are also \emph{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 \emph{standardized} facts. However unique
the actual circumstances of the various individuals who make up the
aggregate, it is their sameness or, more precisely, their differences
along a standardized scale or continuum that are of interest.


The process by which standardized facts susceptible to aggregation are
manufactured seems to require at least three steps. The first,
indispensable step is the creation of common units of measurement or
coding. Size classes of trees, freehold tenure, the metric system for
measuring landed property or the volume of grain, uniform naming
practices, sections of prairie land, and urban lots of standard sizes
are among the units created for this purpose. In the next step, each
item or instance falling within a category is counted and classified
according to the new unit of assessment. A particular tree reappears
as an instance of a certain size class of tree; a particular plot of
agricultural land reappears as coordinates in a cadastral map; a
particular job reappears as an instance of a category of employment; a
particular person reappears bearing a name according to the new
formula.  Each fact must be recuperated and brought back on stage, as
it were, dressed in a new uniform of official weave—as part of “a
series in a total classificatory grid.”\footnote{This is the way that Benedict Anderson puts it in \emph{Imagined Communities}, p. 169.} Only in such garb can
these facts play a role in the culmination of the process: the
creation of wholly new facts by aggregation, following the logic of
the new units. One arrives, finally, at synoptic facts that are useful
to officials: so many thousands of trees in a given size class, so
many thousands of men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, so
many farms in a given size class, so many students whose surnames
begin with the letter \emph{A}, so many people with tuberculosis. Combining
several metrics of aggregation, one arrives at quite subtle, complex,
heretofore unknown truths, including, for example, the distribution of
tubercular patients by income and urban location.


To call such elaborate artifacts of knowledge “state simplifications”
risks being misleading. They are anything but simple-minded, and they
are often wielded with great sophistication by officials. Rather, the
term “simplification” is meant in two quite specific senses. First,
the knowledge that an official needs must give him or her a synoptic
view of the ensemble; it must be cast in terms that are replicable
across many cases. In this respect, such facts must lose their
particularity and reappear in schematic or simplified form as a member
of a class of facts.\footnote{I am grateful to Larry Lohmann for insisting to me that officials are not necessarily any more abstract or narrow of vision in their representation of reality than laypeople are. Rather, the facts that they need are facts that serve the interests and practices of their institutional roles. He would have preferred, I think, that I drop the term “simplification” altogether, but I have resisted.} Second, in a meaning closely related to the
first, the grouping of synoptic facts necessarily entails collapsing
or ignoring distinctions that might otherwise be relevant.


Take, for example, simplifications about employment. The working lives
of many people are exceptionally complex and may change from day to
day.  For the purposes of official statistics, however, being
“gainfully employed” is a stylized fact; one is or is not gainfully
employed. Also, available characterizations of many rather exotic
working lives are sharply restricted by the categories used in the
aggregate statistics.\footnote{There are at least three problems here. The first is the hegemony of the categories. How does one classify someone who usually works for relatives, who may sometimes feed him, let him use some of their land as his own, or pay him in crops or cash? The sometimes quite arbitrary decisions about how to classify such cases are obscured by the final result, in which only the prevailing categories appear. Theodore Porter notes that officials in France’s Office of National Statistics report that even trained coders will code up to 20 percent of occupational categories differently (\emph{Trust in Numbers}, p. 41). The goal of the statistical office is to ensure the maximum reliability among coders, even if the conventions applied to achieve it sacrifice something of the true state of affairs. The second problem, to which we shall return later, is how the categories and, more particularly, the state power behind the categories shape the data. For example, during the recession in the United States in the 1970s, there was some concern that the official unemployment rate, which had reached 13 percent, was exaggerated. A major reason, it was claimed, was that many nominally unemployed were working “off the books” in the informal economy and were not reporting their income or employment for fear of being taxed. One could say then and today that the fiscal system had provoked an offstage reality that was designed to stay out of the data bank. The third problem is that those who collect and assemble the information may have special interests in what the data show. During the Vietnam War the importance of body counts and pacified villages as a measure of counterinsurgency success led commanders to produce inflated figures that pleased their superiors—in the short run—but increasingly bore little relation to the facts on the ground.} Those who gather and interpret such
aggregate data understand that there is a certain fictional and
arbitrary quality to their categories and that they hide a wealth of
problematic variation. Once set, however, these thin categories
operate unavoidably as if all similarly classified cases were in fact
homogeneous and uniform. All Normalbaume in a given size range are the
same; all soil in a defined soil class is statistically identical; all
autoworkers (if we are classifying by industry) are alike; all
Catholics (if we are classifying by religious faith) are alike. There
is, as Theodore Porter notes in his study of mechanical objectivity, a
“strong incentive to prefer precise and standardizable measures to
highly accurate ones,” since accuracy is meaningless if the identical
procedure cannot reliably be performed elsewhere.\footnote{The goal is to get rid of intersubjective variability on the part of the census takers or coders. And that requires standard, mechanical procedures that leave no room for personal judgment. See Porter, \emph{Trust in Numbers}, p. 29.}


To this point, I have been making a rather straightforward, even banal
point about the simplification, abstraction, and standardization that
are necessary for state officials’ observations of the circumstances
of some or all of the population. But I want to make a further claim,
one analogous to that made for scientific forestry: 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. The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the
modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing
social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the
administrative grid of its observations. Much of the statecraft of the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was devoted to this
project. “In the period of movement from tribute to tax, from indirect
rule to direct rule, from subordination to assimilation,” Tilly
remarks, “states generally worked to homogenize their populations and
break down their segmentation by imposing common languages, religions,
currencies, and legal systems, as well as promoting the construction
of connected systems of trade, transportation, and
communication.”\footnote{Charles Tilly, \emph{Coercion, Capital, and European States}, A.D. 990-1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 100.}


As the scientific forester may dream of a perfectly legible forest
planted with same-aged, single-species, uniform trees growing in
straight lines in a rectangular flat space cleared of all underbrush
and poachers,\footnote{Indicative of this tendency in scientific forestry is the substantial literature on “optimum control theory,” which is imported from management science. For an application and bibliography, see D. M. Donnelly and D. R. Betters, “Optimum Control for Scheduling Final Harvest in Even-Aged Forest Stands,” \emph{Forest Ecology and Management} 46 (1991): 135-49.} so the exacting state official may aspire to a
perfectly legible population with registered, unique names and
addresses keyed to grid settlements; who pursue single, identifiable
occupations; and all of whose transactions are documented according to
the designated formula and in the official language. This caricature
of society as a military parade ground is overdrawn, but the grain of
truth that it embodies may help us understand the grandiose plans we
will examine later.\footnote{The caricature is not so far-fetched that it does not capture the lyrical utopianism of early advocates of state sciences. I quote the father of Prussian statistics, Ernst Engel: “In order to obtain an accurate representation, statistical research accompanies the individual through his entire earthly existence. It takes account of his birth, his baptism, his vaccination, his schooling and the success thereof, his diligence, his leave of school, his subsequent education and development, and, once he becomes a man, his physique and his ability to bear arms. It also accompanies the subsequent steps of his walk through life; it takes note of his chosen occupation, where he sets up his household and his management of the same, if he saved from the abundances of his youth for his old age, if and when and at what age he marries and whom he chooses as his wife—statistics look after him when things go well for him and when they go awry. Should he suffer shipwreck in his life, undergo material, moral, or spiritual ruin, statistics take note of the same. Statistics leave a man only after his death—after it has ascertained the precise age of his death and noted the causes that brought about his end” (quoted in Ian Hacking, \emph{The Taming of Chance} [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], p. 34). One could hardly ask for a more complete list of early nineteenth-century state interests and the paper trail that it generated.} The aspiration to such uniformity and order
alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of
internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric,
as a “civilizing mission.” The builders of the modern nation-state do
not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people
and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.\footnote{Tilly, echoing the colonial theme, describes much of this process within the European nation-state as the replacement of indirect rule with direct rule (\emph{Coercion, Capital, and European States}, pp. 103-26).}


This tendency is perhaps one shared by many large hierarchical
organizations. As Donald Chisholm, in reviewing the literature on
administrative coordination, concludes, “central coordinating schemes
do work effectively under conditions where the task environment is
known and unchanging, where it can be treated as a closed
system.”\footnote{Donald Chisholm, \emph{Coordination Without Hierarchy: Informal Structures in Multiorganizational Systems} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 10.} The more static, standardized, and uniform a population
or social space is, the more legible it is, and the more amenable it
is to the techniques of state officials. I am suggesting that many
state activities aim at transforming the population, space, and nature
under their jurisdiction into the closed systems that offer no
surprises and that can best be observed and controlled.


State officials can often make their categories stick and impose their
simplifications, because the state, of all institutions, is best
equipped to insist on treating people according to its schemata. Thus
categories that may have begun as the artificial inventions of
cadastral surveyors, census takers, judges, or police officers can end
by becoming categories that organize people’s daily experience
precisely because they are embedded in state-created institutions that
structure that experience.\footnote{This process is best described by Benedict Anderson: “Guided by its [the colonial state’s] imagined map, it organized the new educational, juridical, public-health, police and immigration bureaucracies it was building on the principle of ethno-racial hierarchies which were, however, always understood in terms of parallel series. The flow of subject populations through the mesh of differential schools, courts, clinics, police stations and immigration offices created ’traffic-habits’ which in time gave real social life to the state’s earlier fantasies” (\emph{Imagined Communities}, p. 169). A related argument about the cultural dimension of state-building in England can be found in Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, \emph{The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution} (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).} The economic plan, survey map, record
of ownership, forest management plan, classification of ethnicity,
passbook, arrest record, and map of political boundaries acquire their
force from the fact that these synoptic data are the points of
departure for reality as state officials apprehend and shape it. In
dictatorial settings where there is no effective way to assert another
reality, fictitious facts-on-paper can often be made eventually to
prevail on the ground, because it is on behalf of such pieces of paper
that police and army are deployed.


These paper records are the operative facts in a court of law, in an
administrative dossier, and before most functionaries. In this sense,
there are virtually no other facts for the state than those that are
contained in documents standardized for that purpose. An error in such
a document can have far more power—and for far longer—than can an
unreported truth. If, for example, you want to defend your claim to
real property, you are normally obliged to defend it with a document
called a property deed, and to do so in the courts and tribunals
created for that purpose. If you wish to have any standing in law, you
must have a document that officials accept as evidence of citizenship,
be that document a birth certificate, passport, or identity card. The
categories used by state agents are not merely means to make their
environment legible; they are an authoritative tune to which most of
the population must dance.

\part{Part 2. Transforming Visions}

\chapter{Chapter 3. Authoritarian High Modernism}



\begin{quote}


Then, as this morning on the dock, again I saw, as if for the first
time in my life, the impeccably straight streets, the glistening glass
of the pavement, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent
dwellings, the square harmony of the grayish blue rows of Numbers. And
it seemed to me that not past generations, but I myself, had won a
victory over the old god and the old life.



\end{quote}


— Eugene Zamiatin, \emph{We}



\begin{quote}


Modern science, which displaced and replaced God, removed that
obstacle [limits on freedom]. It also created a vacancy: the office of
the supreme legislator-cum-manager, of the designer and administrator
of the world order, was now horrifyingly empty. It had to be filled or
else\dots{} The emptiness of the throne was throughout the modern era a
standing and tempting invitation to visionaries and adventurers. The
dream of an all-embracing order and harmony remained as vivid as ever,
and it seemed now closer than ever, more than ever within human
reach. It was now up to mortal earthlings to bring it about and to
secure its ascendancy.



\end{quote}


— Zygmunt Bauman, \emph{Modernity and the Holocaust}


All the state simplifications that we have examined have the character
of maps. That is, they are designed to summarize precisely those
aspects of a complex world that are of immediate interest to the
mapmaker and to ignore the rest. To complain that a map lacks nuance
and detail makes no sense unless it omits information necessary to its
function. A city map that aspired to represent every traffic light,
every pothole, every building, and every bush and tree in every park
would threaten to become as large and as complex as the city that it
depicted.\footnote{My colleague Paul Landau recalls the story by Borges in which a king, unhappy at maps that do not do justice to his kingdom, finally insists on a map with a scale of one-to-one. When complete, the new map exactly covers the existing kingdom, submerging the real one beneath its representation.} And it certainly would defeat the purpose of mapping,
which is to abstract and summarize.  A map is an instrument designed
for a purpose. We may judge that purpose noble or morally offensive,
but the map itself either serves or fails to serve its intended use.


In case after case, however, we have remarked on the apparent power of
maps to transform as well as merely to summarize the facts that they
portray. This transformative power resides not in the map, of course,
but rather in the power possessed by those who deploy the perspective
of that particular map.\footnote{A commonplace example may help. One of the ordinary frustrations of the modern citizen, even in liberal democracies, is the difficulty of representing his unique case to a powerful agent of a bureaucratic institution. But the functionary operates with a simplified grid designed to cover all the cases that she confronts. Once a decision has been made as to which “bin” or “pigeonhole” the case falls into, the action to be taken or the protocol to be followed is largely cut-and-dried. The functionary endeavors to sort the case into the appropriate category, while the citizen resists being treated as an instance of a category and tries to insist, often unsuccessfully, that his unique case be examined on its singular merits.} A private corporation aiming to maximize
sustainable timber yields, profit, or production will map its world
according to this logic and will use what power it has to ensure that
the logic of its map prevails. The state has no monopoly on
utilitarian simplifications. What the state does at least aspire to,
though, is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That is surely
why, from the seventeenth century until now, the most transformative
maps have been those invented and applied by the most powerful
institution in society: the state.


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. Although utopian aspirations to a finely tuned social
control can be traced back to Enlightenment thought and to monastic
and military practices, the eighteenth-century European state was
still largely a machine for extraction. It is true that state
officials, particularly under absolutism, had mapped much more of
their kingdoms’ populations, land tenures, production, and trade than
their predecessors had and that they had become increasingly efficient
in pumping revenue, grain, and conscripts from the countryside. But
there was more than a little irony in their claim to absolute
rule. They lacked the consistent coercive power, the fine-grained
administrative grid, or the detailed knowledge that would have
permitted them to undertake more intrusive experiments in social
engineering. To give their growing ambitions full rein, they required
a far greater hubris, a state machinery that was equal to the task,
and a society they could master. By the mid-nineteenth century in the
West and by the early twentieth century elsewhere, these conditions
were being met.


I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development
in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a
particularly pernicious combination of three elements. The first is
the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society,
an aspiration that we have already seen at work in scientific
forestry, but one raised to a far more comprehensive and ambitious
level. “High modernism” seems an appropriate term for this
aspiration.\footnote{I have borrowed the term “high modernism” from David Harvey, \emph{The Condition of Post-Modernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Social Change} (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Harvey locates the high-water mark of this sort of modernism in the post-World War II period, and his concern is particularly with capitalism and the organization of production. But his description of high modernism also works well here: “The belief ‘in linear progress, absolute truths, and rational planning of ideal social orders’ under standardized conditions of knowledge and production was particularly strong. The modernism that resulted was, as a result, ‘positivistic, technocratic, and rationalistic’ at the same time as it was imposed as the work of an elite avant-garde of planners, artists, architects, critics, and other guardians of high taste. The ‘modernization’ of European economies proceeded apace, while the whole thrust of international politics and trade was justified as bringing a benevolent and progressive ‘modernization process’ to a backward Third World” (p. 35).} As a faith, it was shared by many across a wide
spectrum of political ideologies. Its main carriers and exponents were
the avant-garde among engineers, planners, technocrats, high-level
administrators, architects, scientists, and visionaries. If one were
to imagine a pantheon or Hall of Fame of highmodernist figures, it
would almost certainly include such names as Henri Comte de
Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert
Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir
I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius Nyerere.\footnote{For case studies of “public entrepreneurs” in the United States, see Eugene Lewis’s study of Hyman Rickover, J. Edgar Hoover, and Robert Moses, \emph{Public Entrepreneurs: Toward a Theory of Bureaucratic Political Power: The Organizational Lives of Hyman Rickover, J. Edgar Hoover, and Robert Moses} (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). \protect\endgraf Monnet, like Rathenau, had experience in economic mobilization during World War I, when he helped organize the transatlantic supply of war material for Britian and France, a role that he resumed during World War II. By the time he helped plan the postwar integration of French and German coal and steel production, he had already had several decades of experience in supranational management. See Francois Duchene, \emph{Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence} (New York: Norton, 1995).} They envisioned a
sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order
to improve the human condition. As a conviction, high modernism was
not the exclusive property of any political tendency; it had both
right- and left-wing variants, as we shall see. The second element is
the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument
for achieving these designs. The third element is a weakened or
prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these
plans. The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the
desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire;
and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on
which to build (dis)utopias.


We shall return shortly to the premises of high modernism. But here it
is important to note that 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. One can identify a highmodernist
utopianism of the right, of which Nazism is surely the diagnostic
example.\footnote{I will not pursue the argument here, but I think Nazism is best understood as a reactionary form of modernism. Like the progressive left, the Nazi elites had grandiose visions of state-enforced social engineering, which included, of course, extermination, expulsion, forced sterilization, and selective breeding and which aimed at “improving” genetically on human nature. The case for Nazism as a virulent form of modernism is made brilliantly and convincingly by Zygmunt Bauman in \emph{Modernity and the Holocaust} (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). See also, along the same lines, Jeffrey Herf, \emph{Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and Norbert Frei, \emph{National Socialist Rule in Germany: The Führer State, 1933-1945}, trans. Simon B. Steync (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).} The massive social engineering under apartheid in South
Africa, the modernization plans of the Shah of Iran, villagization in
Vietnam, and huge late-colonial development schemes (for example, the
Gezira scheme in the Sudan) could be considered under this
rubric.\footnote{I am grateful to James Ferguson for reminding me that reactionary highmodernist schemes are about as ubiquitous as progressive variants.} And yet there is no denying that much of the massive,
state-enforced social engineering of the twentieth century has been the
work of progressive, often revolutionary elites. Why?


The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that it is typically
progressives who have come to power with a comprehensive critique of
existing society and a popular mandate (at least initially) to
transform it. These progressives have wanted to use that power to
bring about enormous changes in people’s habits, work, living
patterns, moral conduct, and worldview.\footnote{This is not by any means meant to be a brief for conservatism. Conservatives of many stripes may care little for civil liberties and may resort to whatever brutalities seem necessary to remain in power. But their ambitions and hubris are much more limited; their plans (in contrast to those of reactionary modernists) do not necessitate turning society upside down to create new collectivities, new family and group loyalties, and new people.} They have deployed what
Václav Havel has called “the armory of holistic social
engineering.”\footnote{Václav Havel, address given at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, on March 31, 1995, reprinted in the \emph{New York Review of Books} 42, no. 11 (June 22, 1995): 36.} Utopian aspirations per se are not dangerous. As
Oscar Wilde remarked, “A map of the world which does not include
Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one
country at which Humanity is always landing.”\footnote{Quoted in Zygmunt Bauman, \emph{Socialism: The Active Utopia} (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976), p. 11.} Where the utopian
vision goes wrong is when it is held by ruling elites with no
commitment to democracy or civil rights and who are therefore likely
to use unbridled state power for its achievement. Where it goes
brutally wrong is when the society subjected to such utopian
experiments lacks the capacity to mount a determined resistance.


What is high modernism, then? It is best conceived as a strong (one
might even say muscle-bound) version of the beliefs in scientific and
technical progress that were associated with industrialization in
Western Europe and in North America from roughly 1830 until World
War I.  At its center was a supreme self-confidence about continued
linear progress, the development of scientific and technical
knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social
order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an
increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate
with scientific understanding of natural laws.\footnote{For an enlightening discussion of the intellectual lineage of authoritarian environmentalism, see Douglas R. Weiner, “Demythologizing Environmentalism,” Journal of the History of Biology 25, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 385-411.} \emph{High} modernism
is thus a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of
technical and scientific progress might be applied—usually through the
state—in every field of human activity.\footnote{See Michael Adas’s \emph{Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance} (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) and Marshall Berman’s \emph{All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity} (New York: Penguin, 1988). What is new in high modernism, I believe, is not so much the aspiration for comprehensive planning. Many imperial and absolutist states have had similar aspirations. What are new are the administrative technology and social knowledge that make it plausible to imagine organizing an entire society in ways that only the barracks or the monastery had been organized before. In this respect, Michel Foucault’s argument, in \emph{Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison}, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), is persuasive.} If, as we have seen, the
simplified, utilitarian \emph{descriptions} of state officials had a
tendency, through the exercise of state power, to bring the facts into
line with their representations, then one might say that the
high-modern state began with extensive \emph{prescriptions} for a new
society, and it intended to impose them.


It would have been hard not to have been a modernist of some stripe at
the end of the nineteenth century in the West. How could one fail to
be impressed—even awed—by the vast transformation wrought by science
and industry?\footnote{Here I want to distinguish between advances in scientific knowledge and inventions (many of which occurred in the eighteenth century or earlier) and the massive transformations that scientific inventions wrought in daily material life (which came generally in the nineteenth century).} Anyone who was, say, sixty years old in Manchester,
England, would have witnessed in his or her lifetime a revolution in
the manufacturing of cotton and wool textiles, the growth of the
factory system, the application of steam power and other astounding
new mechanical devices to production, remarkable breakthroughs in
metallurgy and transportation (especially railroads), and the
appearance of cheap mass-produced commodities. Given the stunning
advances in chemistry, physics, medicine, math, and engineering,
anyone even slightly attentive to the world of science would have
almost come to expect a continuing stream of new marvels (such as the
internal combustion engine and electricity). The unprecedented
transformations of the nineteenth century may have impoverished and
marginalized many, but even the victims recognized that something
revolutionary was afoot. All this sounds rather naive today, when we
are far more sober about the limits and costs of technological
progress and have acquired a postmodern skepticism about any
totalizing discourse. Still, this new sensibility ignores both the
degree to which modernist assumptions prevail in our lives and,
especially, the great enthusiasm and revolutionary hubris that were
part and parcel of high modernism.

\section{The Discovery of Society}


The path from description to prescription was not so much an
inadvertent result of a deep psychological tendency as a deliberate
move. The point of the Enlightenment view of legal codes was less to
mirror the distinctive customs and practices of a people than to
create a cultural community by codifying and generalizing the most
rational of those customs and suppressing the more obscure and
barbaric ones.\footnote{Witold Kula, \emph{Measures and Men}, trans. R. Szreter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 211.} Establishing uniform standards of weight and
measurement across a kingdom had a greater purpose than just making
trade easier; the new standards were intended both to express and to
promote a new cultural unity. Well before the tools existed to make
good on this cultural revolution, Enlightenment thinkers such as
Condorcet were looking ahead to the day when the tools would be in
place. He wrote in 1782: “Those sciences, created almost in our own
days, the object of which is man himself, the direct goal of which is
the happiness of man, will enjoy a progress no less sure than that of
the physical sciences, and this idea so sweet, that our descendants
will surpass us in wisdom as in enlightenment, is no longer an
illusion. In meditating on the nature of the moral sciences, one
cannot help seeing that, as they are based like physical sciences on
the observation of fact, they must follow the same method, acquire a
language equally exact and precise, attaining the same degree of
certainty.”\footnote{Quoted in Ian Hacking, \emph{The Taming of Chance} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 38. A few years later, the Jacobins were, one could argue, the first to attempt to actually engineer happiness by transforming the social order. As Saint-Just wrote, “The idea of happiness is new in Europe.” See Albert O. Hirschman, “Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble,” \emph{Journal of Economic Literature} 20 (December 1982): 1463-84.} The gleam in Condorcet’s eye became, by the
mid-nineteenth century, an active utopian project. Simplification and
rationalization previously applied to forests, weights and measures,
taxation, and factories were now applied to the design of society as a
whole.\footnote{I am greatly indebted to James Ferguson, whose perceptive comments on an early draft of the book pointed me in this direction.} Industrial-strength social engineering was born. While
factories and forests might be planned by private entrepreneurs, the
ambition of engineering whole societies was almost exclusively a
project of the nation-state.


This new conception of the state’s role represented a fundamental
transformation. Before then, the state’s activities had been largely
confined to those that contributed to the wealth and power of the
sovereign, as the example of scientific forestry and cameral science
illustrated. The idea that one of the central purposes of the state
was the improvement of all the members of society—their health, skills
and education, longevity, productivity, morals, and family life—was
quite novel.\footnote{See, for example, Graham Buschell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., \emph{The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality} (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), chap. 4.} There was, of course, a direct connection between
the old conception of the state and this new one. A state that
improved its population’s skills, vigor, civic morals, and work habits
would increase its tax base and field better armies; it was a policy
that any enlightened sovereign might pursue. And yet, in the
nineteenth century, the welfare of the population came increasingly to
be seen, not merely as a means to national strength, but as an end in
itself.


One essential precondition of this transformation was the discovery of
society as a reified object that was separate from the state and that
could be scientifically described. In this respect, the production of
statistical knowledge about the population—its age profiles,
occupations, fertility, literacy, property ownership, law-abidingness
(as demonstrated by crime statistics)—allowed state officials to
characterize the population in elaborate new ways, much as scientific
forestry permitted the forester to carefully describe the forest. Ian
Hacking explains how a suicide or homicide rate, for example, came to
be seen as a characteristic of a people, so that one could speak of a
“budget” of homicides that would be “spent” each year, like routine
debits from an account, although the particular murderers and their
victims were unknown.\footnote{Hacking, \emph{The Taming of Chance}, p. 105. Hacking shows brilliantly how a statistical “average” metamorphosed into the category “normal,” and “normal,” in turn, into a “normative” standard to be achieved by social engineering.} Statistical facts were elaborated into
social laws. It was but a small step from a simplified description of
society to a design and manipulation of society, with its improvement
in mind.  If one could reshape nature to design a more suitable
forest, why not reshape society to create a more suitable population?


The scope of intervention was potentially endless. Society became an
object that the state might manage and transform with a view toward
perfecting it. A progressive nation-state would set about engineering
its society according to the most advanced technical standards of the
new moral sciences. The existing social order, which had been more or
less taken by earlier states as a given, reproducing itself under the
watchful eye of the state, was for the first time the subject of
active management. It was possible to conceive of an artificial,
engineered society designed, not by custom and historical accident,
but according to conscious, rational, scientific criteria. Every nook
and cranny of the social order might be improved upon: personal
hygiene, diet, child rearing, housing, posture, recreation, family
structure, and, most infamously, the genetic inheritance of the
population.\footnote{By now, a great deal of historical research has made crystal clear how widespread throughout the West was the support for eugenic engineering. The belief that the state must intervene to protect the races’ physical and mental characteristics was common among progressives and animated a well-nigh international social movement. By 1926, twenty-three of the forty-eight U.S. states had laws permitting sterilization.} The working poor were often the first subjects of
scientific social planning.\footnote{See Gareth Stedman-Jones, \emph{Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832-1982} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). It is important to recognize that, among Western powers, virtually all the initiatives associated with the “civilizing missions” of colonialism were preceded by comparable programs to assimilate and civilize their own lower-class populations, both rural and urban. The difference, perhaps, is that in the colonial setting officials had greater coercive power over an objectified and alien population, thus allowing for greater feats of social engineering.} Schemes for improving their daily
lives were promulgated by progressive urban and public-health policies
and instituted in model factory towns and newly founded welfare
agencies. Subpopulations found wanting in ways that were potentially
threatening—such as indigents, vagabonds, the mentally ill, and
criminals—might be made the objects of the most intensive social
engineering.\footnote{For a science-fiction account of the attempt to create a “technocratic and objective man” who would be free of “nature,” see C. S. Lewis, \emph{That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy Tale For Grown-Ups} (New York: Macmillan, 1946).}


The metaphor of gardening, Zygmunt Bauman suggests, captures much of
this new spirit. The gardener—perhaps a landscape architect
specializing in formal gardens is the most appropriate parallel—takes
a natural site and creates an entirely designed space of botanical
order. Although the organic character of the flora limits what can be
achieved, the gardener has enormous discretion in the overall
arrangement and in training, pruning, planting, and weeding out
selected plants. As an untended forest is to a long-managed scientific
forest, so untended nature is to the garden. The garden is one of
man’s attempts to impose his own principles of order, utility, and
beauty on nature.\footnote{There is the interesting and problematic case of the “wild” garden, in which the precise shape of “disorder” is minutely planned. Here it is a matter of an aesthetic plan, designed to have a certain effect on the eye—an attempt to copy untended nature. The paradox is just as intractable as that of a zoo designed to mimic nature—intractable, that is, until one realizes that the design does not extend to allowing the critters to eat one another!} What grows in the garden is always a small,
consciously selected sample of what \emph{might} be grown there. Similarly,
social engineers consciously set out to design and maintain a more
perfect social order. An Enlightenment belief in the self-improvement
of man became, by degrees, a belief in the perfectibility of social
order.


One of the great paradoxes of social engineering is that it seems at
odds with the experience of modernity generally. Trying to jell a
social world, the most striking characteristic of which appears to be
flux, seems rather like trying to manage a whirlwind. Marx was hardly
alone in claiming that the “constant revolutionizing of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all
earlier times.”\footnote{Karl Marx, from the \emph{Communist Manifesto}, quoted in Berman, \emph{All That Is Solid Melts into Air}, p. 95.} The experience of modernity (in literature, art,
industry, transportation, and popular culture) was, above all, the
experience of disorienting speed, movement, and change, which
self-proclaimed modernists found exhilarating and liberating.\footnote{The airplane, having replaced the locomotive, was in many respects the defining image of modernity in the early twentieth century. In 1913, the futurist artist and playwright Kazimir Malevich created the sets for an opera entitled \emph{Victory over the Sun}. In the last scene, the audience heard from offstage a propeller’s roar and shouts announcing that gravity had been overcome in futurist countries. Le Corbusier, Malevich’s near contemporary, thought the airplane was the reigning symbol of the new age. For the influence of flight, see Robert Wohl, \emph{A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Wester Imagination, 1908-1918} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).}
Perhaps the most charitable way of resolving this paradox is to
imagine that what these designers of society had in mind was roughly
what designers of locomotives had in mind with “streamlining.” Rather
than arresting social change, they hoped to design a shape to social
life that would minimize the friction of progress. The difficulty with
this resolution is that state social engineering was inherently
authoritarian. In place of multiple sources of invention and change,
there was a single planning authority; in place of the plasticity and
autonomy of existing social life, there was a fixed social order in
which positions were designated. The tendency toward various forms of
“social taxidermy” was unavoidable.

\section{The Radical Authority of High Modernism}



\begin{quote}


The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to
social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war
has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past.



\end{quote}


— C. S. Lewis, \emph{That Hideous Strength}


The troubling features of high modernism derive, for the most part,
from its claim to speak about the improvement of the human condition
with the authority of scientific knowledge and its tendency to
disallow other competing sources of judgment.


First and foremost, high modernism implies a truly radical break with
history and tradition. Insofar as rational thought and scientific laws
could provide a single answer to every empirical question, nothing
ought to be taken for granted. All human habits and practices that
were inherited and hence not based on scientific reasoning—from the
structure of the family and patterns of residence to moral values and
forms of production—would have to be reexamined and redesigned. The
structures of the past were typically the products of myth, superstition,
and religious prejudice. It followed that scientifically
designed schemes for production and social life would be superior to
received tradition.


The sources of this view are deeply authoritarian. If a planned social
order is better than the accidental, irrational deposit of historical
practice, two conclusions follow. Only those who have the scientific
knowledge to discern and create this superior social order are fit to
rule in the new age. Further, those who through retrograde ignorance
refuse to yield to the scientific plan need to be educated to its
benefits or else swept aside. Strong versions of high modernism, such
as those heed by Lenin and Le Corbusier, cultivated an Olympian
ruthlessness toward the subjects of their interventions. At its most
radical, high modernism imagined wiping the slate utterly clean and
beginning from zero.\footnote{The Jacobins intended just such a fresh start, starting the calendar again at “year one” and renaming the days and months according to a new, secular system. To signal its intention to create a wholly new Cambodian nation, the Pol Pot regime began with “year zero.”}


High-modernist ideology thus tends to devalue or banish politics.
Political interests can only frustrate the social solutions devised by
specialists with scientific tools adequate to their analysis. As
individuals, high modernists might well hold democratic views about
popular sovereignty or classical liberal views about the inviolability
of a private sphere that restrained them, but such convictions are
external to, and often at war with, their high-modernist convictions.


Although high modernists came to imagine the refashioning of social
habits and of human nature itself, they began with a nearly limitless
ambition to transform nature to suit man’s purposes—an ambition that
remained central to their faith. How completely the utopian
possibilities gripped intellectuals of almost every political
persuasion is captured in the paean to technical progress of the
\emph{Communist Manifesto}, where Marx and Engels write of the “subjection
of nature’s forces to man, machinery, and the application of chemistry
to agriculture and industry, steam navigation, railways, electric
telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization
of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground.”\footnote{Quoted in Harvey, \emph{The Condition of Post-Modernity}, p. 99.} In
fact, this promise, made plausible by capitalist development, was for
Marx the point of departure for socialism, which would place the
fruits of capitalism at the service of the working class for the first
time. The intellectual air in the late nineteenth century was filled
with proposals for such vast engineering projects as the Suez Canal,
which was completed in 1869 with enormous consequences for trade
between Asia and Europe. The pages of \emph{Le globe}, the organ of utopian
socialists of Saint-Simon’s persuasion, featured an endless stream of
discussions about massive projects: the construction of Panama Canal,
the development of the United States, far-reaching schemes for energy
and transportation. This belief that it was man’s destiny to tame
nature to suit his interests and preserve his safety is perhaps the
keystone of high modernism, partly because the success of so many
grand ventures was already manifest.\footnote{In this section, the masculine personal pronoun is less a convention than a choice made with some deliberation. See Carolyn Merchant, \emph{The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution} (San Francisco: Harper, 1980).}


Once again the authoritarian and statist implications of this vision
are clear. The very scale of such projects meant that, with few
exceptions (such as the early canals), they demanded large infusions
of monies raised through taxes or credit. Even if one could imagine
them being financed privately in a capitalist economy, they typically
required a vast public authority empowered to condemn private
property, relocate people against their will, guarantee the loans or
bonds required, and coordinate the work of the many state agencies
involved. In a statist society, be it Louis Napoleon’s France or
Lenin’s Soviet Union, such power was already built into the political
system. In a nonstatist society, such tasks have required new public
authorities or “superagencies” having quasi-governmental powers for
sending men to the moon or for constructing dams, irrigation works,
highways, and public transportation systems.


The temporal emphasis of high modernism is almost exclusively on the
future. Although any ideology with a large altar dedicated to progress
is bound to privilege the future, high modernism carries this to great
lengths. The past is an impediment, a history that must be
transcended; the present is the platform for launching plans for a
better future. A key characteristic of discourses of high modernism
and of the public pronouncements of those states that have embraced it
is a heavy reliance on visual images of heroic progress toward a
totally transformed future.\footnote{See, for example, Margaret M. Bullitt, “Toward a Marxist Theory of Aesthetics: The Development of Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union,” Russian Review 35, no. 1 (January 1976): 53-76.} The strategic choice of the future is
freighted with consequences. To the degree that the future is known
and achievable—a belief that the faith in progress encourages—the less
future benefits are discounted for uncertainty. The practical effect
is to convince most high modernists that the certainty of a better
future justifies the many short-term sacrifices required to get
there.\footnote{Baruch Knei-Paz, “Can Historical Consequences Falsify Ideas? Or, Karl Marx After the Collapse of the Soviet Union.” Paper presented to Political Theory Workshop, Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, November 1994.} The ubiquity of five-year plans in socialist states is an
example of that conviction. Progress is objectified by a series of
preconceived goals—largely material and quantifiable—which are to be
achieved through savings, labor, and investments in the interim. There
may, of course, be no alternative to planning, especially when the
urgency of a single goal, such as winning a war, seems to require the
subordination of every other goal. The immanent logic of such an
exercise, however, implies a degree of certainty about the future,
about means-ends calculations, and about the meaning of human welfare
that is truly heroic. That such plans have often had to be adjusted or
abandoned is an indication of just how heroic are the assumptions
behind them.


In this reading, high modernism ought to appeal greatly to the classes
and strata who have most to gain—in status, power, and wealth—from its
worldview. And indeed it is the ideology par excellence of the
bureaucratic intelligentsia, technicians, planners, and
engineers.\footnote{Raymond Aron’s prophetic dissent, \emph{The Opium of the Intellectuals}, trans. Terence Kilmartin (London: Secker and Warburg, 1957), is a key document in this context.} The position accorded to them is not just one of rule
and privilege but also one of responsibility for the great works of
nation building and social transformation. Where this intelligentsia
conceives of its mission as the dragging of a technically backward,
unschooled, subsistence-oriented population into the twentieth
century, its selfassigned cultural role as educator of its people
becomes doubly grandiose. Having a historic mission of such breadth
may provide a ruling intelligentsia with high morale, solidarity, and
the willingness to make (and impose) sacrifices. This vision of a
great future is often in sharp contrast to the disorder, misery, and
unseemly scramble for petty advantage that the elites very likely see
in their daily foreground. One might in fact speculate that the more
intractable and resistant the real world faced by the planner, the
greater the need for utopian plans to fill, as it were, the void that
would otherwise invite despair. The elites who elaborate such plans
implicitly represent themselves as exemplars of the learning and
progressive views to which their compatriots might aspire. Given the
ideological advantages of high modernism as a discourse, it is hardly
surprising that so many postcolonial elites have marched under its
banner.\footnote{The larger, the more capital-intensive, and the more centralized the schemes, the greater their appeal in terms of power and patronage. For a critique of flood-control projects and World Bank projects in this context, see James K. Boyce, “Birth of a Megaproject: Political Economy of Flood Control in Bangladesh,” \emph{Environmental Management} 14, no. 4 (1990): 419-28.}


Aided by hindsight as it is, this unsympathetic account of
highmodernist audacity is, in one important respect, grossly
unfair. If we put the development of high-modernist beliefs in their
historical context, if we ask who the enemies of high modernism
actually were, a far more sympathetic picture emerges. Doctors and
public-health engineers who did possess new knowledge that could save
millions of lives were often thwarted by popular prejudices and
entrenched political interests. Urban planners who could in fact
redesign urban housing to be cheaper, more healthful, and more
convenient were blocked by realestate interests and existing
tastes. Inventors and engineers who had devised revolutionary new
modes of power and transportation faced opposition from industrialists
and laborers whose profits and jobs the new technology would almost
certainly displace.


For nineteenth-century high modernists, the scientific domination of
nature (including human nature) was emancipatory. It “promised freedom
from scarcity, want and the arbitrariness of natural calamity,” David
Harvey observes. “The development of rational forms of social
organization and rational modes of thought promised liberation from
the irrationalities of myth, religion, superstition, release from the
arbitrary use of power as well as from the dark side of our human
natures.”\footnote{Harvey, \emph{The Condition of Post-Modernity}, p. 12.} Before we turn to later versions of high modernism, we
should recall two important facts about their nineteenth-century
forebears: first, that virtually every high-modernist intervention was
undertaken in the name of and with the support of citizens seeking
help and protection, and, second, that we are all beneficiaries, in
countless ways, of these various high-modernist schemes.

\section{Twentieth-Century High Modernism}


The idea of a root-and-branch, rational engineering of entire social
orders in creating realizable utopias is a largely twentieth-century
phenomenon. And a range of historical soils have seemed particularly
favorable for the flourishing of high-modernist ideology. Those soils
include crises of state power, such as wars and economic depressions,
and circumstances in which a state’s capacity for relatively unimpeded
planning is greatly enhanced, such as the revolutionary conquest of
power and colonial rule.


The industrial warfare of the twentieth century has required
unprecedented steps toward the total mobilization of the society and
the economy.\footnote{See Charles Tilly’s important theoretial contribution in \emph{Coercion, Capital, and European States}, A.D. 990-1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).} Even quite liberal societies like the United States
and Britain became, in the context of war mobilization, directly
administered societies. The worldwide depression of the 1930s
similarly propelled liberal states into extensive experiments in
social and economic planning in an effort to relieve economic distress
and to retain popular legitimacy. In the cases of war and depression,
the rush toward an administered society has an aspect of \emph{force
majeure} to it. The postwar rebuilding of a war-torn nation may well
fall in the same category.


Revolution and colonialism, however, are hospitable to high modernism
for different reasons. A revolutionary regime and a colonial regime
each disposes of an unusual degree of power. The revolutionary state
has defeated the ancien régime, often has its partisans’ mandate to
remake the society after its image, \emph{and} faces a prostrate civil
society whose capacity for active resistance is limited.\footnote{A civil war, as in the Bolshevik case, may be the price of consolidating the revolutionaries’ power.} The
millennial expectations commonly associated with revolutionary
movements give further impetus to high-modernist ambitions. Colonial
regimes, particularly late colonial regimes, have often been sites of
extensive experiments in social engineering.\footnote{White-settler colonies (e.g., South Africa, Algeria) and anti-insurgency campaigns (e.g., Vietnam, Algeria, Afghanistan) have carried out huge population removals and forced resettlements. In most such cases, however, even the pretense that the comprehensive social planning was for the welfare of the affected populations has been paper-thin.} An ideology of
“welfare colonialism” combined with the authoritarian power inherent
in colonial rule have encouraged ambitious schemes to remake native
societies.


If one were required to pinpoint the “birth” of twentieth-century high
modernism, specifying a particular time, place, and individual in what
is admittedly a rather arbitrary exercise, given high modernism’s many
intellectual wellsprings—a strong case can be made for German
mobilization during World War I and the figure most closely associated
with it, Walther Rathenau. German economic mobilization was the
technocratic wonder of the war. That Germany kept its armies in the
field and adequately supplied long after most observers had predicted
its collapse was largely due to Rathenau’s planning.\footnote{Here I am particularly indebted to the discussion of George Yaney, \emph{The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia} (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 448-62.} An
industrial engineer and head of the great electrical firm A.E.G
(Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft), which had been founded by his
father, Rathenau was placed in charge of the Office of War Raw
Materials (Kriegsrohstoffabteilung).\footnote{Anson Rabinbach, \emph{The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 260-71. In 1907, long before the war, Rathenau and a number of architects and political leaders had founded Deutsche Werkbund, which was devoted to fostering technical innovation in industry and the arts.} He realized that the planned
rationing of raw materials and transport was the key to sustaining the
war effort.  Inventing a planned economy step by step, as it were,
Germany achieved feats—in industrial production, munitions and
armament supply, transportation and traffic control, price controls,
and civilian rationing—that had never before been attempted. The scope
of planning and coordination necessitated an unprecedented
mobilization of conscripts, soldiers, and war-related industrial
labor. Such mobilization fostered the idea of creating “administered
mass organizations” that would encompass the entire society.\footnote{See Gregory J. Kasza, \emph{The Conscription Society: Administered Mass Organizations} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), especially chap. 1, pp. 7-25.}


Rathenau’s faith in pervasive planning and in rationalizing production
had deep roots in the intellectual connection being forged between the
physical laws of thermodynamics on one hand and the new applied
sciences of work on the other. For many specialists, a narrow and
materialist “productivism” treated human labor as a mechanical system
which could be decomposed into energy transfers, motion, and the
physics of work. The simplification of labor into isolated problems of
mechanical efficiencies led directly to the aspiration for a
scientific control of the entire labor process. Late
nineteenth-century materialism, as Anson Rabinbach emphasizes, had an
equivalence between technology and physiology at its metaphysical
core.\footnote{Rabinbach, \emph{The Human Motor}, p. 290.}


This productivism had at least two distinct lineages, one of them
North American and the other European. An American contribution came
from the influential work of Frederick Taylor, whose minute
decomposition of factory labor into isolable, precise, repetitive
motions had begun to revolutionize the organization of factory
work.\footnote{For recent assessments of the evolution of technology and production in the United States, see Nathan Rosenberg, \emph{Perspectives on Technology} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Rosenberg, \emph{Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics} (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Philip Scranton, \emph{Figured Tapestry: Production, Markets, and Power in Philadelphia, 1885-1942} (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).} For the factory manager or engineer, the newly invented
assembly lines permitted the use of unskilled labor and control over
not only the pace of production but the whole labor process. The
European tradition of “energetics,” which focused on questions of
motion, fatigue, measured rest, rational hygiene, and nutrition, also
treated the worker notionally as a machine, albeit a machine that must
be well fed and kept in good working order. In place of workers, there
was an abstract, standardized worker with uniform physical capacities
and needs. Seen initially as a way of increasing wartime efficiency at
the front and in industry, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für
Arbeitsphysiologie, like Taylorism, was based on a scheme to
rationalize the body.\footnote{See the inventive article by Ernest J. Yanorella and Herbert Reid, “From ‘Trained Gorilla’ to ‘Humanware’: Repoliticizing the Body-Machine Complex Between Fordism and Post-Fordism,” in Theodore R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter, eds., \emph{The Social and Political Body} (New York: Guildford Press, 1996), pp. 181-219.}


What is most remarkable about both traditions is, once again, how
widely they were believed by educated elites who were otherwise poles
apart politically. “Taylorism and technocracy were the watchwords of a
three-pronged idealism: the elimination of economic and social crisis,
the expansion of productivity through science, and the reenchantment
of technology. The vision of society in which social conflict was
eliminated in favor of technological and scientific imperatives could
embrace liberal, socialist, authoritarian, and even communist and
fascist solutions. Productivism, in short, was politically
promiscuous.”\footnote{Rabinbach, \emph{The Human Motor}, p. 272. Rabinbach is here paraphrasing the conclusions of a seminal article by Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970): 27-63.}


The appeal of one or another form of productivism across much of the
right and center of the political spectrum was largely due to its
promise as a technological “fix” for class struggle. If, as its
advocates claimed, it could vastly increase worker output, then the
politics of redistribution could be replaced by class collaboration, in
which both profits and wages could grow at once. For much of the left,
productivism promised the replacement of the capitalist by the engineer
or by the state expert or official. It also proposed a single optimum
solution, or “best practice,” for any problem in the organization of
work. The logical outcome was some form of slide-rule authoritarianism
in the interest, presumably, of all.\footnote{Thorstein Veblen was the best-known social scientist expounding this view in the United States. Literary versions of this ideology are apparent in Sinclair Lewis’s \emph{Arrowsmith} and Ayn Rand’s \emph{Fountainhead}, works from very different quadrants of the political spectrum.}


A combination of Rathenau’s broad training in philosophy and
economics, his wartime experience with planning, and the social
conclusions that he thought were inherent in the precision, reach, and
transforming potential of electric power allowed him to draw the
broadest lessons for social organization. In the war, private industry
had given way to a kind of state socialism; “gigantic industrial
enterprises had transcended their ostensibly private owners and all
the laws of property.”\footnote{Rabinbach, \emph{The Human Motor}, p. 452. For Rathenau’s writings, see, for example, \emph{Von kommenden Dingen} (Things to come) and \emph{Die Neue Wirtschaft} (The new economy), the latter written after the war.} The decisions required had nothing to do
with ideology; they were driven by purely technical and economic
necessities. The rule of specialists and the new technological
possibilities, particularly huge electric power grids, made possible a
new social-industrial order that was both centralized and locally
autonomous. During the time when war made necessary a coalition among
industrial firms, technocrats, and the state, Rathenau discerned the
shape of a progressive peacetime society.  Inasmuch as the technical
and economic requirements for reconstruction were obvious and required
the same sort of collaboration in all countries, Rathenau’s
rationalist faith in planning had an internationalist flavor. He
characterized the modern era as a “new machine order \dots{} [and] a
consolidation of the world into an unconscious association of
constraint, into an uninterrupted community of production and
harmony.”\footnote{Walther Rathenau, \emph{Von kommenden Dingen} (1916), quoted in Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy,” p. 47. Maier notes that the apparent harmony of capital and labor in wartime Germany was achieved at the cost of an eventually ruinous policy of inflation (p. 46).}


The world war was the high-water mark for the political influence of
engineers and planners. Having seen what could be accomplished in
extremis, they imagined what they could achieve if the identical
energy and planning were devoted to popular welfare rather than mass
destruction. Together with many political leaders, industrialists,
labor leaders, and prominent intellectuals (such as Philip Gibbs in
England, Ernst Jünger in Germany, and Gustave Le Bon in France), they
concluded that only a renewed and comprehensive dedication to
technical innovation and the planning it made possible could rebuild
the European economies and bring social peace.\footnote{Michael Adas, \emph{Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance} (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 380. Sheldon Wolin, in Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), provides an extensive list of like-minded thinkers spanning the political spectrum, from fascists and nationalists at one end to liberals, social democrats, and communists at the other, and hailing from France, Germany, Austria-Prussia (the Prussian Richard von Moellendorf, a close associate of Rathenau and a publicist for a managed postwar economy), Italy (Antonio Gramsci on the left and fascists Masimo Rocca and Benito Mussolini on the right), and Russia (Alexej Kapitonovik Gastev, the “Soviet Taylor”).}


Lenin himself was deeply impressed by the achievements of German
industrial mobilization and believed that it had shown how production
might be socialized. Just as Lenin believed that Marx had discovered
immutable social laws akin to Darwin’s laws of evolution, so he
believed that the new technologies of mass production were scientific
laws and not social constructions. Barely a month before the October
1917 revolution, he wrote that the war had “accelerated the
development of capitalism to such a tremendous degree, converting
monopoly capitalism into \emph{state}-monopoly capitalism, that \emph{neither}
the proletariat \emph{nor} the revolutionary petty-bourgeois democrats
\emph{can} keep within the limits of capitalism.”\footnote{V. I. Lenin, \emph{The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907}, 2nd rev. ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954), p. 195, written September 28, 1917 (first emphasis only added).} He and his economic
advisers drew directly on the work of Rathenau and Mollendorf in their
plans for the Soviet economy. The German war economy was for Lenin
“the ultimate in modern, large-scale capitalist techniques, planning
and organization”; he took it to be the prototype of a socialized
economy.\footnote{Leon Smolinski, “Lenin and Economic Planning,” \emph{Studies in Comparative Communism} 2, no. 1 (January 1969): 99. Lenin and Trotsky were explicit, Smo- linski claims, about how electric centrals would create a farm population depen dent on the center and thus make state control of agricultural production possible (pp. 106-7).} Presumably, if the state in question were in the hands
of representatives of the working class, the basis of a socialist
system would exist. Lenin’s vision of the future looked much like
Rathenau’s, providing, of course, we ignore the not so small matter of
a revolutionary seizure of power.


Lenin was not slow to appreciate how Taylorism on the factory floor
offered advantages for the socialist control of production. Although
he had earlier denounced such techniques, calling them the “scientific
extortion of sweat,” by the time of the revolution he had become an
enthusiastic advocate of systematic control as practiced in
Germany. He extolled “the principle of discipline, organization, and
harmonious cooperation based upon the most modern, mechanized
industry, the most rigid system of accountability and control.”\footnote{Lenin, \emph{Works} (Moscow, 1972), 27:163, quoted in Ranier Traub, “Lenin and Taylor: The Fate of ‘Scientific Management’ in the (Early) Soviet Union,” trans. Judy Joseph, in \emph{Telos} 34 (Fall 1978): 82-92 (originally published in \emph{Kursbuch} 43 [1976]). The “bard” of Taylorism in the Soviet Union was Alexej Kapitonovik Gastev, whose poetry and essays waxed lyrical about the possibilities of a “union” between man and machine: “Many find it repugnant that we want to deal with human beings as a screw, a nut, a machine. But we must undertake this as fearlessly as we accept the growth of trees and the expansion of the railway network” (quoted in ibid., p. 88). Most of the labor institutes were closed and their experts deported or shot in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s.}



\begin{quote}


The Taylor system, the last word of capitalism in this respect, like
all capitalist progress, is a combination of the subtle brutality of
bourgeois exploitation and a number of its great scientific
achievements in the fields of analysing mechanical motions during
work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the working
out of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of
accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must at all costs
adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and
technology in this field\dots{} We must organize in Russia the study and
teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt
it to our purposes.\footnote{Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” \emph{Izvestia}, April 28, 1918, cited in Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy,” p. 51 n. 58.}



\end{quote}


By 1918, with production falling, he was calling for rigid work norms
and, if necessary, the reintroduction of hated piecework. The first
All-Russian Congress for Initiatives in Scientific Management was
convened in 1921 and featured disputes between advocates of Taylorism
and those of energetics (also called ergonomics). At least twenty
institutes and as many journals were by then devoted to scientific
management in the Soviet Union. A command economy at the macrolevel
and Taylorist principles of central coordination at the microlevel of
the factory floor provided an attractive and symbiotic package for an
authoritarian, high-modernist revolutionary like Lenin.


Despite the authoritarian temptations of twentieth-century high
modernism, they have often been resisted. The reasons are not only
complex; they are different from case to case. While it is not my
intention to examine in detail all the potential obstacles to
high-modernist planning, the particular barrier posed by liberal
democratic ideas and institutions deserves emphasis. Three factors
seem decisive. The first is the existence and belief in a private
sphere of activity in which the state and its agencies may not
legitimately interfere. To be sure, this zone of autonomy has had a
beleaguered existence as, following Mannheim, more heretofore private
spheres have been made the object of official intervention. Much of
the work of Michel Foucault was an attempt to map these incursions
into health, sexuality, mental illness, vagrancy, or sanitation and
the strategies behind them. Nevertheless, the idea of a private realm
has served to limit the ambitions of many high modernists, through
either their own political values or their healthy respect for the
political storm that such incursions would provoke.


The second, closely related factor is the private sector in liberal
political economy. As Foucault put it: unlike absolutism and
mercantilism, “political economy announces the unknowability for the
sovereign of the totality of economic processes and, as a consequence,
the \emph{impossibility of an economic sovereignty}.”\footnote{Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, \emph{The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality}, with two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault (London: Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 106.} The point of
liberal political economy was not only that a free market protected
property and created wealth but also that the economy was far too
complex for it ever to be managed in detail by a hierarchical
administration.\footnote{This point has been made forcefully and polemically in the twentieth century by Friedrich Hayek, the darling of those opposed to postwar planning and the welfare state. See, especially, \emph{The Road to Serfdom} (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).}


The third and by far most important barrier to thoroughgoing
highmodernist schemes has been the existence of working,
representative institutions through which a resistant society could
make its influence felt. Such institutions have thwarted the most
draconian features of high-modernist schemes in roughly the same way
that publicity and mobilized opposition in open societies, as Amartya
Sen has argued, have prevented famines. Rulers, he notes, do not go
hungry, and they are unlikely to learn about and respond readily to
curb famine unless their institutional position provides strong
incentives. The freedoms of speech, of assembly, and of the press
ensure that widespread hunger will be publicized, while the freedoms
of assembly and elections in representative institutions ensure that
it is in the interest of elected officials’ self-preservation to
prevent famine when they can. In the same fashion, high-modernist
schemes in liberal democratic settings must accommodate themselves
sufficiently to local opinion in order to avoid being undone at the
polls.


But high modernism, unimpeded by liberal political economy, is best
grasped through the working out of its high ambitions and its
consequences. It is to this practical terrain in urban planning and
revolutionary discourse that we now turn.

\chapter{Chapter 4. The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique}



\begin{quote}


No one, wise Kuublai, knows better than you that the city must never
be confused with the words that describe it.



\end{quote}


— Italo Calvino, \emph{Invisible Cities}



\begin{quote}


Time is a fatal handicap to the baroque conception of the world: its
mechanical order makes no allowances for growth, change, adaptation,
and creative renewal. In short, a baroque plan was a block
achievement. It must be laid out at a stroke, fixed and frozen
forever, as if done overnight by Arabian nights genii. Such a plan
demands an architectural despot, working for an absolute ruler, who
will live long enough to complete their own conceptions. To alter this
type of plan, to introduce fresh elements of another style, is to
break its esthetic backbone.



\end{quote}


— Lewis Mumford, \emph{The City in History}


In Mumford’s epigraph to this chapter, his criticism is directed at
Pierre-Charles L’Enfant’s Washington in particular and at baroque
urban planning in general.\footnote{I am particularly grateful to Talja Potters for her perceptive comments on a first draft of this chapter.} Greatly amplified, Mumford’s criticism
could be applied to the work and thought of the Swiss-born French
essayist, painter, architect, and planner Charles-Edouard Jeanneret,
who is better known by his professional name, Le Corbusier. Jeanneret
was the embodiment of high-modernist urban design. Active roughly
between 1920 and 1960, he was less an architect than a visionary
planner of planetary ambitions. The great majority of his gargantuan
schemes were never built; they typically required a political resolve
and financial wherewithal that few political authorities could
muster. Some monuments to his expansive genius do exist, the most
notable of which are perhaps Chandigarh, the austere capital of
India’s Punjab, and L’Unité d’Habitation, a large apartment complex in
Marseilles, but his legacy is most apparent in the logic of his
unbuilt megaprojects. At one time or another he proposed city-planning
schemes for Paris, Algiers, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires,
Stockholm, Geneva, and Barcelona.\footnote{Le Corbusier’s entry in the 1927 design competition for the palace of the League of Nations won first prize, but his design was never built.} His early politics was a
bizarre combination of Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism and
Saint-Simon’s utopian modernism, and he designed both in Soviet Russia
(1928-36)\footnote{For this period, see Jean-Louis Cohen, \emph{Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR}: Theories and Projects for Moscow, 1928-1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).} and in Vichy for Marshal Philippe Pétain. The key
manifesto of modern urban planning, the Athens charter of the Congrés
Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), faithfully reflected his
doctrines.


Le Corbusier embraced the huge, machine-age, hierarchical, centralized
city with a vengeance. If one were looking for a caricature—a Colonel
Blimp, as it were, of modernist urbanism—one could hardly do better
than to invent Le Corbusier. His views were extreme but influential,
and they were representative in the sense that they celebrated the
logic implicit in high modernism. In his daring, his brilliance, and
his consistency, Le Corbusier casts the high-modernist faith in sharp
relief.\footnote{For an excellent analysis of modernity and the American city, see Katherine Kia Tehranian, \emph{Modernity, Space, and Power: The American City in Discourse and Practice} (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 1995).}

\section{Total City Planning}


In \emph{The Radiant City} (\emph{La ville radieuse}), published in 1933 and
republished with few changes in 1964, Le Corbusier offers the most
complete exposition of his views.\footnote{Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret), \emph{The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to Be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization}, trans. Pamela Knight (New York: Orion Press, 1964). The original French edition is \emph{La ville radieuse: Eléments d’une doctrine d’urbanisme pour u’équipement de la civilisation machiniste} (Boulogne: Editions de l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 1933). The following analysis draws heavily on both.} Here as elsewhere,
Le Corbusier’s plans were self-consciously immodest. If
E. F. Schumacher made the case for the virtue of smallness, Le
Corbusier asserted, in effect, “Big is beautiful.” The best way to
appreciate the sheer extravagance of his reach is to look briefly at
three of his designs. The first is the core idea behind his Plan
Voisin for central Paris (figure 14); the second, a new “business
city” for Buenos Aires (figure 15); and the last, a vast housing
scheme for about ninety thousand residents in Rio de Janeiro
(figure 16).


In their magnitude, these plans speak for themselves. No compromise is
made with the preexisting city; the new cityscape completely supplants
its predecessor. In each case, the new city has striking sculptural
properties; it is designed to make a powerful visual impact as a
\emph{form}.  That impact, it is worth noting, can be had only from a great
distance.  Buenos Aires is pictured as if seen from many miles out to
sea: a view of the New World “after a two-week crossing,” writes
Le Corbusier, adopting the perspective of a modern-day Christopher
Columbus.\footnote{Le Corbusier, \emph{The Radiant City}, p. 220.} Rio is seen at several miles remove, as if from an
airplane. What we behold is a six-kilometer-long highway elevated one
hundred meters and enclosing a continuous ribbon of fifteen-story
apartments. The new city literally towers over the old. The plan for a
city of 3 million in Paris is seen from far above and outside, the
distance emphasized by dots representing vehicles on the major avenue
as well as by a small airplane and what appears to be a
helicopter. None of the plans makes any reference to the urban
history, traditions, or aesthetic tastes of the place in which it is
to be located. The cities depicted, however striking, betray no
context; in their neutrality, they could be anywhere at all. While
astoundingly high construction costs may explain why none of these
projects was ever adopted, Le Corbusier’s refusal to make any appeal
to local pride in an existing city cannot have helped his case.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-15.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 14. Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for Paris, a city of 3 million people}
\end{figure}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-16.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 15. Le Corbusier’s plan for the “business city” of Buenos Aires, as if seen from an approaching ship}
\end{figure}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-17.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 16. Le Corbusier’s plan for roads and housing in Rio de Janeiro}
\end{figure}


Le Corbusier had no patience for the physical environment that
centuries of urban living had created. He heaped scorn on the tangle,
darkness, and disorder, the crowded and pestilential conditions, of
Paris and other European cities at the turn of the century. Part of
his scorn was, as we shall see, on functional and scientific grounds;
a city that was to become efficient and healthful would indeed have
had to demolish much of what it had inherited. But another source of
his scorn was aesthetic.  He was visually offended by disarray and
confusion. And the disorder he wished to correct was not so much a
disorder at ground level but a disorder that was a function of
distance, a bird’s-eye view.\footnote{Like many high modernists, Le Corbusier had a romance with the airplane. He wrote: “It is as an architect and town planner \dots{} that I let myself be carried off on the wings of an airplane, make use of the bird’s-eye view, of the view from the air\dots{} The eye now sees in substance what the mind could only subjectively conceive. [The view from the air] is a new function added to our senses; it is a new standard of measurement; it is the basis of a new sensation. Man will make use of it to conceive new aims. Cities will arise out of their ashes” (quoted in James Corner and Alex S. MacLean, \emph{Taking Measures Across the American Landscape} [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996], p. 15).} His mixed motives are nicely captured
in his judgment on small rural properties as seen from the air
(figure 17). “From airplanes, a look down on infinitely subdivided,
\emph{incongruously shaped} plots of land. The more modern machinery
develops, the more land is chopped up into tiny holdings that render
the miraculous promise of machinery useless. The result is waste:
inefficient, individual scrabbling.”\footnote{Le Corbusier, \emph{The Radiant City}, p. 322 (emphasis added).} The purely formal order was
at least as important as the accommodation with the machine
age. “Architecture,” he insisted, “is the art above all others which
achieves a state of platonic grandeur, mathematical order,
speculation, the perception of harmony that lies in emotional
relationships.”\footnote{Ibid. p. 121.}


Formal, geometric simplicity and functional efficiency were not two
distinct goals to be balanced; on the contrary, formal order was a
precondition of efficiency. Le Corbusier set himself the task of
inventing the ideal industrial city, in which the “general truths”
behind the machine age would be expressed with graphic simplicity. The
rigor and unity of this ideal city required that it make as few
concessions as possible to the history of existing cities. “We must
refuse to afford even the slightest concession to what is: to the mess
we are in now,” he wrote. “There is no solution to be found there.”
Instead, his new city would preferably rise on a cleared site as a
single, integrated urban composition. Le Corbusier’s new urban order
was to be a lyrical marriage between Cartesian pure forms and the
implacable requirements of the machine. In characteristically
bombastic terms, he declared, “We claim, in the name of the steamship,
the airplane, and the automobile, the right to health, logic, daring,
harmony, perfection.”\footnote{Robert Fishman, \emph{Urban Utopias of the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier} (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 186.} Unlike the existing city of Paris, which to
him resembled a “porcupine” and a “vision of Dante’s Inferno,” his
city would be an “organized, serene, forceful, airy, ordered
entity.”\footnote{Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, p. 134.}

\subsection{Geometry and Standardization}


It is impossible to read much of Le Corbusier or to see many of his
architectural drawings without noticing his love (mania?) for simple,
repetitive lines and his horror of complexity. He makes a personal
commitment to austere lines and represents that commitment as an
essential characteristic of human nature. In his own words, “an
infinity of combinations is possible when innumerable and diverse
elements are brought together. But the human mind loses itself and
becomes fatigued by such a labyrinth of possibilities. Control becomes
impossible. The spiritual failure that must result is
disheartening\dots{} Reason \dots{} is an unbroken straight line. Thus, in
order to save himself from this chaos, in order to provide himself
with a bearable, acceptable framework for his existence, one
productive of human well-being and control, man has projected the laws
of nature into a system that is a manifestation of the human spirit
itself: geometry.”\footnote{Ibid., pp. 82-83 (first emphasis added, second emphasis in original).}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-18.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 17. Aerial view of Alsace, circa 1930, from Le Corbusier’s \emph{La ville radieuse}}
\end{figure}


When Le Corbusier visited New York City, he was utterly taken by the
geometric logic of midtown Manhattan. The clarity of what he called
the “skyscraper machines” and the street plan pleased him: “The
streets are at right angles to each other and the mind is
liberated.”\footnote{From Le Corbusier’s “When the Cathedrals Were White,” trans. Francis Hyslop, quoted in Richard Sennett, \emph{The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities} (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 169. For an account of Le Corbusier’s yearlong visit to America in 1935, see Mardges Bacon, \emph{Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid} (forthcoming). Le Corbusier failed to win the commissions he sought in America, apparently because, even at the frontier, urban planners were put off by his demolition-based schemes.} Elsewhere Le Corbusier answered what he saw as the
criticism of those who were nostalgic for the variety of the existing
city—in this case, Paris.  People may complain, he noted, that in
reality streets intersect at all sorts of angles and that the
variations are infinite. “But,” he replied, “that’s precisely the
point. \emph{I eliminate all those things. That’s my starting point\dots{} I
insist on right-angled intersections.}”\footnote{Le Corbusier, \emph{The Radiant City}, p. 123 (emphasis in original).}


Le Corbusier would have liked to endow his love of straight lines and
right angles with the authority of the machine, of science, and of
nature. Neither the brilliance of his designs nor the heat of his
polemic, however, could succeed in justifying this move. The machines
to which he most adoringly referred—the locomotive, the airplane, and
the automobile—embody rounder or more elliptical shapes than right
angles (the teardrop being the most streamlined of shapes). As for
science, \emph{any} shape is geometrical: the trapezoid, the triangle, the
circle. If sheer simplicity or efficiency was the criterion, why not
prefer the circle or sphere—as the minimum surface enclosing the
maximum space—to the square or the rectangle? Nature, as Le Corbusier
claimed, might be mathematical, but the complex, intricate, “chaotic”
logic of living forms has only recently been understood with the aid
of computers.\footnote{For an accessible introduction to the fractal logic of living processes, see James Gleick, \emph{Chaos: Making a New Science} (New York: Penguin, 1988).} No, the great architect was expressing no more, and
no less, than an aesthetic ideology—a strong taste for classic lines,
which he also considered to be “Gallic” lines: “sublime straight
lines, and oh, sublime French rigor.”\footnote{Le Corbusier, \emph{The Radiant City}, p. 178. In his actual buildings, however, Le Corbusier’s practice was far more varied.} It was \emph{one} powerful way
of mastering space.  What’s more, it provided a legible grid that
could be easily grasped at a glance and that could be repeated in
every direction, ad infinitum. As a practical matter, of course, a
straight line was often impractical and ruinously expensive. Where the
topography was irregular, building a straight, flat avenue without
daunting climbs and descents would require great feats of digging and
leveling. Le Corbusier’s kind of geometry was rarely cost effective.


He took his utopian scheme for an abstract, linear city to impressive
lengths. He foresaw that the industrialization of the construction
trades would lead to a welcome standardization. He foresaw, too, the
prefabrication of houses and office blocks, whose parts were built at
factories and then assembled at the building sites. The sizes of all
elements would be standardized, with multiples of standard sizes
allowing for unique combinations determined by the architect. Door
frames, windows, bricks, roof tiles, and even screws would all conform
to a uniform code. The first manifesto of CIAM in 1928 called for the
new standards to be legislated by the League of Nations, which would
develop a universal technical language to be compulsorily taught
throughout the world. An international convention would “normalize”
the various standard measurements for domestic equipment and
appliances.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 22-23. It was ironically fitting that his never-built design for the palace of the League of Nations—at the time, the most universal of institutions—had won first prize.} Le Corbusier made efforts to practice what he
preached. His design for the mammoth Palace of Soviets (never built)
was intended to appeal to Soviet high modernism. The building, he
claimed, would establish precise and universal new standards for all
buildings-standards that would cover lighting, heating, ventilation,
structure, and aesthetics and that would be valid in all latitudes for
all needs.\footnote{Ibid., p. 46.}


The straight line, the right angle, and the imposition of
international building standards were all determined steps in the
direction of simplification. Perhaps the most decisive step, however,
was Le Corbusier’s lifelong insistence on strict functional
separation.  Indicative of this doctrine was the second of fourteen
principles he enunciated at the beginning of \emph{La ville radieuse},
namely, “the death of the street.” What he meant by this was simply
the complete separation of pedestrian traffic from vehicle traffic
and, beyond that, the segregation of slow- from fast-moving vehicles. He
abhorred the mingling of pedestrians and vehicles, which made walking
unpleasant and impeded the circulation of traffic.


The principle of functional segregation was applied across the board.
Written by Le Corbusier and his brother Pierre, the final report for
the second meeting of CIAM, in 1929, began with an assault on
traditional housing construction: “The poverty, the inadequacy of
traditional techniques have brought in their wake a confusion of
powers, \emph{an artificial mingling of functions}, only indifferently
related to one another\dots{} We must find and apply new
methods\dots{}lending themselves naturally to standardization,
industrialization, Taylorization\dots{} If we persist in the present
methods by which the two functions [arrangement and furnishing versus
construction; circulation versus structure] are mingled and
interdependent, then we will remain petrified in the same
immobility.”\footnote{Ibid., pp. 29-30. For a convincing argument that rigid, functionally specific zoning laws lie behind failed communities and suburban sprawl in the United States today, see James Howard Kunstler, “Home from Nowhere,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1996, pp. 43-66.}


Outside the apartment block, the city itself was an exercise in
planned functional segregation—an exercise that became standard
urban-planning doctrine until the late 1960s. There would be separate
zones for workplaces, residences, shopping and entertainment centers,
and monuments and government buildings. Where possible, work zones
were to be further subdivided into office buildings and factories. Le
Corbusier’s insistence on an urban plan in which each district had one
and only one function was evident in his first act after taking over
the planning of Chandigarh, his only built city. He replaced the
housing that had been planned for the city center with an “acropolis
of monuments” on a 220-acre site at a great distance from the nearest
residences.\footnote{Lawrence Vale, \emph{Architecture, Power, and National Identity} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 109.} In his Plan Voisin for Paris, he separated what he
called \emph{la ville}, which was for dwelling, and the business center,
which was for working. “These are two distinct functions, consecutive
and not simultaneous, representative of two distinct and categorically
separate areas.”\footnote{Le Corbusier, \emph{The Radiant City}, p. 71.}


The logic of this rigid segregation of functions is perfectly
clear. It is far easier to plan an urban zone if it has just one
purpose. It is far easier to plan the circulation of pedestrians if
they do not have to compete with automobiles and trains. It is far
easier to plan a forest if its sole purpose is to maximize the yield
of furniture-grade timber.  When two purposes must be served by a
single facility or plan, the trade-offs become nettlesome. When
several or many purposes must be considered, the variables that the
planner must juggle begin to boggle the mind. Faced with such a
labyrinth of possibilities, as Le Corbusier noted, “the human mind
loses itself and becomes fatigued.”


The segregation of functions thus allowed the planner to think with
greater clarity about efficiency. If the only function of roads is to
get automobiles from \emph{A} to \emph{B} quickly and economically, then one can
compare two road plans in terms of relative efficiency. This logic is
eminently reasonable inasmuch as this is precisely what we have in
mind when we build a road from \emph{A} to \emph{B}. Notice, however, that the
clarity is achieved by bracketing the many other purposes that we may
want roads to serve, such as affording the leisure of a touristic
drive, providing aesthetic beauty or visual interest, or enabling the
transfer of heavy goods. Even in the case of roads, narrow criteria of
efficiency ignore other ends that are not trivial. In the case of the
places that people call home, narrow criteria of efficiency do
considerably greater violence to human practice. Le Corbusier
calculates the air (\emph{la respiration exacte}), heat, light, and space
people need as a matter of public health. Starting with a figure of
fourteen square meters per person, he reckons that this could be
reduced to ten square meters if such activities as food preparation
and laundering were communal. But here the criteria of efficiency that
may apply to a road can hardly do justice to a home, which is
variously used as a place for work, recreation, privacy, sociability,
education, cooking, gossip, politics, and so on. Each of these
activities, moreover, resists being reduced to criteria of efficiency;
what is going on in the kitchen when someone is cooking for friends
who have gathered there is not merely “food preparation.” But the
logic of efficient planning from above for large populations requires
that each of the values being maximized be sharply specified and that
the number of values being maximized simultaneously be sharply
restricted—preferably to a single value.\footnote{One alternative to such simplification is to be guided by the tastes of the end user or consumer. Do people want to live there? Do current residents like living there? These criteria are not to be confounded with market criteria, which also ask whether people can afford it.} The logic of
Le Corbusier’s doctrine was to carefully delineate urban space by use
and function so that single-purpose planning and standardization were
possible.\footnote{I write “Le Corbusier’s doctrine” because in practice his buildings were neither low in cost nor efficient in function. The actual buildings, however, were also rather more interesting than his theoretical doctrines.}

\subsection{Rule by the Plan, the Planner, and the State}


The first of Le Corbusier’s “principles of urbanism,” before even “the
death of the street,” was the dictum “The Plan: Dictator.”\footnote{Le Corbusier, \emph{The Radiant City}, p. 7.} It
would be difficult to exaggerate the emphasis that, like Descartes, Le
Corbusier placed on making the city the reflection of a single,
rational plan. He greatly admired Roman camps and imperial cities for
the overall logic of their layouts. He returned repeatedly to the
contrast between the existing city, which is the product of historical
chance, and the city of the future, which would be consciously
designed from start to finish following scientific principles.


The centralization required by Le Corbusier’s doctrine of the Plan
(always capitalized in his usage) is replicated by the centralization
of the city itself. Functional segregation was joined to
hierarchy. His city was a “monocephalic” city, its centrally located
core performing the “higher” functions of the metropolitan area. This
is how he described the business center of his Plan Voisin for Paris:
“From its offices come the commands that put the world in order. In
fact, the skyscrapers are the \emph{brain} of the city, \emph{the brain of the
whole country}.  They embody the work of elaboration and command on
which all activities depend. Everything is concentrated there: the
tools that conquer time and space-telephones, telegraphs, radios, the
banks, trading houses, the organs of decision for the factories:
finance, technology, commerce.”\footnote{Le Corbusier, quoted in Fishman, \emph{Urban Utopias}, p. 193 (emphasis added).}


The business center issues commands; it does not suggest, much less
consult. The program of high-modernist authoritarianism at work here
stems in part from Le Corbusier’s love of the order of the factory. In
condemning the “rot” (\emph{la pourriture}) of the contemporary city, its
houses, and its streets, he singles out the factory as the sole
exception. There, a single rational purpose structures both the
physical layout and the coordinated movements of hundreds. The Van
Nelle tobacco factory in Rotterdam is praised in particular. Le
Corbusier admires its auster ity, its floor-to-ceiling windows on each
floor, the order in the work, and the apparent contentment of the
workers. He finishes with a hymn to the authoritarian order of the
production line. “There is a hierarchical scale, famously established
and respected,” he admiringly observes of the workers. “They accept it
so as to manage themselves like a colony of worker-bees: order,
regularity, punctuality, justice and paternalism.”\footnote{Le Corbusier, \emph{La ville radieuse}, pp. 178-79 (my translation).}


The scientific urban planner is to the design and construction of the
city as the entrepreneur-engineer is to the design and construction of
the factory. Just as a single brain plans the city and the factory, so a
single brain directs its activity—from the factory’s office and from the
city’s business center. The hierarchy doesn’t stop there. The city is
the brain of the whole society. “The great city commands everything:
peace, war, work.”\footnote{Le Corbusier, quoted in Fishman, \emph{Urban Utopias}, p. 208.} Whether it is a matter of clothing, philosophy,
technology, or taste, the great city dominates and colonizes the
provinces: the lines of influence and command are exclusively from the
center to the periphery.\footnote{Compare this spatial representation of social and political order with the city plan Plato outlines in \emph{The Laws}: an acropolis at the center, concentric rings of the urban core, an artisan (noncitizen) suburb, and the the inner and outer rings of the cultivated area. The “pie” is divided into twelve segments that form the basis for the recruitment and annual rotation of the guard force. See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “A Study in Ambiguity: Artisans in the Platonic City,” chap. 11 of \emph{The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World}, trans. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 224-45.}


There is no ambiguity to Le Corbusier’s view of how authority
relations should be ordered: hierarchy prevails in every direction. At
the apex of the pyramid, however, is not a capricious autocrat but
rather a modern philosopher-king who applies the truths of scientific
understanding for the well-being of all.\footnote{The urban-planning genius’s search for the autocrat who will give him the power to realize his vision was also evident in the career of Walter Christaller, the great German geographer and originator of central place theory. He lent his services to the Nazi regime “in order to give advice about the creation of a hierarchical order of urban settlements for the newly won Polish territories.” It was a chance to implement his theory of hexagonal market areas and town placement on a flat plain. After the war he joined the Communist Party, “for his hope was that an authoritarian regime would use its power to relocate war-devastated cities according to an optimal pattern as demanded by central place theory.” It was a classic case of the attempt to \emph{impose} what had begun as a simplified analytical description of the economics of location. Hans Carol, “Geographica: Walter Christaller, a Personal Memoir,” \emph{Canadian Geographer} 14, no. 1 (1970): 67-69. I am grateful to Otto van den Muijzenberg for this reference.} It is true, naturally,
that the master planner, in his not infrequent bouts of megalomania,
imagines that he alone has a monopoly on the truth. In a moment of
personal reflection in \emph{The Radiant City}, for example, Le Corbusier
declares: “I drew up plans [for Algiers], after analyses, after
calculations, with imagination, with poetry. The plans were
prodigiously true. They were incontrovertible. They were breathtaking.
They expressed all the splendor of modern times.”\footnote{Le Corbusier, \emph{The Radiant City}, p. 181.} It is not,
however, the excess of pride that concerns us here but the sort of
implacable authority Le Corbusier feels entitled to claim on behalf of
universal scientific truths. His high-modernist faith is nowhere so
starkly—or so ominously—expressed as in the following, which I quote
at length:



\begin{quote}


The despot is not a man. It is the \emph{Plan. The correct, realistic,
exact plan,} the one that will provide your solution once the problem
has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable
harmony. \emph{This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in the
mayor’s office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or
the laments of society’s victims.} It has been drawn up by serene and
lucid minds. It has taken account of nothing but human truths. It has
ignored all current regulations, all existing usages, and channels. It
has not considered whether or not it could be carried out with the
constitution now in force. It is a biological creation destined for
human beings and capable of realization by modern techniques.\footnote{Ibid., p. 154 (emphasis added).}



\end{quote}


The wisdom of the plan sweeps away all social obstacles: the elected
authorities, the voting public, the constitution, and the legal
structure. At the very least, we are in the presence of a dictatorship
of the planner; at most, we approach a cult of power and
remorselessness that is reminiscent of fascist imagery.\footnote{I try to be exceptionally cautious in using such loaded terms as “fascism,” but I think this one is justified here. When Le Corbusier writes of the beauty of the Parthenon, the celebration of violence is just beneath the surface. “Remember the Parthenon,” he writes. “Remember its clarity, its clear lines, its intensity, its economy, its \emph{violence}, remember its great cry in the midst of that landscape created by grace and \emph{terror}. Strength and purity” (ibid., p. 187 [emphasis added]). Le Corbusier also has the tendency, as we shall presently see, to dehumanize his opponents and the urban poor: “Everything depends upon the wisdom of the plans\dots{} I am talking here of a society that has already provided itself with a planned economy and swept away all the \emph{parasites} present in the society we know today” (p. 73 [emphasis added]).} Despite
the imagery, Le Corbusier sees himself as a technical genius and
demands power in the name of his truths. Technocracy, in this
instance, is the belief that the human problem of urban design has a
unique solution, which an expert can discover and execute. Deciding
such technical matters by politics and bargaining would lead to the
wrong solution. As there is a single, true answer to the problem of
planning the modern city, no compromises are possible.\footnote{Mumford condemns for its similar hubris the spirit of baroque planning, which, to a twentieth-century eye, seems far less expansive. In his commentary on the passage from Descartes (quoted in chapter 1), Mumford contrasts two orders of thinking: the organic and the mechanical. “The first springs out of the total situation, the other simplifies the facts of life for the sake of an artful system of concepts, more dear to the mind than life itself. One works cooperatively with the ‘materials of others,’ perhaps guiding them, but first acknowledging their existence and understanding their purpose; the other, that of the baroque despot, insisting on his law, his order, his society, is imposed by a single professional authority, working under his command” (\emph{The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects} [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961], p. 394). The appeal of a centrally conceived city over a city grown up largely by unplanned accretions stemmed not necessarily from an \emph{esprit géométrique}, as it did with Descartes; the planned city was seen to demonstrate royal power and to be more healthful, even in the seventeenth century. Thus John Evelyn, recently back from European exile with Charles II, wrote that London was “a city consisting of a wooden, northern, and \emph{inartificial} congestion of houses, some of its principal streets so narrow, as there is nothing more deformed and unlike the prospect of it at a distance, and its assvrnnietrie within the walls” (quoted in Mark Jenner, “The Politics of London Air: John Evelyn’s \emph{Fumifugium} and the Restoration,” \emph{Historical Journal} 38, no. 3 [1995]: 542 [emphasis added]).}


Throughout his career, Le Corbusier is clearly aware that his kind of
root-and-branch urban planning requires authoritarian measures. “A
Colbert is required,” he declares to his French reading public in an
early article entitled “Toward a Machine Age Paris.”\footnote{Quoted in Fishman, \emph{Urban Utopias}, p. 213.} On the title
page of his major work, one finds the words, “This work is Dedicated
to Authority.” Much of Le Corbusier’s career as a would-be public
architect can be read as a quest for a “Prince” (preferably an
authoritarian one) who would anoint him as the court’s Colbert. He
exhibited designs for the League of Nations, lobbied the Soviet elite
to accept his new plan for Moscow, and did what he could to get
himself appointed as regulator of planning and zoning for the whole of
France and to win the adoption of his plan for the new
Algiers. Finally, under the patronage of Jawaharlal Nehru, he built a
provincial capital at Chandigarh in India.  Although Le Corbusier’s
own political affiliations in France were firmly anchored on the
right,\footnote{Le Corbusier was a member of Redressment Français, a circle of industrialists linked to the right. Regarding this connection and especially Le Corbusier’s work in the Soviet Union, see Cohen, \emph{Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR.}} he would clearly have settled for any state authority that
would give him a free hand. He was appealing to logic rather than
politics when he wrote, “Once his [the scientific planner’s]
calculations are finished, he is in a position to say—and he does say:
\emph{It shall be thus!}”\footnote{Le Corbusier, \emph{The Radiant City}, p. 131 (emphasis in original). He continued, “The power of calculation is such that the imprudent might be tempted to raise altars to it forthwith, and worship it.”}


What captivated Le Corbusier about the Soviet Union was not so much
its ideology as the prospect that a revolutionary, high-modernist
state might prove hospitable to a visionary planner. After building
the headquarters of the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives
(Centrosoyuz),\footnote{Le Corbusier was particularly proud of the transparency and line of this building, which, like many of his buildings in the 1920s, was set up on pilings (\emph{pilotis}). Describing it, he wrote, “Appreciate the entirely new and formidable virtues of this architecture; the impeccable line of the substructure. The building resembles an object in a window display, \emph{and it is perfectly legible}” (Le Corbusier, “Les Techniques sont l’assiette même du lyricisme: Elles ouvrent un nouveau cycle de l’architecture,” in \emph{Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme} [Paris, 1930], quoted in Cohen, \emph{Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR}, p. 77 [emphasis added]).} he proposed, in plans prepared in only six weeks, a
vast design for the rebuilding of Moscow in line with what he thought
were Soviet aspirations to create an entirely new mode of living in a
classless society. Having seen Sergey Eisenstein’s film about the
peasantry and technology, \emph{The General Line}, Le Corbusier was utterly
taken with its celebration of tractors, centrifuge creamers, and huge
farms. He referred to it often in his plan to work a comparable
transformation of Russia’s urban landscape.


Stalin’s commissars found his plans for Moscow as well as his project
for the Palace of Soviets too radical.\footnote{In the end, Le Corbusier was bitter about his Soviet experience: “On several occasions I have been asked to draw up plans of cities for the Soviet Union; unfortunately it was all hot air. I am extremely sorry about this\dots{} I have studied the basic social truths in such depth that I have been the first to create, in a natural way, THE GREAT CLASSLESS CITY, harmonious and joyful. It sometimes pains me to think that in the USSR I am resisted for reasons that to me do not appear to be valid” (quoted in Cohen, *Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR, p. 199).} The Soviet modernist
El Lissitzky attacked Le Corbusier’s Moscow as a “city of nowhere, \dots{}
[a city] that is neither capitalist, nor proletarian, nor socialist,
\dots{} a city on paper, extraneous to living nature, located in a desert
through which not even a river must be allowed to pass (since a curve
would contradict the style).”\footnote{Quoted in ibid., p. 109. In justifying the linear rigor of his Moscow plans, Le Corbusier wrote, “curved lines constitute paralysis, and the winding path is the path of donkeys” (quoted in ibid., p. 15).} As if to confirm El Lissitzky’s
charge that he had designed a “city of nowhere,” Le Corbusier recycled
his design virtually intact—aside from removing all references to
Moscow—and presented it as \emph{La ville radieuse}, suitable for central
Paris.

\subsection{The City as a Utopian Project}


Believing that his revolutionary urban planning expressed universal
scientific truths, Le Corbusier naturally assumed that the public,
once they understood this logic, would embrace his plan. The original
manifesto of CIAM called for primary school students to be taught the
elementary principles of scientific housing: the importance of
sunlight and fresh air to health; the rudiments of electricity, heat,
lighting, and sound; the right principles of furniture design; and so
on. These were matters of science, not of taste; instruction would
create, in time, a clientele worthy of the scientific
architect. Whereas the scientific forester could, as it were, go right
to work on the forest and shape it to his plan, the scientific
architect was obliged to first train a new clientele that would
“freely” choose the urban life that Le Corbusier had planned for them.


Any architect, I imagine, supposes that the dwellings she designs will
contribute to her clients’ happiness rather than to their misery. The
difference lies in how the architect understands happiness. For Le
Corbusier, “\emph{human happiness already exists} expressed in terms of
numbers, of mathematics, of properly calculated designs, plans in
which the cities can already be seen.”\footnote{Quoted in ibid., p. 93 (emphasis in original). Like so much of \emph{The Radiant City}, this passage reflects Le Corbusier’s constant appeal to the political authorities who alone can give substance to his plans.} He was certain, at least
rhetorically, that since his city was the rational expression of a
machine-age consciousness, modern man would embrace it
wholeheartedly.\footnote{See Colin Rowe, \emph{The Architecture of Good Intentions: Towards a Possible Retrospect} (London: Academy Editions, 1995), for a discussion of Le Corbusier and the concept of the sublime.}


The kinds of satisfactions that the citizen-subject of Le Corbusier’s
city would experience, however, were not the pleasures of personal
freedom and autonomy. They were the pleasures of fitting logically
into a rational plan: “Authority must now step in, patriarchal
authority, the authority of a father concerned for his children\dots{} We
must build places where mankind will be reborn. When the collective
functions of the urban community have been organized, then there will
be individual liberty for all. Each man will live in an ordered
relation to the whole.”\footnote{Le Corbusier, quoted in ibid., p. 152.} In the Plan Voisin for Paris, the place
of each individual in the great urban hierarchy is spatially
coded. The business elite (\emph{industrials}) will live in high-rise
apartments at the core, while the subaltern classes will have small
garden apartments at the periphery.  One’s status can be directly read
from one’s distance from the center.  But, like everyone in a well-run
factory, everyone in the city will have the “collective pride” of a
team of workers producing a perfect product.  “The worker who does
only a part of the job understands the role of his labor; the machines
that cover the floor of the factory are examples to him of power and
clarity, and \emph{make him part of a work of perfection to which his
simple spirit never dared to aspire}.”\footnote{Le Corbusier, quoted in Fishman, \emph{Urban Utopias}, p. 177 (emphasis added).} Just as Le Corbusier was
perhaps most famous for asserting that “the home is a machine for
living,” so he thought of the planned city as a large, efficient
machine with many closely calibrated parts. He assumed, therefore,
that the citizens of his city would accept, with pride, their own
modest role in a noble, scientifically planned urban machine.


By his own lights Le Corbusier was planning for the basic needs of his
fellow men-needs that were ignored or traduced in the existing city.
Essentially, he established them by stipulating an abstract,
simplified human subject with certain material and physical
requirements. This schematic subject needed so many square meters of
living space, so much fresh air, so much sunlight, so much open space,
so many essential services. At this level, he designed a city that was
indeed far more healthful and functional than the crowded, dark slums
against which he railed. Thus he spoke of “punctual and exact
respiration,” of various formulas for determining optimal sizes for
apartments; he insisted on apartment skyscrapers to allow for park
space and, above all, for efficient traffic circulation.


The Le Corbusian city was designed, first and foremost, as a workshop
for production. Human needs, in this context, were scientifically
stipulated by the planner. Nowhere did he admit that the subjects for
whom he was planning might have something valuable to say on this
matter or that their needs might be plural rather than singular. Such
was his concern with efficiency that he treated shopping and meal
preparation as nuisances that would be discharged by central services
like those offered by well-run hotels.\footnote{Le Corbusier, \emph{The Radiant City}, p. 116.} Although floor space was
provided for social activities, he said almost nothing about the
actual social and cultural needs of the citizenry.


High modernism implies, as we have seen, a rejection of the past as a
model to improve upon and a desire to make a completely fresh
start. The more utopian the high modernism, the more thoroughgoing its
implied critique of the existing society. Some of the most
vituperative prose of \emph{The Radiant City} was directed at the misery,
confusion, “rot,” “decay,” “scum,” and “refuse” of the cities that
Le Corbusier wanted to transcend. The slums he showed in pictures were
labeled “shabby” or, in the case of the French capital, “history,
historic and tubercular Paris.” He deplored both the conditions of the
slums and the people they had created. “How many of those five million
[those who came from the countryside to make their fortune] are simply
a dead weight on the city, an obstacle, a black clot of misery, of
failure, of human garbage?”\footnote{Ibid., p. 138.}


His objection to the slums was twofold. First, they failed
aesthetically to meet his standards of discipline, purpose, and
order. “Is there anything,” he asked rhetorically, “more pitiful than
an undisciplined crowd?” Nature, he added, is “all discipline” and
will “sweep them away” even if nature operates by a logic “contrary to
the interests of mankind.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 176.} Here he signals that the founders of
the modern city must be prepared to act ruthlessly. The second danger
of the slums was that, besides being noisy, dangerous, dusty, dark,
and disease-ridden, they harbored a potential revolutionary menace to
the authorities. He understood, as Haussmann had, that crowded slums
were and had always been an obstacle to efficient police
work. Switching back and forth between Louis XIV’s Paris and imperial
Rome, Le Corbusier wrote: “From the huddle of hovels, from the depths
of grimy lairs (in Rome—the Rome of the Caesars—the plebes lived in an
inextricable chaos of abutting and warren-like skyscrapers), there
sometimes came the hot gust of rebellion; the plot would be hatched in
the \emph{dark recesses of an accumulated chaos in which any kind of police
activity was extremely difficult}\dots{} St. Paul of Tarsus was impossible
to arrest while he stayed in the slums, and the words of his Sermons
were passed like wildfire from mouth to mouth.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 120. Baroque city planners also recognized that narrow streets posed a danger to the state. See Mumford’s comment about the Neapolitan king Ferrante’s fear of dark and crooked streets (The City in History, p. 348).}


In case they were wondering, Le Corbusier’s potential bourgeois
backers and their representatives could rest assured that his legible,
geometric city would facilitate police work. Where Haussmann managed
to retrofit the baroque city of absolutism, Le Corbusier proposed to
clear the decks completely and replace the center of Haussmann’s city
with one built with control and hierarchy in mind.\footnote{Le Corbusier, \emph{The Radiant City}, p. 120. In a whimsical footnote Le Corbusier imagines a monument in bronze with Louis XIV, Napoleon I, and Napoleon III joining hands in the foreground and a smiling Colbert and Haussmann, also holding hands, in the background. With their free hands the three in the foreground raise a scroll bearing the admonition, “Keep at it, for God’s sake.”}

\subsection{A Textbook Case of High-Modernist Architecture}


Le Corbusier’s intellectual influence on architecture was out of all
proportion to the actual structures he built. Not even the Soviet
Union was quite up to his sweeping ambition. It is as an exemplar, a
textbook case, of the key elements of high-modernist planning—often
exaggerated—that he belongs in this analysis. His commitment to what
he called the “total efficiency and total rationalization” of a new
machineage civilization was uncompromising.\footnote{Ibid., p. 27.} Although he was
obliged to deal with nation-states, his vision was universal. As he
put it, “city planning everywhere, universal city planning, total city
planning”\footnote{Ibid., p. 187.} His actual plans for Algiers, Paris, and Rio were, as
we have seen, on a scale that was virtually without precedent. Le
Corbusier was influenced, as were others of his generation, by the
spectacle of total military mobilization in World War I. “Let’s make
our plans,” he urged, “plans on a scale with twentieth century events,
plans equally as big as Satan’s [war]\dots{} Big! Big!”\footnote{Ibid., p. 185.}


The visual, aesthetic component of his bold plans was central. Clean,
smooth lines were something he associated with the “all-business”
leanness of the machine. He was positively lyrical about the beauty of
the machine and its products. And houses, cities, and agrovilles could
also “emerge properly equipped, glitteringly new, from the factory, from
the workshop, faultless products of smoothly humming machines.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 70. The influence of Fordism and Taylorism are evident here, too. See David Harvey, \emph{The Condition of Post-Modernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Social Change} (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 35-44. Le Corbusier was, after his first two decades of professional work, firmly associated with purism and constructivism. For constructivists, the most efficient shape of an object was the ideal shape; decorative touches were forbidden, as they only detracted from the pure beauty of functional design. The design of a house conceived in this spirit would begin from the inside, with its function and the available materials determining its shape and look. Despite his ideological commitments, Le Corbusier was always concerned with the painterly line of his designs, which he associated with classical or natural forms. In his later years, he forbade the use of the word “functionalism” in his studio. For discussions of Le Corbusier’s early designs and intellectual milieu, see Russel Walden, ed., \emph{The Open Hand: Essays on Le Corbusier} (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975), especially the selections by Charles Jencks, Anthony Sutcliffe, and Mary Patricia May Sekler.}


Integral, finally, to Le Corbusier’s ultramodernism was his
repudiation of tradition, history, and received taste. After
explaining the origin of the traffic congestion in contemporary Paris,
he warned against temptations to reform. “We must refuse even the
slightest consideration to \emph{what is}: to the mess we are in now.” He
emphasized, “There is no solution to be found here.”\footnote{Le Corbusier, \emph{The Radiant City}, p. 121.} Instead, he
insisted, we must take a “blank piece of paper,” a “clean tablecloth,”
and start new calculations from zero. It was in this context that he
was drawn to the USSR and to the ambitious rulers of developing
countries. There, he hoped, he would not be cramped by the
“grotesquely inadequate sites” available in the West, where it was
possible to practice only what he called an “\emph{orthopedic
architecture}”\footnote{Ibid., p. 128 (emphasis added). Curiously enough, when compared to Le Corbusier’s grand schemes, his smaller projects seem to have been more successful, both aesthetically and practically. In particular, his small Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp is considered a brilliant achievement, and his early houses at La Chaux-de-Fonds are much admired for decorative features that he later renounced.} The long-established cities of the West, their
traditions, their interest groups, their slow-moving institutions, and
their complex legal and regulatory structures could only shackle the
dreams of a high-modernist Gulliver.

\section{Brasília: The High-Modernist City Built—Almost}



\begin{quote}


Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but
neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls.



\end{quote}


— Italo Calvino, \emph{Invisible Cities}


No utopian city gets built precisely as designed by its
prophet-architect. Just as the scientific forester is foiled by the
vagaries of unpredictable nature and by the divergent purposes of both
his employers and those who have access to the forest, so the urban
planner must contend with the tastes and financial means of his
patrons as well as the resistance of builders, workers, and
residents. Even so, Brasília is about the closest thing we have to a
high-modernist city, having been built more or less along the lines
set out by Le Corbusier and CIAM. Thanks to an excellent book by James
Holston, \emph{The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of
Brasília},\footnote{James Holston, \emph{The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília} (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).} it is possible to analyze both the logic of the plan
for Brasília and the extent of its realization. An appreciation of the
slippage between what Brasilia meant for its originators on one hand
and for its residents on the other will in turn pave the way (no pun
intended) for Jane Jacob’s thoroughgoing critique of modern urban
planning.


The idea of a new capital in the interior predates even the
independence of Brazil.\footnote{Brazil has something of a history of making ambitious plans to claim the interior and then seeing them come to grief. In 1972, the trans-Amazonian highway was opened amid much fanfare (and ecological concern); by the late 1980s, much of the road was overgrown and impassible.} Its realization, however, was the pet
project of Juscelino Kubitschek, the populist president from 1956 to
1961, who promised Brazilians “fifty years of progress in five” and a
future of selfsustaining economic growth. In 1957 Oscar Niemeyer, who
had already been named the chief architect for public buildings and
housing prototypes, organized a design competition that was won, on
the basis of very rough sketches, by Lucio Costa. Costa’s idea—for it
was no more than that—was of a “monumental axis” to define the center
of the city, which consisted of terraced embankments describing an arc
intersected in its center by a straight avenue, and of a triangle to
define the city’s limits (figure 18).


Both architects were working within the doctrines of CIAM and Le
Corbusier. Niemeyer, a longtime member of the Brazilian Communist
Party, was also influenced by the Soviet version of architectural
modernism.  After the design competition, construction began almost
immediately on an empty site on the Central Plateau in the state of
Goias, nearly 1000 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro and the coast and
1620 kilometers from the Pacific Ocean in the northeast. It was indeed
a new city in the wilderness. No “orthopedic” compromises were
necessary now that the planners had, thanks to Kubitschek, who made
Brasilia his top priority, a “clean tablecloth.” The state planning
agency controlled all the land at the site, so there were no
private-property owners with whom to negotiate. The city was then
designed from the ground up, according to an elaborate and unified
plan. Housing, work, recreation, traffic, and public administration
were each spatially segregated as Le Corbusier would have
insisted. Inasmuch as Brasília was itself a single-function, strictly
administrative capital, the planning itself was greatly simplified.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-19.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 18. The Costa plan of 1957, showing \emph{A}, the Plaza of the Three Powers; \emph{B}, the ministries; \emph{C}, superquadra residential zones; \emph{D}, the president’s residence; and \emph{E}, single-family housing}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Brasília as the Negation (or Transcendence) of Brazil}


Brasília was conceived of by Kubitschek and by Costa and Niemeyer as a
city of the future, a city of development, a realizable utopia. It
made no reference to the habits, traditions, and practices of Brazil’s
past or of its great cities, São Paulo, São Salvador, and Rio de
Janeiro. As if to emphasize the point, Kubitschek called his own
residence in Brasília the Dawn Palace. “What else will Brasília be,”
he asked, “if not the dawn of a new day for Brazil?”\footnote{Quoted in Lawrence J. Vale, \emph{Architecture, Power, and National Identity} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 125.} Like the
Saint Petersburg of Peter the Great, Brasilia was to be an exemplary
city, a center that would transform the lives of the Brazilians who
lived there—from their personal habits and household organization to
their social lives, leisure, and work. The goal of making over Brazil
and Brazilians necessarily implied a disdain for what Brazil had
been. In this sense, the whole point of the new capital was to be a
manifest contrast to the corruption, backwardness, and ignorance of
the old Brazil.


The great crossroads that was the plan’s point of departure has been
variously interpreted as a symbol of Christ’s cross or an Amazonian
bow.  Costa, however, referred to it as a “monumental axis,” the same
term that Le Corbusier used to describe the center of many of his
urban plans. Even if the axis represented a small attempt to
assimilate Brasília in some way to its national tradition, it remained
a city that could have been anywhere, that provided no clue to its own
history, unless that history was the modernist doctrine of CIAM. It
was a state-imposed city invented to project a new Brazil to
Brazilians and to the world at large. And it was a state-imposed city
in at least one other sense: inasmuch as it was created to be a city
for civil servants, many aspects of life that might otherwise have
been left to the private sphere were minutely organized, from domestic
and residential matters to health services, education, child care,
recreation, commercial outlets, and so forth.


If Brasília was to be Brazil’s urban future, what was Brazil’s urban
past and present? What, precisely, was the new capital intended to
negate? A large part of the answer can be inferred from Le Corbusier’s
second principle of the new urbanism: “the death of the street.”
Brasília was designed to eliminate the street and the square as places
for public life. Although the elimination of local barrio loyalties
and rivalries may not have been planned, they were also a casualty of
the new city.


The public square and the crowded “corridor” street had been venues of
civic life in urban Brazil since colonial days. As Holston explains,
this civic life took two forms. In the first, which had been sponsored
by the church or state, ceremonial or patriotic processions and
rituals were typically held in the principal square of the town.\footnote{Holston, \emph{The Modernist City}, pp. 113-19.}
The second form encompassed a nearly inexhaustible range of popular
uses of all the town squares. Children might play there; adults might
simply shop, stroll and run into acquaintances, meet friends for a
meal or coffee, play cards or chess, enjoy the social diversions of
seeing and being seen. The point is that the square, as a confluence
of streets and a sharply enclosed, framed space, become what Holston
aptly calls a “public visiting room.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 115.} As a public room, the
square is distinguished by its accessibility to all social classes and
the great variety of activities it accommodates. Barring state
proscriptions, it is a flexible space that enables those who use it to
use it for \emph{their} mutual purposes. The square or the busy street
attracts a crowd precisely because it provides an animated scene—a
scene in which thousands of unplanned, informal, improvised encounters
can take place simultaneously. The street was the spatial focus for
public life outside the usually cramped family dwelling.\footnote{Compare this tradition with the intention of Le Corbusier, who wrote, “Cafes and places of recreation will no longer be the fungus which eats up the pavements of Paris. We must kill the street” (\emph{Towards a New Architecture}, trans. Frederick Etchells [New York: Praeger, 1959], pp. 56-59).} The
colloquialism for “I’m going downtown” was “I’m going to the street.”
As the focus for sociability, these spaces were also crucial sites for
the development of public opinion as well as for “barrio nationalism,”
which could take institutional form in sports teams, bands,
patron-saint celebrations, festival groups, and so on. It goes without
saying that the street or the public square, under the right
circumstances, could also become the site of public demonstrations and
riots directed against the state.


A mere glance at the scenes of Brasília, juxtaposed to the urban
Brazil that we have been describing, shows at once how radical is the
transformation. There are no streets in the sense of public gathering
places; there are only roads and highways to be used exclusively by
motorized traffic (compare figures 19 and 20).


There \emph{is} a square. But what a square! The vast, monumental Plaza of
the Three Powers, flanked by the Esplanade of the Ministries, is of
such a scale as to dwarf even a military parade (compare figures 21
and 22, and figures 23 and 24). In comparison, Tiananmen Square and
the Red Square are positively cozy and intimate. The plaza is best
seen, as are many of Le Corbusier’s plans, from the air (as in
figure 24). If one were to arrange to meet a friend there, it would be
rather like trying to meet someone in the middle of the Gobi
desert. And if one did meet up with one’s friend, there would be
nothing to do. Functional simplification demands that the rationale
for the square as a public visiting room be designed out of
Brasília. This plaza is a symbolic center for the state; the only
activity that goes on around it is the work of the ministries.
Whereas the vitality of the older square depended on the mix of
residence, commerce, and administration in its catchment area, those
who work in the ministries must drive to their residences and then
again to the separate commercial centers of each residential area.


One striking result of Brasília’s cityscape is that virtually all the
public spaces in the city are officially designated public spaces: the
stadium, the theater, the concert hall, the planned restaurants. The
smaller, unstructured, informal public spaces—sidewalk cafés, street
corners, small parks, neighborhood squares—do not
exist. Paradoxically, a great deal of nominally open space
characterizes this city, as it does Le Corbusier’s city plans. But
that space tends to be “dead” space, as in the Plaza of the Three
Powers. Holston explains this by showing how CLAM doctrines create
sculptural masses widely separated by large voids, an inversion of the
“figure-ground” relations in older cities. Given our perceptual
habits, these voids in the modernist city seem to be not inviting
public spaces but boundless, empty spaces that are avoided.\footnote{See Holston’s interesting analysis in \emph{The Modernist City}, pp. 119-36.} One
could fairly say that the effect of the plan was to design out all
those unauthorized locations where casual encounters could occur and
crowds could gather spontaneously. The dispersal and functional
segregation meant that meeting someone virtually required a plan.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-20.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 19. Residential street in the neighborhood Barra Funda, São Paulo, 1988}
\end{figure}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-21.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 20. Residential access way L1 in Brasília, 1980}
\end{figure}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-22.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 21. Largo do Pelourinho, with the museum of the city and the former slave market, São Salvador, 1980}
\end{figure}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-23.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 22. The Plaza of the Three Powers, with the museum of the city and Planalto Palace, Brasília, 1980}
\end{figure}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-24.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 23. The Praça de Sé, São Paulo, 1984}
\end{figure}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-25.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 24. The Plaza of the Three Powers and the Esplanade of the Ministries, Brasília, 1981}
\end{figure}


Costa and Niemeyer were not only banishing the street and the square
from their utopian city. They believed that they were also banishing
crowded slums, with their darkness, disease, crime, pollution, traffic
jams and noise, and lack of public services. There were definite
advantages to beginning with an empty, bulldozed site belonging to the
state. At least the problems of land speculation, rent gouging, and
property-based inequalities that beset most planners could be
circumvented. As with Le Corbusier and Haussmann, there was an
emancipating vision here. The best and most current architectural
knowledge about sanitation, education, health, and recreation could be
made part of the design. Twenty-five square meters of green space per
resident reached the UNESCO-designed ideal. And as with any utopian
plan, the design of Brasilia reflected the social and political
commitments of the builders and their patron, Kubitschek. All
residents would have similar housing; the sole difference would be the
number of units they were allotted. Following the plans of progressive
European and Soviet architects, the planners of Brasília grouped the
apartment buildings into what were called \emph{superquadra} in order to
facilitate the development of a collective life. Each superquadra
(roughly 360 apartments housing 1,500—2,500 residents) had its own
nursery and elementary school; each grouping of four superquadra had a
secondary school, a cinema, a social club, sports facilities, and a
retail sector.


Virtually all the needs of Brasília’s future residents were reflected
in the plan. It is just that these needs were the same abstract,
schematic needs that produced the formulas for Le Corbusier’s
plans. Although it was surely a rational, healthy, rather egalitarian,
state-created city, its plans made not the slightest concession to the
desires, history, and practices of its residents. In some important
respects, Brasília is to São Paulo or Rio as scientific forestry is to
the unplanned forest. Both plans are highly legible, planned
simplifications devised to create an efficient order that can be
monitored and directed from above. Both plans, as we shall see,
miscarry in comparable respects. Finally, both plans change the city
and the woods to conform to the simple grid of the planner.

\subsection{Living in Brasília}


Most of those who have moved to Brasília from other cities are amazed
to discover “that it is a city without crowds.” People complain that
Brasília lacks the bustle of street life, that it has none of the busy
street corners and long stretches of storefront facades that animate a
sidewalk for pedestrians. For them, it is almost as if the founders of
Brasília, rather than having planned a city, have actually planned to
prevent a city. The most common way they put it is to say that
Brasília “lacks street corners,” by which they mean that it lacks the
complex intersections of dense neighborhoods comprising residences and
public cafes and restaurants with places for leisure, work, and
shopping. While Brasília provides well for some human needs, the
functional separation of work from residence and of both from commerce
and entertainment, the great voids between superquadra, and a road
system devoted exclusively to motorized traffic make the disappearance
of the street corner a foregone conclusion. The plan did eliminate
traffic jams; it also eliminated the welcome and familiar pedestrian
jams that one of Holston’s informants called “the point of social
conviviality.”\footnote{Ibid., pp. 105-7. I take the liberty of translating \emph{convivencia} as “conviviality” rather than “sociality,” as it seems more faithful to the point that Holston’s informant is trying to make (p. 105).}


The term \emph{brasilite}, meaning roughly Brasíl(ia)-itis, which was
coined by the first-generation residents, nicely captures the trauma
they experienced.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 24-26.} As a mock clinical condition, it connotes a
rejection of the standardization and anonymity of life in
Brasília. “They use the term \emph{brasilite} to refer to their feelings
about a daily life without the pleasures—the distractions,
conversations, flirtations, and little rituals—of outdoor life in
other Brazilian cities.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 24.} Meeting someone normally requires seeing
them either at their apartment or at work. Even if we allow for the
initial simplifying premise of Brasília’s being an administrative
city, there is nonetheless a bland anonymity built into the very
structure of the capital. The population simply lacks the small
accessible spaces that they could colonize and stamp with the
character of their activity, as they have done historically in Rio and
São Paulo.  To be sure, the inhabitants of Brasília haven’t had much
time to modify the city through their practices, but the city is
designed to be fairly recalcitrant to their efforts.\footnote{There are, of course, some things that residents \emph{do} like about living in Brasília: the government facilities, the high standard of living, and the fact that it is a safe environment for children.}


“Brasilite,” as a term, also underscores how the built environment
affects those who dwell in it. Compared to life in Rio and São Paulo,
with their color and variety, the daily round in bland, repetitive,
austere Brasília must have resembled life in a sensory deprivation
tank.  The recipe for high-modernist urban planning, while it may have
created formal order and functional segregation, did so at the cost of
a sensorily impoverished and monotonous environment—an environment
that inevitably took its toll on the spirits of its residents.


The anonymity induced by Brasília is evident from the scale and
exterior of the apartments that typically make up each residential
superquadra (compare figures 25 and 26). For superquadra residents,
the two most frequent complaints are the sameness of the apartment
blocks and the isolation of the residences (“In Brasília, there is
only house and work”).\footnote{Ibid., p. 163.} The facade of each block is strictly
geometric and egalitarian. Nothing distinguishes the exterior of one
apartment from another; there are not even balconies that would allow
residents to add distinctive touches and create semipublic
spaces. Part of the disorientation arises from the fact that apartment
dwelling—especially, perhaps, this form of apartment dwelling—fails to
accord with deeply embedded conceptions of home. Holston asked a class
of nine-year-old children, most of whom lived in superquadra, to draw a
picture of “home.” Not one drew an apartment building of any kind. All
drew, instead, a traditional freestanding house with windows, a
central door, and a pitched roof.\footnote{Ibid., p. 171. The freestanding small house could also be merely a representational convention that gets established early in childhood.} The superquadra blocks, by
contrast, resist the stamp of individuality, while the glass walls on
their exteriors infringe on the sense of private space in the
home.\footnote{See Holston’s interesting analysis of how the superquadra apartment design eliminates the most public or social space of the traditional Brazilian dwelling, the \emph{copa}, in ibid., pp. 177-80.} Concerned with the overall aesthetic of the plan, the
architects erased not only the external display of status distinctions
but also much of the visual play of difference. Just as the general
design of the city militates against an autonomous public life, so the
design of the residential city militates against individuality.


The disorienting quality of Brasília is exacerbated by architectural
repetition and uniformity. Here is a case where what seems like
rationality and legibility to those working in administration and
urban services seems like mystifying disorder for the ordinary
residents who must navigate the city. Brasília has few landmarks. Each
commercial quarter or superquadra cluster looks roughly like any
other. The sectors of the city are designated by an elaborate set of
acronyms and abbreviations that are nearly impossible to master,
except from the global logic of the center. Holston notes the irony
between macro-order and micro-confusion: “Thus, while the topologies
of total order produce an unusual, abstract awareness of the plan,
practical knowledge of the city actually decreases with the imposition
of systematic rationality.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 149. See also Kevin Lynch, \emph{The Image of the City} (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960). Lynch’s concept of “imageability” has more to do with how a place or neighborhood can be “pictured” by its inhabitants than the legibility it might have to a planner or administrator. The two forms of order might often, as Holston reminds us, be negatively correlated.} From the perspective of the planners
of a utopian city, whose goal is more to change the world than to
accommodate it, however, the shock and disorientation occasioned by
life in Brasília may be part of its didactic purpose. A city that
merely pandered to existing tastes and habits would not be doing its
utopian job.

\subsection{Unplanned Brasília}


From the beginning, Brasília failed to go precisely as planned. Its
master builders were designing for a new Brazil and for new Brazilians—orderly,
modern, efficient, and under their discipline. They were
thwarted by contemporary Brazilians with different interests and the
determination to have them heard. Somehow, it was assumed that the
huge workforce (more than sixty thousand strong) would respond to the
call to build the city and then quietly leave it to the administrators
for whom it was intended. The construction workers, moreover, had not
been adequately planned for. Kubitschek accorded top priority to
finishing Brasília as quickly as possible. Although most construction
laborers routinely worked overtime, the population at the building
site quickly outstripped the temporary housing allotted to them in
what was called the Free City. They soon squatted on additional land
on which they built makeshift houses; in cases where whole families
migrated to Brasília (or farmed there), the houses they erected were
sometimes quite substantial.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-26.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 25. Residential area along Rua Tiradentes in Ouro Preto, 1980}
\end{figure}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-27.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 26. A superquadra apartment block in Brasilia, 1980}
\end{figure}


The “pioneers” of Brasília were collectively called “\emph{bandeirantes of
the twentieth century},” after the adventurers who had first
penetrated the interior. The label was intended as a compliment,
inasmuch as Kubitschek’s Brasília was also a symbolic conquest of
the interior in a nation that had historically clung to the
shoreline. At the outset, however, the manual laborers attracted to
Brasilia were derogatorily called \emph{candangos}. A candango was “a man
without qualities, without culture, a vagabond, lower-class,
lowbrow.”\footnote{Holston, \emph{The Modernist City}, p. 209.} Kubitschek changed that.  He used the building of
Brasília, which was, after all, devised to transform Brazil, in order
to transform the candangos into the proletarian heroes of the new
nation. “Future interpreters of Brazilian Civilization,” he declared,
“must dwell with astonishment before the bronzed rigors of this
anonymous titan, who is the candango, the obscure and formidable hero
of the construction of Brasília\dots{} While the skeptics laughed at the
intended utopia of the new city that I prepared to build, the
candangos shouldered the responsibility.”\footnote{Quoted in ibid., p. 210.} Taking full advantage
of the rhetorical space thus provided them, the candangos insisted on
having their own patch of the utopian city. They organized to defend
their land, to demand urban services, and to be given secure title. In
the end, by 1980, 75 percent of the population of Brasília lived in
settlements that had never been anticipated, while the planned city
had reached less than half of its projected population of 557,000.
The foothold the poor gained in Brasília was not just a result of the
beneficence of Kubitschek and his wife, Doña Sara. Political structure
played a key role as well. Squatters were able to mobilize, protest,
and be heard by virtue of a reasonably competitive political
system. Neither Kubitschek nor other politicians could possibly ignore
the opportunity to cultivate a political clientele who might vote as a
bloc.


The unplanned Brasília—that is, the real, existing Brasília—was quite
different from the original vision. Instead of a classless
administrative city, it was a city marked by stark spatial segregation
according to social class. The poor lived on the periphery and
commuted long distances to the center, where much of the elite lived
and worked.  Many of the rich also created their own settlements with
individual houses and private clubs, thereby replicating the affluent
lifestyles found elsewhere in Brazil. The unplanned Brasílias—that of
the rich and that of the poor—were not merely a footnote or an
accident; one could say that the cost of this kind of order and
legibility at the center of the plan virtually required that it be
sustained by an unplanned Brasília at the margins. The two Brasílias
were not just different; they were symbiotic.


Radically transforming an entire nation of Brazil’s size and
diversity—let alone in only five years—was all but inconceivable. One
senses that Kubitschek, like many rulers with great ambitions for
their countries, despaired of a direct assault on all Brazil and all
Brazilians and turned to the more plausible task of creating from zero
a utopian model. Raised on a new site, in a new place, the city would
provide a transforming physical environment for its new residents—an
environment minutely tailored to the latest dictates regarding health,
efficiency, and rational order. As the progressive city would evolve
from a unitary, integrated plan on land owned entirely by the state,
with all contracts, commercial licenses, and zoning in the hands of
the planning agency (Novacap), the conditions seemed favorable for a
successful “utopian miniaturization.”


How successful was Brasilia as a high-modernist, utopian space? If we
judge it by the degree to which it departs from cities in older, urban
Brazil, then its success was considerable. If we judge it by its
capacity either to transform the rest of Brazil or to inspire a love
of the new way of life, then its success was minimal. The real
Brasília, as opposed to the hypothetical Brasília in the planning
documents, was greatly marked by resistance, subversion, and political
calculation.

\section{Le Corbusier at Chandigarh}


Since Le Corbusier did not design Brasília, it may seem like guilt by
association to blame him for its manifest failings. Two
considerations, however, justify the connection. The first is that
Brasília was faithfully built according to CIAM doctrines elaborated
mostly by Le Corbusier. Second, Le Corbusier did in fact play a major
role in designing another capital city that reflected precisely the
human problems encountered in Brasília.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-28.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 27. The chowk, or piazza, that Le Corbusier designed for Chandigarh’s city center}
\end{figure}


Chandigarh, the new capital of the Punjab, was half planned when the
architect in charge, Matthew Nowicki, suddenly died.\footnote{My information about Chandigarh comes from the following sources: Ravi Kalia, \emph{Chandigarh: In Search of an Identity} (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), and three articles in Russell Walden, ed., \emph{The Open Hand: Essays on Le Corbusier} (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977): Maxwell Fry, “Le Corbusier at Chandigarh,” pp. 351-63; Madhu Sarin, “Chandigarh as a Place to Live In,” pp. 375-411; and Stanislaus von Moos, “The Politics of the Open Hand: Notes on Le Corbusier and Nehru at Chandigarh,” pp. 413-57.} Nehru, in
search of a successor, invited Le Corbusier to finish the design and
supervise the construction. The choice was in keeping with Nehru’s own
high-modernist purpose: namely, the promotion of modern technology in
a new capital that would dramatize the values that the new Indian
elite wished to convey.\footnote{Punjabi politicians also embraced the project, seeing it as compensation for the loss of Lahore, the pre-partition capital of the Punjab, a focus of Mogul power, and capital of the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh. I’m grateful to Ramachandra Guha for this information.} Le Corbusier’s modifications of Nowicki’s
and Albert Mayer’s original plan were all in the direction of
monumentalism and linearity. In place of large curves, Le Corbusier
substituted rectilinear axes. At the center of the capital, he
inserted a huge monumental axis not unlike those in Brasília and in
his plan for Paris.\footnote{As Maxwell Fry describes it, Le Corbusier was preoccupied at the time with the visual effects of buildings in large spaces. He had brought with him a plan of the grand axis that joined the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe via the Champs Elysees and tried to work out “the farthest extension of grandeur comprehensible, at a single view,” in the new setting. See Fry, “Le Corbusier at Chandigarh,” p. 357.} In place of crowded bazaars cramming as many
goods and people as possible into small spaces, he substituted huge
squares that today stand largely empty (figure 27).


Whereas road crossings in India had typically served as public gathering
places, Le Corbusier shifted the scale and arranged the zoning in order
to prevent animated street scenes from developing. Notes one recent
observer: “On the ground, the scale is so large and the width between
meeting streets so great that one sees nothing but vast stretches of
concrete paving with a few lone figures here and there. The small-scale
street trader, the hawker or the rehris (barrows) have been banned from
the city center, so that even where sources of interest and activity
could be included, if only to reduce the concreted barrenness and
authority of the \emph{chowk}, these are not utilized.”\footnote{Sarin, “Chandigarh as a Place to Live In,” p. 386.}


As in Brasília, the effort was to transcend India as it existed and to
present Chandigarh’s citizens—largely administrators—with an image of
their own future. As in Brasília, the upshot was another unplanned city
at the periphery and the margins, one that contradicted the austere
order at the center.

\section{The Case Against High-Modernist Urbanism: Jane Jacobs}


Jane Jacobs’s book \emph{The Death and Life of Great American Cities} was
written in 1961 against a high tide of modernist, functional urban
planning. Hers was by no means the first criticism of high-modernist
urbanism, but it was, I believe, the most carefully observed and
intellectually grounded critique.\footnote{See, for example, the book published a decade and a half earlier by Percival Goodman and Paul Goodman, \emph{Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life} (New York: Vintage Books, 1947), which touches on many of the same themes found in Jacobs’s work but which promotes decentralization and appropriate technology.} As the most comprehensive
challenge to contemporary doctrines of urban planning, it sparked a
debate, the reverberations of which are still being felt. The result,
some three decades later, has been that many of Jacobs’s views have
been incorporated into the working assumptions of today’s urban
planners.  Although what she called her “attack on current city
planning and rebuilding” was concerned primarily with American cities,
she located Le Corbusier’s doctrines, as applied abroad and at home,
at the center of her field of fire.


What is remarkable and telling about Jacobs’s critique is its unique
perspective. She begins at street level, with an ethnography of
microorder in neighborhoods, sidewalks, and intersections. Where
Le Corbusier “sees” his city initially from the air, Jacobs sees her
city as a pedestrian on her daily rounds would. Jacobs was also a
political activist involved in many campaigns against proposals for
zoning changes, road building, and housing development that she
thought ill-advised.\footnote{In New York City, Jacobs was seen as a prominent enemy of the master builder Robert Moses.} It was all but inconceivable that a radical
critique, grounded in this fashion, could ever have originated from
within the intellectual circle of urban planners.\footnote{On the other hand, Jacobs had a great deal of knowledge about architecture. She was married to an architect and had worked her way up from newspaper and editing jobs to become associate editor of the journal \emph{Architectural Forum}.} Her novel brand
of everyday urban sociology applied to the design of cities was simply
too far removed from the orthodox educational routines of urban
planning schools at the time.\footnote{An interesting parallel case from the same time period is Rachel Carson’s \emph{Silent Spring} (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). Carson began her influential attack on the profligate use of insecticides by asking a homely but powerful question: “Where have all the songbirds gone?”} An examination of her critique from
the margins serves to underline many of the failings of high
modernism.

\subsection{Visual Order Versus Experienced Order}


A formative insight in Jacobs’s argument is that there is no necessary
correspondence between the tidy look of geometric order on one hand
and systems that effectively meet daily needs on the other. Why should
we expect, she asks, that well-functioning built environments or
social arrangements will satisfy purely visual notions of order and
regularity?  To illustrate the conundrum, she refers to a new housing
project in East Harlem that sported, conspicuously, a rectangular
lawn. The lawn was the object of general contempt by the residents. It
was even taken as an insult by those who had been forcibly relocated
and now lived in a project among strangers where it was impossible to
get a newspaper or a cup of coffee or to borrow fifty cents.\footnote{Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), p. 15.} The
apparent order of the lawn seemed cruelly emblematic of a more keenly
felt disorder.


A fundamental mistake that urban planners made, Jacobs claims, was to
infer \emph{functional} order from the duplication and regimentation of
building forms: that is, from purely visual order. Most complex
systems, on the contrary, do not display a surface regularity; their
order must be sought at a deeper level. “To see complex systems of
functional order as order, and not as chaos, takes understanding. The
leaves dropping from the trees in the autumn, the interior of an
airplane engine, the entrails of a rabbit, the city desk of a
newspaper, all appear to be chaos if they are seen without
comprehension. Once they are seen as systems of order, they actually
look different.” At this level one could say that Jacobs was a
“functionalist,” a word whose use was banned in Le Corbusier’s
studio. She asked, What function does this structure serve, and how
well does it serve it? The “order” of a thing is determined by the
purpose it serves, not by a purely aesthetic view of its surface
order.\footnote{Ibid., p. 376. The early constructivist Le Corbusier would not have disavowed this view as a matter of principle, but as a matter of practice he was always greatly concerned with the sculptural properties of an urban plan or a single building—sometimes with brilliant results, as in Notre-Dame-du-Haut, Ronchamp (1953).} Le Corbusier, by contrast, seemed to have firmly believed
that the most efficient forms would \emph{always} have a classical clarity
and order. The physical environments Le Corbusier designed and built
had, as did Brasília, an overall harmony and simplicity of form. For
the most part, however, they failed in important ways as places where
people would want to live and work.


It was this failure of the general urban planning models that so
preoccupied Jacobs. The planners’ conception of a city accorded
neither with the actual economic and social functions of an urban area
nor with the (not unrelated) individual needs of its
inhabitants. Their most fundamental error was their entirely aesthetic
view of order. This error drove them to the further error of rigidly
segregating functions. In their eyes, mixed uses of real estate—say,
stores intermingled with apartments, small workshops, restaurants, and
public buildings—created a kind of visual disorder and confusion. The
great advantage of single uses—one shopping area, one residential
area—was that it made possible the monofunctional uniformity and visual
regimentation that they sought.  As a planning exercise, it was of
course vastly easier to plan an area zoned for a single use than one
zoned for several. Minimizing the number of uses and hence the number
of variables to be juggled thus combined with an aesthetic of visual
order to argue for a single-use doctrine.\footnote{A useful critique of current zoning practice may be found in James Howard Kunstler, “Home from Nowhere,” \emph{Atlantic Monthly}, September 1996, pp. 43-66.} The metaphor that comes
to mind in this connection is that of an army drawn up on the parade
ground as opposed to an army engaged in combat with the enemy. In the
first case is a tidy visual order created by units and ranks drawn up
in straight lines. But it is an army doing nothing, an army on
display. An army at war will not display the same orderly arrangement,
but it will be, in Jacobs’s terms, an army doing what it was trained
to do. Jacobs thinks she knows the roots of this penchant for
abstract, geometric order from above: “Indirectly through the utopian
tradition, and directly through the more realistic doctrine of art by
imposition, modern city planning has been burdened from its beginnings
with the unsuitable aim of converting cities into disciplined works of
art.”\footnote{Jacobs, \emph{Death and Life}, p. 375. This seems especially reasonable so long as the disciplined works of art one is talking about are those of a Josef Albers rather than a Jackson Pollock. In this connection, it is useful to recall that Le Corbusier began as an artist and never stopped painting.}


Recently, Jacobs notes, the statistical techniques and input-output
models available to planners had become far more sophisticated. They
were encouraged to attempt such ambitious feats of planning as massive
slum clearance now that they could closely calculate the budget,
materials, space, energy, and transportation needs of a rebuilt area.
These plans continued to ignore the social costs of moving families
“like grains of sand, or electrons, or billiard balls.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 437.} The plans
were also based on notoriously shaky assumptions, and they treated
systems of complex order as if they could be simplified by numerical
techniques, regarding shopping, for example, as a purely mathematical
issue involving square footage for shopping space and traffic
management as an issue of moving a certain number of vehicles in a
given time along a certain number of streets of a given width. These
were indeed formidable technical problems, but, as we shall see, the
real issues involved much more besides.

\subsection{The Functional Superiority of Cross-Use and Complexity}


The establishment and maintenance of social order in large cities are,
as we have increasingly learned, fragile achievements. Jacobs’s view
of social order is both subtle and instructive. \emph{Social} order is not
the result of the architectural order created by T squares and slide
rules.  Nor is social order brought about by such professionals as
policemen, nightwatchmen, and public officials. Instead, says Jacobs,
“the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities \dots{} is kept
by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and
standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people
themselves.” The necessary conditions for a safe street are a clear
demarcation between public space and private space, a substantial
number of people who are watching the street on and off (“eyes on the
street”), and fairly continual, heavy use, which adds to the quantity
of eyes on the street.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 31-32. The recent social science literature on social trust and social capital, demonstrating the economic costs of their absence, signals that this homely truth is now a subject of formal inquiry. It is important to specify that Jacobs’s point about “eyes on the street” assumes a rudimentary level of community feeling. If the eyes on the street are hostile to some or all members of the community, as Talja Potters has reminded me, public security is not enhanced.} Her example of an area where these
conditions were met is Boston’s North End. Its streets were thronged
with pedestrians throughout the day owing to the density of
convenience and grocery stores, bars, restaurants, bakeries, and other
shops. It was a place where people came to shop and stroll and to
watch others shop and stroll. The shopkeepers had the most direct
interest in watching the sidewalk: they knew many people by name, they
were there all day, and their businesses depended on the neighborhood
traffic. Those who came and went on errands or to eat or drink also
provided eyes on the street, as did the elderly who watched the
passing scene from their apartment windows. Few of these people were
friends, but a good many were acquaintances who did recognize one
another. The process is powerfully cumulative. The more animated and
busier the street, the more interesting it is to watch and observe;
all these unpaid observers who have some familiarity with the
neighborhood provide willing, informed surveillance.


Jacobs recounts a revealing incident that occurred on her mixed-use
street in Manhattan when an older man seemed to be trying to cajole an
eight- or nine-year-old girl to go with him. As Jacobs watched this
from her second-floor window, wondering if she should intervene, the
butcher’s wife appeared on the sidewalk, as did the owner of the deli,
two patrons of a bar, a fruit vendor, and a laundryman, and several
other people watched openly from their tenement windows, ready to
frustrate a possible abduction. No “peace officer” appeared or was
necessary.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 38-40. It is worth noting that the linchpin of this informal surveillance and social order is the fast-disappearing and much maligned petite bourgeoisie.}


Another instance of informal urban order and services is instructive.
Jacobs explains that when a friend used their apartment while she and
her husband were away or when they didn’t want to wait up for a
late-arriving visitor, they would leave the key to their apartment
with the deli owner, who had a special drawer for such keys and who
held them for the friends.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 59-62.} She noted that every nearby mixed-use
street had someone who played the same role: a grocer, candy-store
owner, barber, butcher, dry cleaner, or bookshop owner. This is one of
the many public functions of private business.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 60-61. Jacobs offers a catalogue of nonreimbursed services provided by a typical candy-store proprietor in the course of a single morning, acknowledging that many of these small services allow the shopkeeper to further “entangle” his or her clientele.} These services,
Jacobs notes, are not the outgrowth of any deep friendship; they are
the result of people being on what she calls “sidewalk terms” with
others. And these are services that could not plausibly be provided by
a public institution.  Having no recourse to the face-to-face politics
of personal reputation that underwrites social order in small rural
communities, the city relies on the density of people who are on
sidewalk terms with one another to maintain a modicum of public
order. The web of familiarity and acquaintanceship enabled a host of
crucial but often invisible public amenities. A person didn’t think
twice about asking someone to hold one’s seat at the theater, to watch
a child while one goes to the restroom, or to keep an eye on a bike
while one ducks into a deli to buy a sandwich.


Jacobs’s analysis is notable for its attention to the microsociology
of public order. The agents of this order are all nonspecialists whose
main business is something else. There are no formal public or
voluntary organizations of urban order here—no police, no private
guards or neighborhood watch, no formal meetings or
officeholders. Instead, the order is embedded in the logic of daily
practice. What’s more, Jacobs argues, the formal public institutions
of order function successfully \emph{only} when they are undergirded by
this rich, informal public life. An urban space where the police are
the sole agents of order is a very dangerous place. Jacobs admits that
each of the small exchanges of informal public life-nodding hello,
admiring a newborn baby, asking where someone’s nice pears come
from—can be seen as trivial. “But the sum is not trivial at all,” she
insists. “The sum of each casual, public contact at a local level—most
of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it
metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone—is a
feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and
trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need. The
absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street. Its cultivation
cannot be institutionalized. And above all, \emph{it implies no private
commitments}.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 56 (emphasis in original).} Where Le Corbusier began with formal,
architectural order from above, Jacobs begins with informal, social
order from below.


Diversity, cross-use, and complexity (both social and architectural)
are Jacobs’s watchwords. The mingling of residences with shopping
areas and workplaces makes a neighborhood more interesting, more
convenient, and more desirable—qualities that draw the foot traffic
that in turn makes the streets relatively safe. The whole logic of her
case depends on the creation of the crowds, diversity, and
conveniences that define a setting where people will want to be. In
addition, a high volume of foot traffic stimulated by an animated and
colorful neighborhood has economic effects on commerce and property
values, which are hardly trivial. The popularity of a district and its
economic success go hand in hand. Once created, such places will
attract activities that most planners would have specially sequestered
elsewhere. Rather than play in the large parks created for that
purpose, many children prefer the sidewalks, which are safer, more
eventful, and more convenient to the comforts available in stores and
at home.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 84-88. Jacobs quotes a 1928 regional planning report on recreation, which noted that only about one-fourth of the population whose ages ranged from five to fifteen years actually played in playgrounds, which could not compete with city streets that were “teeming with life and adventure.”} Understanding the magnetic effect of the busy street
over more specialized settings is no more difficult than understanding
why the kitchen is typically the busiest room in a house.  It is the
most versatile setting—a place of food and drink, of cooking and
eating, and hence of socialization and exchange.\footnote{In the modern home, if the kitchen also has a television, its status as the most heavily used room in the home is likely to be without competition. Talja Potters, a Dutch colleague, tells me that in working-class apartments built in Holland between 1920 and 1970, the dimensions of the kitchen were deliberately minimized so that laborers would be obliged to dine and socialize in the living room, like decent middle-class people.}


What are the conditions of this diversity? That a district have mixed
primary uses, Jacobs suggests, is the most vital factor. Streets and
blocks should be short in order to avoid creating long barriers to
pedestrians and commerce.\footnote{Jacobs’s chapter “The Need for Small Blocks” is a model of her mode of analysis. See \emph{Death and Life}, pp. 178-86.} Buildings should ideally be of greatly
varying age and condition, thereby making possible different rental
terms and the varied uses that accompany them. Each of these
conditions, not surprisingly, violates one or more of the working
assumptions of orthodox urban planners of the day: single-use
districts, long streets, and architectural uniformity. Mixed primary
uses, Jacobs explains, are synergistic with diversity and density.


Take, for example, a small restaurant in a single-use district—say,
the financial district of Wall Street. Such a restaurant must make
virtually all its profit between 10 A.M. and 3 P.M., the hours when
office workers take their midmorning coffee breaks and lunch breaks
before commuting home at the end of the day, leaving the street
silent. The restaurant in a mixed-use district, on the other hand, has
potential clients passing by throughout the day and into the night. It
may therefore stay open for more hours, benefiting not only its own
business but also that of nearby specialized shops, which might be
economically marginal in a single-use district but which become going
concerns in a lively mixed-use area. The very jumble of activities,
buildings, and people—the apparent \emph{disorder} that offended the
aesthetic eye of the planner—was for Jacobs the sign of dynamic
vitality: “Intricate minglings of different uses are not a form of
chaos. On the contrary they represent a complex and highly developed
form of order.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 222.}


While Jacobs makes a convincing case for mixed use and complexity by
examining the micro-origins of public safety, civic trust, visual
interest, and convenience, there is a larger argument to be made for
cross-use and diversity. Like the diverse old-growth forest, a richly
differentiated neighborhood with many kinds of shops, entertainment
centers, services, housing options, and public spaces is, virtually by
definition, a more resilient and durable neighborhood. Economically,
the diversity of its commercial “bets” (everything from funeral
parlors and public services to grocery stores and bars) makes it less
vulnerable to economic downturns. At the same time its diversity
provides many opportunities for economic growth in upturns. Like
monocropped forests, single-purpose districts, although they may
initially catch a boom, are especially susceptible to stress. The
diverse neighborhood is more sustainable.


I think that a “woman’s eye,” for lack of a better term, was essential
to Jacobs’s frame of reference. A good many men, to be sure, were
insightful critics of high-modernist urban planning, and Jacobs refers
to many of their writings. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine
her argument being made in quite the same way by a man. Several
elements of her critique reinforce this impression. First, she
experiences the city as far more than a setting for the daily trek to
and from work and the acquisition of goods and services. The eyes with
which she sees the street are, by turns, those of shoppers running
errands, mothers pushing baby carriages, children playing, friends
having coffee or a bite to eat, lovers strolling, people looking from
their windows, shopkeepers dealing with customers, old people sitting
on park benches.\footnote{Jacobs, in addition to holding several jobs, was a wife and mother in the 1950s.} Work is not absent from her account, but her
attention is riveted on the quotidian in the street as it appears
around work and outside of work. A concern with public space puts both
the interior of the home and the office as factory outside her
purview. The activities that she observes so carefully, from taking a
walk to window-shopping, are largely activities that do not have a
single purpose or that have no conscious purpose in the narrow sense.


Compare this perspective with most of the key elements in
highmodernist urban planning. Such plans all but require forms of
simplification that strip human activity to a sharply defined single
purpose. In orthodox planning, such simplifications underlie the
strict functional segregation of work from domicile and both from
commerce. The matter of transportation becomes, for Le Corbusier and
others, the single problem of how to transport people (usually in
automobiles) as quickly and economically as possible. The activity of
shopping becomes a question of providing adequate floor space and
access for a certain quantity of shoppers and goods. Even the category
of entertainment was split up into specified activities and segregated
into playgrounds, athletic fields, theaters, and so on.


Thus, the second result of Jacobs’s having a woman’s eye is her
realization that a great deal of human activity (including, by all
means, work) is pursued for a wide range of goals and
satisfactions. An amiable lunch with co-workers may be the most
significant part of the day for a jobholder. Mothers pushing baby
carriages may also be talking to friends, doing errands, getting a
bite to eat, and looking for a book at the local bookstore or
library. In the course of these activities, still another “purpose”
might arise, unbidden. The man or woman driving to work may not just
be driving to work. He or she may care about the scenery or
companionship along the way and the availability of coffee near the
parking lot. Jacobs herself was an enormously gifted “eye on the
street,” and she wrote in full recognition of the great variety of
human purposes embedded in any activity. The purpose of the city is to
accommodate and abet this rich diversity and not to thwart it. And the
persistent failure of urban-planning doctrines to do so, she
suggested, had something to do with gender.\footnote{In explaining why children often prefer to play on sidewalks rather than in playgrounds, Jacobs writes: “Most city architectural designers are men. Curiously, they design and plan to exclude men as part of normal, daytime life wherever people live. In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies” (\emph{Death and Life}, p. 83).}

\subsection{Authoritarian Planning as Urban Taxidermy}


For Jacobs, the city as a social organism is a living structure that
is constantly changing and springing surprises. Its interconnections
are so complex and dimly understood that planning always risks
unknowingly cutting into its living tissue, thereby damaging or
killing vital social processes. She contrasts the “art” of the planner
to the practical conduct of daily life: “\emph{A city cannot be a work of
art}\dots{} In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless
intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic, and abstracted. That is
its value and the source of its own kind of order and
coherence\dots{} The results of such profound confusion between art and
life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place,
taxidermy can be a useful and decent craft.  However, it goes too far
when the specimens put on display are exhibitions of dead, stuffed
cities.”\footnote{Ibid., pp. 372-73 (emphasis in original). Compare Jacobs’s critique with Mumford’s criticism of baroque city planning as being “ruthless, one-sided, noncooperative, \dots{} [and] indifferent to the slow, complex interactions, the patient adjustments and modifications, through trial and selection, which mark more organic methods of city development” (\emph{The City in History}, p. 350).} The core of Jacobs’s case against modern city planning
was that it placed a static grid over this profusion of unknowable
possibilities. She condemned Ebenezer Howard’s vision of the garden
city because its planned segregation presumed that farmers, factory
workers, and businessmen would remain fixed and distinct castes. Such
a presumption failed to respect or provide for the “spontaneous
self-diversification” and fluidity that were the main features of the
nineteenth-century city.\footnote{Jacobs, \emph{Death and Life}, p. 289. For an extensive analysis of the process of economic diversification, see Jacobs later book, \emph{The Economy of Cities} (New York: Random House, 1970). Carol Rose, the legal theorist, makes the interesting point that the visual representations of property—fences, walls, hedges, windows, gates—function as a rhetoric of a static and timeless property that ignores historical change. See Rose, \emph{Property and Persuasion: Essays in the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership} (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), especially chap. 9, “Seeing Property,” pp. 267-303.}


Urban planners’ great penchant for massive schemes of slum clearance
was attacked on the same grounds. Slums were the first foothold of
poor migrants to the city. As long as these areas were reasonably
stable, the economy relatively strong, and people and businesses not
starved for credit, the slums could, given time, manage to “unslum”
themselves. Many already had. Planners frequently destroyed
“unslumming slums” because these areas violated their doctrines of “layout,
use, ground coverage, mixture and activities”\footnote{Jacobs, \emph{Death and Life}, p. 287.}—not to mention the
land speculation and security concerns behind much “urban renewal.”


From time to time Jacobs stands back from the infinite and changing
variety of American cities to express a certain awe and humility:
“Their intricate order—a manifestation of the freedom of countless
numbers of people to make and carry out countless plans—is in many
ways a great wonder. We ought not to be reluctant to make this living
collection of interdependent uses, this freedom, this life, more
understandable for what it is, nor so unaware that we do not know what
it is.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 391. The echoes of such influential anarchist thinkers as PierreJoseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin reverberate in this passage. I do not know whether Jacobs intended these resonances, which may have come from the work of Paul Goodman. But what is missing is a recognition that, in the absence of statebased urban planning, large commercial and speculative interests are transforming the urban landscape every day. The effect of her argument is to “naturalize” the unplanned city by treating it as the consequence of thousands of small and notionally equal acts.} The magisterial assumption behind the doctrines of many
urban planners—that they know what people want and how people should
spend their time—seems to Jacobs shortsighted and arrogant. They
assumed, or at least their plans assumed, that people preferred open
spaces, visual (zoned) order, and quiet. They assumed that people
wanted to live in one place and work in another. Jacobs believes they
were mistaken, and most important, she is prepared to argue from close
daily observation at street level rather than stipulating human wishes
from above.


The logic behind the spatial segregation and single-use zoning of the
urban planners that Jacobs criticized was at once aesthetic,
scientific, and practical. As an aesthetic matter, it led to the
visual regularity—even regimentation—that a sculptural view of the
ensemble required. As a scientific matter it reduced the number of
unknowns for which the planner had to find a solution. Like
simultaneous equations in algebra, too many unknowns in urban planning
rendered any solution problematic or else required heroic
assumptions. The problem the planner faced was analogous to that of
the forester. One modern solution to the forester’s dilemma was to
borrow a management technique called optimum control theory, whereby
the sustained timber yield could be successfully predicted by few
observations and a parsimonious formula. It goes without saying that
optimum control theory was simplest where more variables could be
turned into constants. Thus a singlespecies, same-age forest planted
in straight lines on a flat plain with consistent soil and moisture
profiles yielded simpler and more accurate optimum control
formulas. Compared to uniformity, diversity is always more difficult
to design, build, and control. When Ebenezer Howard approached town
planning as a simple, two-variable problem of relating housing needs
to the quantity of jobs in a closed system, he was both temporally and
functionally operating “scientifically” within those self-imposed
limits. Formulas for green space, light, schools, and square meters
per capita did the rest.


In urban planning as in forestry, it is a short step from parsimonious
assumptions to the practice of shaping the environment so that it
satisfies the simplifications required by the formula. The logic of
planning for the shopping needs of a given population serves as an
example. Once planners applied the formula for a certain number of
square feet of commercial space, parceled out among such categories as
food and clothing, they realized that they would then have to make
these shopping centers monopolistic within their areas, lest nearby
competitors draw away their clientele. The whole point was to
legislate the formula, thereby guaranteeing the shopping center a
monopoly of its catchment area.\footnote{Ibid., p. 737.} Rigid, single-use zoning is,
then, not just an aesthetic measure. It is an indispensable aid to
scientific planning, and it can also be used to transform formulas
posing as observations into self-fulfilling prophesies.


The radically simplified city, provided it is viewed from above, is
also practical and efficient. The organization of
services—electricity, water, sewage, mail—is simplified both below and
above ground.  Single-use districts, by virtue of the repetition of
functionally similar apartments or offices, are simpler to produce and
build. Le Corbusier looked forward to a future when all the components
of such buildings would be industrially prefabricated.\footnote{Some small components of buildings have of course been mass produced for a long time, from standard lumber stock, Sheetrock, and shingles to flooring and, most famously, nails. Sears and Roebuck home kits were available as early as the 1890s.} Zoning
along these lines also produces a city that is, district by district,
both more uniform aesthetically and more “orderly” functionally. A
single activity or narrow band of activities is appropriate to each
district: work in the business district, family life in the
residential quarter, shopping and entertainment in the commercial
district. As a police matter, this functional segregation minimizes
unruly crowds and introduces as much regimentation into the movement
and conduct of the population as physical planning alone can
encourage.


Once the desire for comprehensive urban planning is established, the
logic of uniformity and regimentation is well-nigh inexorable. Cost
effectiveness contributes to this tendency. Just as it saves a prison
trouble and money if all prisoners wear uniforms of the same material,
color, and size, every concession to diversity is likely to entail a
corresponding increase in administrative time and budgetary cost. If
the planning authority does not need to make concessions to popular
desires, the one-size-fits-all solution is likely to prevail.\footnote{Where performance is critical—say, in an army—this logic is superseded by other criteria. Thus soldiers will typically have different-sired boots that fit well but haircuts that are identical.}


Against the planners’ eye and formulas, Jacobs juxtaposes her own. Her
aesthetic, she would claim, is pragmatic and street level, an
aesthetic that has as its reference the experienced working order of
the city for the people who live there. She asks, What physical
environments draw people, facilitate circulation, promote social
exchange and contact, and satisfy both utilitarian and nonutilitarian
needs? This perspective leads her to many judgments. Short blocks are
preferable to long blocks because they knit together more
activities. Large truck depots or filling stations that break the
continuity of pedestrian interest are to be avoided. To be kept to a
minimum are huge roads and vast, forbidding open spaces that operate
as visual and physical barriers. There is a logic here, but it is not
an a priori visual logic, nor is it a purely utilitarian logic
narrowly conceived. Rather, it is a standard of evaluation that
springs from how satisfactorily a given arrangement meets the social
and practical desires of urban dwellers as those needs are revealed in
their actual activity.

\subsection{Planning for the Unplanned}


The historic diversity of the city—the source of its value and
magnetism—is an unplanned creation of many hands and long historical
practice. Most cities are the outcome, the vector sum, of innumerable
small acts bearing no discernible overall intention. Despite the best
efforts of monarchs, planning bodies, and capitalist speculators,
“most city diversity is the creation of incredible numbers of
different people and different private organizations, with vastly
different ideas and purposes, planning and contriving outside the
formal framework of public action.”\footnote{Jacobs, \emph{Death and Life}, p. 241.} Le Corbusier would have
agreed with this description of the existing city, and it was
precisely what appalled him. It was just this cacophony of intentions
that was responsible for the clutter, ugliness, disorder, and
inefficiencies of the unplanned city. Looking at the same social and
historical facts, Jacobs sees reason to praise them: “Cities have the
capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and
only when, they are created by everybody.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 238. The caveat, “and only when,” may be a rare recognition by Jacobs that, in the absence of extensive planning in a liberal economy, the asymmetrical market forces which shape the city are hardly democratic.} She is no freemarket
libertarian, however; she understands clearly that capitalists and
speculators are, willy-nilly, transforming the city with their
commercial muscle and political influence. But when it comes to urban
public policy, she thinks planning ought not to usurp this unplanned
city: “The main responsibility of city planning and design should be
to develop, insofar as public policy and action can do so, cities that
are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas,
and opportunities to flourish.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 241.} Whereas Le Corbusier’s planner is
concerned with the overall form of the cityscape and its efficiency in
moving people from point to point, Jacobs’s planner consciously makes
room for the unexpected, small, informal, and even nonproductive human
activities that constitute the vitality of the “lived city.”


Jacobs is more aware than most urban planners of the ecological and
market forces continually transforming the city. The succession of
harbors, railroads, and highways as means of moving people and goods
had already marked the rise and decline of sections of the city. Even
the successful, animated neighborhoods that Jacobs so prizes were, she
recognizes, becoming victims of their own success. Areas were
“colonized” by urban migrants because land values, and hence rents,
were cheap. As an area became more desirable to live in, its rents
rose and its local commerce changed, the new businesses often driving
out the original pioneers who had helped transform it. The nature of
the city was flux and change; a successful neighborhood could not be
frozen and preserved by the planners. A city that was extensively
planned would inevitably diminish much of the diversity that is the
hallmark of great towns. The best a planner can hope for is to
modestly enhance rather than impede the development of urban
complexity.


For Jacobs, how a city develops is something like how a language
evolves. A language is the joint historical creation of millions of
speakers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of
a language, the process is not particularly egalitarian. Linguists,
grammarians, and educators, some of them backed by the power of the
state, weigh in heavily. But the process is not particularly amenable
to a dictatorship, either. Despite the efforts toward “central
planning,” language (especially its everyday spoken form) stubbornly
tends to go on its own rich, multivalent, colorful way. Similarly,
despite the attempts by urban planners toward designing and stablizing
the city, it escapes their grasp; it is always being reinvented and
inflected by its inhabitants.\footnote{For an elaboration of this argument applied to urban design, see Michel de Certeau, \emph{The Practice of Everyday Life} (Arts de faire: La pratique du quotidien), trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Another analogy that may be made in this context is to the market, along the lines developed by Friedrich Hayek. The problem that I see with this analogy is that the market in the modern sense is not synonymous with “spontaneous social order,” but rather had to be imposed by a coercive state in the nineteenth century, as Karl Polanyi has convincingly shown. Hayek’s description of the development of common law is, I believe, somewhat closer to the mark. In any event, city, market, and common law are all creators of historical power relations that are neither “natural” nor creative of “spontaneous social order.” In her telling critique of planning, Jacobs is frequently tempted to naturalize the unplanned city rather as Hayek naturalizes the market.} For both a large city and a rich
language, this openness, plasticity, and diversity allow them to serve
an endless variety of purposes—many of which have yet to be conceived.


The analogy can be pressed further. Like planned cities, planned
languages are indeed possible. Esperanto is one example; technical and
scientific languages are another, and they are quite precise and
powerful means of expression within the limited purposes for which
they were designed. But language per se is not for only one or two
purposes.  It is a general tool that can be bent to countless ends by
virtue of its adaptability and flexibility. The very history of an
inherited language helps to provide the range of associations and
meanings that sustain its plasticity. In much the same way, one could
plan a city from zero. But since no individual or committee could ever
completely encompass the purposes and lifeways, both present and
future, that animate its residents, it would necessarily be a thin and
pale version of a complex city with its own history. It will be a
Brasília, Saint Petersburg, or Chandigarh rather than a Rio de
Janeiro, Moscow, or Calcutta. Only time and the work of millions of
its residents can turn these thin cities into thick cities. The grave
shortcoming of a planned city is that it not only fails to respect the
autonomous purposes and subjectivity of those who live in it but also
fails to allow sufficiently for the contingency of the interaction
between its inhabitants and what that produces.


Jacobs has a kind of informed respect for the novel forms of social
order that emerge in many city neighborhoods. This respect is
reflected in her attention to the mundane but meaningful human
connections in a functioning neighborhood. While recognizing that no
urban neighborhood can ever be, or should be, static, she stresses the
minimal degree of continuity, social networks, and “street-terms”
acquaintanceship required to knit together an urban locality. “If
self-government in the place is to work,” she muses, “underlying any
float of population must be a continuity of people who have forged
neighborhood networks. These networks are a city’s irreplaceable
social capital. Whenever the capital is lost, from whatever cause, the
[social] income from it disappears, never to return until and unless
new capital is slowly and chancily accumulated.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 138.} It follows from
this vantage point that even in the case of slums, Jacobs was
implacably opposed to the wholesale slum-clearance projects that were
so much in vogue when she was writing. The slum might not have much
social capital, but what it did have was something to build on, not
destroy.\footnote{Some of Jacobs’s insights appear to be behind the early stages of recuperation in a few blighted sections of New York City’s South Bronx, once a synonym for the worst in urban decay. A combination of refurbishing existing buildings and apartments, promoting mixed-use development and urban homesteading, making small loans more readily available, and keeping to a modest scale appears to have facilitated the creation of viable neighborhoods.} What keeps Jacobs from becoming a Burkean conservative,
celebrating whatever history has thrown up, is her emphasis on change,
renewal, and invention. To try to arrest this change (although one
might try to modestly influence it) would be not only unwise but
futile.


Strong neighborhoods, like strong cities, are the product of complex
processes that cannot be replicated from above. Jacobs quotes with
approval Stanley Tankel, a planner who made the rarely heard case
against large-scale slum clearance in these terms: “The next step will
require great humility, since we are now so prone to confuse great
building projects with great social achievements. We will have to
admit that it is beyond the scope of anyone’s imagination to create a
community. We must learn to cherish the communities we have, they are
hard to come by. ‘Fix the buildings, but leave the people.’ ‘No
relocation outside the neighborhood.’ These must be the slogans if
public housing is to be popular.”\footnote{Quoted in ibid., pp. 336-37. Tankel’s plea appeared in a symposium called “The Architecture Forum” in June 1957.} In fact, the political logic of
Jacobs’s case is that while the planner cannot create a functioning
community, a functioning community can, within limits, improve its own
condition. Standing the planning logic on its head, she explains how a
reasonably strong neighborhood can, in a democratic setting, fight to
create and maintain good schools, useful parks, vital urban services,
and decent housing.


Jane Jacobs was writing against the major figures still dominating the
urban planning landscape of her day: Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier.
To some of her critics she has seemed a rather conservative figure,
extolling the virtues of community in poor neighborhoods that many
were anxious to leave and ignoring the degree to which the city was
already being “planned,” not by popular initiative or by the state but
by developers and financiers with political connections. There is some
justice to these points of view. For our purposes, however, there is
little doubt that she has put her finger on the central flaws of
hubris in high-modernist urban planning. The first flaw is the
presumption that planners can safely make most of the predictions
about the future that their schemes require. We know enough by now to
be exceptionally skeptical about forecasting from current trends in
fertility rates, urban migration, or the structure of employment and
income. Such predictions have often been wildly wrong. As for wars,
oil embargoes, weather, consumer tastes, and political eruptions, our
capacity for prediction is practically nil. Second, thanks in part to
Jacobs, we now know more about what constitutes a satisfactory
neighborhood for the people who live in it, but we still know precious
little about how such communities can be fostered and
maintained. Working from formulas about density, green space, and
transportation may produce narrowly efficient outcomes, but it is
unlikely to result in a desirable place to live.  Brasília and
Chandigarh, at a minimum, demonstrate this.


It is not a coincidence that many of the high-modernist cities
actually built—Brasília, Canberra, Saint Petersburg, Islamabad,
Chandigarh, Abuja, Dodoma, Ciudad Guayana\footnote{See Lisa Redfield Peattie, \emph{Planning, Rethinking Ciudad Guayana} (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987).}—have been
administrative capitals. Here at the center of state power, in a
completely new setting, with a population consisting largely of state
employees who have to reside there, the state can virtually stipulate
the success of its planning grid. The fact that the business of the
city is state administration already vastly simplifies the task of
planning. Authorities do not have to contend, as did Haussmann, with
preexisting commercial and cultural centers. And because the
authorities control the instruments of zoning, employment, housing,
wage levels, and physical layout, they can bend the environment to the
city. These urban planners backed by state power are rather like
tailors who are not only free to invent whatever suit of clothes they
wish but also free to trim the customer so that he fits the measure.


Urban planners who reject “taxidermy,” Jacobs claims, must
nevertheless invent a kind of planning that encourages novel
initiatives and contingencies, foreclosing as few options as possible,
and that fosters the circulation and contact out of which such
initiatives arise. To illustrate the diversity of urban life, Jacobs
lists more than a dozen uses which have been served over the years by
the center for the arts in Louisville: stable, school, theater, bar,
athletic club, blacksmith’s forge, factory, warehouse, artists’
studio. She then asks, rhetorically, “Who could anticipate or provide
for such a succession of hopes and services?” Her answer is simple:
“Only an unimaginative man would think he could; only an arrogant man
would want to.”\footnote{Jacobs, \emph{Death and Life}, p. 195.}

\chapter{Chapter 5. The Revolutionary Party: A Plan and a Diagnosis}



\begin{quote}


Feeling, Comrade C, is a mass element, but thought is organization.
Comrade Lenin said that organization is the highest of all of us.



\end{quote}


— Andrei Platonov, \emph{Chevengur}



\begin{quote}


Communism was modernity’s most devout, vigorous and gallant
champion\dots{}  It was under communist \dots{} auspices that the audacious
dream of modernity, freed from obstacles by the merciless and
omnipotent state, was pushed to its radical limits: grand designs,
unlimited social engineering, huge and bulky technology, total
transformation of nature.



\end{quote}


— Zygmunt Bauman, “\emph{Living Without an Alternative}”


Lenin’s design for the construction of the revolution was in many ways
comparable to Le Corbusier’s design for the construction of the modern
city. Both were complex endeavors that had to be entrusted to the
professionalism and scientific insight of a trained cadre with full
power to see the plan through. And just as Le Corbusier and Lenin
shared a broadly comparable high modernism, so Jane Jacobs’s
perspective was shared by Rosa Luxemburg and Aleksandra Kollontay, who
opposed Lenin’s politics. Jacobs doubted both the possibility and the
desirability of the centrally planned city, and Luxemburg and
Kollontay doubted the possibility and desirability of a revolution
planned from above by the vanguard party.

\section{Lenin: Architect and Engineer of Revolution}


Lenin, if we judge him from his major writings, was a convinced high
modernist. The broad lines of his thought were quite consistent;
whether he was writing about revolution, industrial planning,
agricultural organization, or administration, he focused on a unitary
scientific answer that was known to a trained intelligentsia and that
ought to be followed. The Lenin of practice was, of course, something
else again.  His capacity for sensing the popular mood in fashioning
Bolshevik propaganda, for beating a tactical retreat when it seemed
prudent, and for striking boldly to seize the advantage was more
relevant than his high modernism to his success as a revolutionary. It
is Lenin as a high modernist, however, with whom we are primarily
concerned.


The major text for the elaboration of Lenin’s high-modernist views of
revolution is \emph{What Is to Be Done?}\footnote{V. I. Lenin, \emph{What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement} (New York: International Publishers, 1929), p. 82.} High modernism was integral
to the central purpose of Lenin’s argument: to convince the Russian
left that only a small, selected, centralized, professional cadre of
revolutionaries could bring about a revolution in Russia. Written in
1903, well before the “dress rehearsal” revolution of 1905, this view
was never entirely abandoned, even under totally different
circumstances in 1917 between the February overthrow of the czar and
the Bolshevik seizure of power in October, when he wrote \emph{State and
Revolution}. I shall compare Lenin’s view in these two works and in
his writings on agriculture with Rosa Luxemburg’s “Mass-Strike, Party,
and Trade Unions,” written in reply to \emph{What Is to Be Done?} and with
the writings of Aleksandra Kollontay, an important figure in what was
called the Workers’ Opposition, a group within the Bolshevik party who
criticized many of Lenin’s policies after the revolution.

\subsection{The Lenin of \emph{What Is to Be Done}?}


Lenin’s choice of the title \emph{What Is to Be Done?} has great
significance.  It was also the title of an exceptionally popular novel
by Nicholas Chernyshevsky, in which a “new man” of the intelligentsia
set about destroying the old order and then ruling autocratically to
establish a social utopia. It had been the favorite book of Lenin’s
adored older brother, Alexander, who had been executed in 1887 for a
plot against the czar’s life. Even after Lenin became a Marxist, it
was still his favorite book: “I became acquainted with the works of
Marx, Engels, and Plekhanov, but it was only Chernyshevsky who had an
overwhelming influence on me.”\footnote{Quoted in Robert Conquest, “The Somber Monster,” \emph{New York Review of Books}, June 8, 1995, p. 8. We also know that Lenin was an admirer of another utopian work, Tommaso Campanella’s \emph{City of the Sun}, which describes a religious utopia whose design includes strong pedagogical and didactic features for shaping the minds and souls of its citizens.} The idea that superior knowledge,
authoritarian instruction, and social design could transform society
pervades both works.


Certain metaphors suffuse Lenin’s analysis of the link between the
vanguard party and the workers in \emph{What Is to Be Done?} They set the
tone of the work and limit what can be said within its confines. These
metaphors center on the classroom and the barracks.\footnote{The metaphors of the classroom and the barracks were in keeping with Lenin’s reputation in the party, where his comrades referred to him as “the German” or “Herr Doktor,” alluding not so much to his time in Zurich or the assistance he received from Germany but simply to “his tidiness and self-discipline” (Conquest, “The Somber Monster”).} The party and
its local agitators and propagandists function as schoolteachers
capable of raising merely economic complaints to the level of
revolutionary political demands, or they function as officers in a
revolutionary army who deploy their troops to best advantage. In their
roles as teachers, the vanguard party and its newspaper develop a
pedagogical style that is decidedly authoritarian. The party analyzes
the many and varied popular grievances and, at the right time,
“dictate[s] a positive programme of action” that will contribute to a
“universal political struggle.”\footnote{Lenin, \emph{What Is to Be Done?} p. 80.} In fact, Lenin complained, the
party’s activists have been woefully inadequate. It is not enough to
call the movement a “vanguard,” he insisted. “We must act in such a
way that \emph{all other units of the army} shall see us, and be obliged to
admit that we are the vanguard.” The goal of the vanguard party is to
train willing but “backward” proletarians in revolutionary politics so
that they may be inducted into an army that will “collect and utilize
every grain of even rudimentary protest,” thereby creating a
disciplined revolutionary army.\footnote{Ibid., p. 84 (emphasis added).}


In keeping with these metaphors, the “masses” in general and the
working class in particular become “the body,” while the vanguard
party is “the brain.” The party is to the working class as
intelligence is to brute force, deliberation to confusion, a manager
to a worker, a teacher to a student, an administrator to a
subordinate, a professional to an amateur, an army to a mob, or a
scientist to a layman. A brief explanation of how these metaphors work
will help situate Lenin’s own version of high-modern, albeit
revolutionary, politics.


Lenin realized, of course, that the revolutionary project depended on
popular militancy and spontaneous protest. The problem of relying
solely on popular action from below, however, was that such action was
scattered and sporadic, making easy pickings for the czarist
police. If we think of popular action as incendiary political
material, the role of the vanguard party was to concentrate and aim
this explosive charge so that its detonation could bring down the
regime. The vanguard party “merged the \emph{elemental} destructive force
of a crowd with the \emph{conscious} destructive force of the organization
of revolutionists.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 161 (emphasis added).} It was the thinking organ of the revolution,
ensuring that the otherwise diffuse brute force of the masses was
effectively used.


The logic of this perspective led Lenin to think of the vanguard party
as a would-be general staff to a vast but undisciplined army of raw
recruits already in combat. The more unruly the army, the greater the
need for a small, cohesive general staff. To his competitors on the
left (the Economists), who argued that ten wise men could easily be
grabbed by the police, whereas one hundred fools (the revolutionary
crowd) could not be stopped, Lenin replied, “Without the ‘dozen’ of
tried and talented leaders (and talented men are not born by
hundreds), professionally trained, schooled by long experience and
working in perfect harmony, no class in modern society is capable of
conducting a determined struggle.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 114. Lenin is here referring to the Social Democrats in Germany, whom he regards as far more advanced than their Russian counterparts. See also p. 116, where Lenin asserts, “No movement can be durable without a stable organization of leaders to maintain continuity.” This issue was debated anew in practically every socialist movement. We see it in the writings of the Italian Communist and theoretician Antonio Gramsci, who basically shared Lenin’s opinion on this matter. Rosa Luxemburg, as we shall see, also addressed the issue and reached very different conclusions.}


Lenin’s analogies to military organization were not just colorful
figures of speech; they were how he thought about most aspects of
party organization. He wrote of “tactics” and “strategy” in a
straightforwardly military style. Only a general staff is capable of
deploying its revolutionary forces in accord with an overall battle
plan. Only a general staff can see the entire battlefield and
anticipate enemy movements. Only a general staff would have the
“flexibility \dots{} to adapt itself immediately to the most diverse and
rapidly changing conditions of struggle,” the “ability to renounce an
open fight against overwhelming and concentrated forces, and yet
capable of taking advantage of the awkwardness and immobility of the
enemy and of attacking at a time and a place where he least expects
attack.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 162.} The earlier failures of social democrat revolutionaries
could, he insisted, be attributed precisely to the absence of
organization, planning, and coordination that a general staff could
provide. These “young warriors,” who had “marched to battle with
astonishingly primitive equipment and training,” were “like peasants
from the plough, snatching up a club.”  Their “immediate and complete
defeat” was a foregone conclusion “because these open conflicts were
not the result of a systematic and carefully thought-out and gradually
prepared plan for a prolonged and stubborn struggle.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 95.}


Part of the necessity for strict discipline arose from the fact that
the enemies of revolution were better armed and more
sophisticated. This explains why “freedom of criticism” among the
revolutionary forces could only favor opportunists and the ascendancy
of bourgeois values. Once again Lenin seized on a military analogy to
drive the point home: “We are marching in a compact group along a
precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the
hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and are under their
almost constant fire. We have combined voluntarily, especially for the
purpose of fighting the enemy and not to retreat into the adjacent
marsh,” that is, freedom of criticism.\footnote{Ibid., p. 15.}


The relationship envisioned by Lenin between the vanguard party and
its rank and file is perhaps best exemplified by the terms “mass” or
“masses.” Although the terms became standard in socialist parlance,
they are heavy with implications. Nothing better conveys the
impression of mere quantity and number without order than the word
“masses.” Once the rank and file are so labeled, it is clear that what
they chiefly add to the revolutionary process are their weight in
numbers and the kind of brute force they can represent if firmly
directed. The impression conveyed is of a huge, formless, milling
crowd without any cohesion—without a history, without ideas, without a
plan of action. Lenin was all too aware, of course, that the working
class does have its own history and values, but this history and these
values will lead the working class in the wrong direction unless they
are replaced by the historical analysis and advanced revolutionary
theory of scientific socialism.


Thus the vanguard party not only is essential to the tactical cohesion
of the masses but also must literally do their thinking for them. The
party functions as an executive elite whose grasp of history and
dialectical materialism allows it to devise the correct “war aims” of
the class struggle. Its authority is based on its scientific
intelligence. Lenin quoted the “profoundly true and important
utterances by Karl Kautsky,” who said that the proletariat cannot
aspire to “modern socialist consciousness” on its own because it lacks
the “profound scientific knowledge” required to do so: “the vehicles
of science are not the proletariat, but the \emph{bourgeois
intelligentsia}.”\footnote{Quoted in ibid., p. 40. It is possible, Lenin remarks in a footnote (p. 41), for workers to rise into the intelligentsia and thereby play a role in creating socialist ideology. “But,” he adds, “they take part not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians like Proudhon and Weitling.”}


This is the core of Lenin’s case against spontaneity. There are only
two ideologies: bourgeois and socialist. Given the pervasiveness and
historical power of bourgeois ideology, the spontaneous development of
the working class will always lead to the triumph of bourgeois
ideology.  In Lenin’s memorable formulation, “the working class,
exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union
consciousness.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 33.} Social democratic consciousness, in contrast,
must come from outside, that is, from the socialist
intelligentsia. The vanguard party is depicted as conscious,
scientific, and socialist in the full sense and is contrasted with the
masses who are, by extension, unconscious, prescientific, and in
constant danger of absorbing bourgeois values.  Lenin’s stern
admonitions about indiscipline—“to deviate from it [socialist
ideology] in the slightest degree means strengthening bourgeois
ideology”\footnote{Ibid., p. 41.}—leave the impression of a general staff whose tight
control is the only counterweight to a force of conscripts who might
at any moment disband and wander off.


Another metaphor occasionally replaces those of the army and classroom
in Lenin’s discourse. It is the image of a bureaucratic or industrial
enterprise in which only the executives and engineers can see the
larger purposes of the organization. Lenin appeals to something like a
division of labor in revolutionary work, where the executive has a
monopoly on the advanced theory without which revolution is
impossible. Resembling factory owners and engineers who design
rational plans for production, the vanguard party possesses a
scientific grasp of revolutionary theory that makes it uniquely able
to guide the entire proletarian struggle for emancipation. It was a
bit too early, in 1903, for Lenin to refer to the assembly lines of
mass production to make his point, but he appropriated the next best
analogy from the building industry. “Pray tell me,” he proposed. “When
a brick layer lays bricks in various parts of an \emph{enormous structure},
the like of which has never been seen before, is it a ‘paper’ line
that he uses to help him find the correct place to place each brick,
to indicate to him the ultimate goal of the work as a whole, to enable
him to use not only every brick but even every piece of brick, which,
joining with the bricks placed before and after it, forms a complete
and all embracing line? And are we not now passing through a period in
our party life, when we have bricks and bricklayers, but we lack the
guiding line, visible to all, by which to guide our movements?”\footnote{Ibid., p. 151 (emphasis added). Lenin is writing specifically here about the newspaper \emph{Iskra}, an organ of the vanguard party.}
What the party has is the blueprint of the entire new structure, which
its scientific insight has made possible. The role of the workers is
to follow that part of the blueprint allotted to them in the
confidence that the architects of revolution know what they are doing.


The analogy to the division of labor in modern capitalist production
has implications roughly parallel to those of the military
metaphor. Both, for example, require authoritarian methods and central
control. Thus Lenin wrote of the party’s need “to distribute the
thousand-andone minute \emph{functions} of their organizational work,”
complained of “technical defects,” and called for the unification of
“all these tiny fractions into one whole.” As he concluded,
“specialization necessarily presupposes centralization, and in its
turn imperatively calls for it.”\footnote{Ibid., pp. 120-21.}


It is surely a great paradox of \emph{What Is to Be Done?} that Lenin takes
a subject—promoting revolution—that is inseparable from popular anger,
violence, and the determination of new political ends and transforms
it into a discourse on technical specialization, hierarchy, and the
efficient and predictable organization of \emph{means}. Politics
miraculously disappears from within the revolutionary ranks and is
left to the elite of the vanguard party, much as industrial engineers
might discuss, among themselves, how to lay out a factory floor. The
vanguard party is a machine to produce a revolution. There is no need
for politics within the party inasmuch as the science and rationality
of the socialist intelligentsia require instead a technically
necessary subordination; the party’s judgments are not subjective and
value laden but objective and logically inevitable.


Lenin extends this line of reasoning to his characterization of the
revolutionary elite. They are not mere revolutionaries; they are
“professional revolutionists.” He insists on the full meaning of the
term “professional”: someone who is an experienced, full-time, trained
revolutionist. This small, secret, disciplined, professional cadre is
specifically contrasted to workers’ organizations, which are large,
public, and established according to trades. The two are never to be
confused. Thus, to the analogy of the factory manager vis-à-vis the
worker, Lenin adds that of the professional vis-à-vis the apprentice
or amateur. It is assumed that those in the second category will defer
to those in the first on the basis of their greater technical
knowledge and experience. Just as Le Corbusier imagines that the
public will acquiesce to the knowledge and calculations of the master
architect, so Lenin is confident that a sensible worker will want to
place himself under the authority of professional revolutionists.


Let us return, finally, to the metaphor of the schoolroom where the
vanguard party is the teacher and the masses are the pupils. Lenin is
hardly unique in his use of this analogy. His was a pedagogical age in
general, and reading circles for workers and schools for socialist
militants were common, especially in Germany, where Rosa Luxemburg
taught at the Socialist Party’s school in Berlin. Although the imagery
of the schoolroom may have been commonplace, Lenin’s particular use of
it to characterize socialist training bears emphasis. A tremendous
amount of Lenin’s thought and prose was devoted to “socialist
instruction” broadly understood. He was preoccupied with how militants
might be trained, the role of the party newspaper, \emph{Iskra}, and the
content of speeches, manifestos, and slogans. But Lenin’s socialist
schoolroom is fraught with danger. His constant fear is that the
teachers will lose control of the students and be swamped by the
pervasive influence of narrow economic demands, legislative reforms,
and purely local concerns. The classroom metaphor is inherently
hierarchical, but Lenin’s main worry is that his socialist teachers
will succumb and “go native.” Lurking near the surface of Lenin’s
writings is a powerful cultural judgment, which is evident here in a
representative passage.



\begin{quote}


Our very first and most imperative duty is to help to train
working-class revolutionists who will be on the same level in regard
to party activity as intellectual revolutionists (we emphasize the
words \emph{in regard to party activity} because although it is necessary,
it is not so easy and not so imperative to bring workers up to the
level of intellectuals in other respects). Therefore attention must be
devoted principally to the task of raising the workers to the level of
revolutionists, but without, in doing so, necessarily \emph{degrading}
ourselves to the level of the “labor masses” as the Economists wish to
do, or necessarily to the level of the average worker, as [the
newspaper] \emph{Svoboda} desires to do.\footnote{Ibid., p. 122 (emphasis in original).}



\end{quote}


The dilemma for the party is how to train revolutionists who will be
close to the workers (and perhaps of worker backgrounds themselves) but
who will not be absorbed, contaminated, and weakened by the political
and cultural backwardness of the workers. Some of Lenin’s worries have
to do with his conviction at the time that the Russian working class and
most of its socialist intelligentsia were woefully backward compared to
their German counterparts. In \emph{What Is to Be Done?} German social
democracy and the German trade-union movement function repeatedly as the
model, in terms of which Russia is found wanting. But the principle
behind Lenin’s concerns transcends national differences; it stems from
the sharply delineated, functional roles that the party and the working
class each played. Class consciousness, in the final analysis, is an
objective truth carried solely by the ideologically enlightened who
direct the vanguard party.\footnote{See, for example, Kathy E. Ferguson, “Class Consciousness and the Marxist Dialectic: The Elusive Synthesis,” \emph{Review of Politics} 42, no. 4 (October 1986): 504-32.}


However contrary to Newton’s first law of motion, the central idea
informing Lenin’s logic is that the party will be an “unmoved mover.”
An intimate association with the working class is absolutely necessary
to the task of propaganda and agitation, but it must be a closeness
that will never threaten the hierarchy of knowledge, influence, and
power. If professional revolutionists are to be effective leaders,
they require the kind of detailed understanding and knowledge of the
workers that successful teachers need of their students, military
officers need of their troops, or production managers need of their
workforce. It is knowledge for the purpose of achieving goals set by
an elite. The relationship depicted is so asymmetrical that one is
even tempted to compare it to the relation that a craftsman has to his
raw material. A woodworker or a mason must know his inert materials
well in order to realize his designs. In Lenin’s case, the relative
inertness of the material being shaped is implied by the global
imagery of “the masses” or “the proletariat.” Once these flattened
terms are used, it becomes difficult to examine the enormous
differences in history, political experience, organizational skills,
and ideology (not to mention religion, ethnicity, and language) that
exist within the working class.


There is still another contingent and Russia-centered reason why Lenin
might have insisted on a small, disciplined, and secret cadre of
revolutionists. They were, after all, operating in an autocracy, under
the noses of the czarist secret police. After commenting favorably on
the openness of competition for office within the German Social
Democratic Party, where, owing to certain political and press
freedoms, all candidates’ public records were known, he exclaimed,
“Try to put this picture in the frame of our autocracy!”\footnote{Lenin, \emph{What Is to Be Done?} p. 129.} Where a
revolutionary must conceal his identity, under pain of arrest, such
openly democratic methods were impossible. The revolutionaries in
Russia must, Lenin argued, adapt their tactics to those of their
enemy—the political police. If this were the only argument Lenin made
for secrecy and iron discipline, then it could be treated as an
incidental tactical concession to local conditions. But it was
not. The secrecy of the party was designed to prevent contamination
from below as much as arrest and exile. There is no other way to
interpret passages like the following: “If such an organization [a
secret body of ‘tried’ revolutionists] existed on a firm theoretical
basis, and possessed a Social-Democratic journal, we would have \emph{no
reason to fear that the movement will be diverted from its path by the
numerous ‘outside’ elements that will be attracted to it.}”\footnote{Ibid., p. 121 (emphasis added).}


How would the movement be diverted? Lenin had chiefly two potential
dangers in mind. The first was the danger of spontaneity, which makes
the tactical coordination of revolutionary pressure impossible. The
second was, of course, the virtually inevitable ideological diversion
of the working class toward trade unionism and legislative
reform. Since authentic, revolutionary class consciousness could never
develop autonomously within the working class, it followed that the
actual political outlook of workers was always a threat to the
vanguard party.


It is perhaps for these reasons that when Lenin wrote of propaganda
and agitation, it was a one-way transmission of information and ideas
that he had in mind. His unrelenting emphasis on a party newspaper fit
nicely into this context. A newspaper, even more than “agitation”
before heckling or sullen crowds, creates a decidedly one-sided
relationship.\footnote{“Agitation” is another diagnostic word in this context. It conjures up still waters that move only when “agitated” by an outside agent.} The organ is a splendid way to diffuse
instructions, explain the party line, and rally the troops. Like its
successor, the radio, the newspaper is a medium better suited to
sending messages than to receiving them.


On many occasions, Lenin and his colleagues took the threat of
contamination more literally and spoke in metaphors drawn from the
science of hygiene and the germ theory of disease. Thus it became
possible to talk of “petit-bourgeois bacilli” and “infection.”\footnote{In the Tenth Party Congress in 1921, while troops under Trotsky were crushing a genuine proletarian revolt against Bolshevik autocracy, Bukharin and others condemned the “petit-bourgeois infection” that had spread from the peasantry to parts of the working class. See Paul Averich, \emph{Kronstadt}, 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), chap. 3, especially pp. 129-30.}
The shift in imagery was not far-fetched, for Lenin did want to keep
the party in an environment that was as sterile and germ-free as
possible lest the party contract one of the many diseases lurking
outside.\footnote{When it came to preventing actual disease and infection, Lenin took it on himself to ensure that the Kremlin was a clean, germ-free environment by writing its sanitary regulations himself. He instructed, for example, that “all those arriving (by train) shall before entering their accommodation take a bath and hand their dirty clothes to the disinfector at the baths\dots{} Anyone refusing to obey the sanitary regulations will be expelled from the Kremlin at once and tried for causing social harm.” From Dimitri Volkogonov, \emph{Lenin: Life and Legacy}, trans. Harold Shukman (London: Harper Collins, 1995), cited in Robert Service, “The First Master Terrorist,” \emph{Times Literary Supplement}, January 6, 1995, p. 9.}


Lenin’s general treatment of the working class in \emph{What Is to Be
Done?} is strongly reminiscent of Marx’s famous depiction of the
smallholding French peasantry as a “sack of potatoes”—just so many
“homologous” units lacking any overall structure or cohesion. This
premise shapes in turn the role of the vanguard party. The trick is to
change a formless, sporadic, fragmented, and localized anger among the
masses into an organized force with purpose and direction. Just as the
force of a powerful magnet aligns a chaos of thousands of iron
filings, so the party’s leadership is expected to turn a crowd into a
political army. At times it is hard to know what the masses actually
bring to the revolutionary project beyond the raw material they
represent. Lenin’s catalogue of the functional roles that the party
assumes is quite comprehensive: “We must go among all classes of
people as \emph{theoreticians}, as \emph{propagandists}, as \emph{agitators}, and as
\emph{organizers}.”\footnote{Lenin, \emph{What Is to Be Done?} p. 79 (emphasis added).} The inference to be drawn from this list is that
the revolutionists are to provide knowledge, opinion, the urge and
direction to action, and organizational structure. Given this
unidirectional flow of intellectual, social, and cultural services
from above, it is hard to imagine what role the masses could have had
beyond being mustered up.


Lenin conceived of a division of revolutionary labor that resembled
what came to be the expectation (if rarely the practice) of Communist
parties both in and out of power. The central committee made all the
crucial decisions about tactics and strategy, while the mass
organizations and trade unions affiliated with the party served as
“transmission belts” for instructions. If we consider the vanguard
party, as Lenin did, to be a machine for bringing about the
revolution, then we see that the vanguard party’s relation to the
working class is not much different from a capitalist entrepreneur’s
relation to the working class. The working class is necessary to
production; its members must be trained and instructed, and the
efficient organization of their work must be left to professional
specialists. The ends of the revolutionist and the capitalist are, of
course, utterly different, but the problem of \emph{means} that confronts
each is similar and is similarly resolved. The problem of the factory
manager is how to deploy so many factory “hands” (interchangeable
units all) for the purpose of efficient production. The problem of the
scientific socialist party is how to efficiently deploy the masses in
order to hasten the revolution. Such organizational logic seems more
appropriate to factory production, which involves steady routines,
known technologies, and daily wages, than to the decidedly nonroutine,
high-stakes endeavor of revolution. Nevertheless, it was the model of
organization that structured much of Lenin’s argument.


To grasp the picture of Lenin’s utopian hopes for the vanguard party,
one might relate it to the “mass exercises” that were enormously
popular among both reactionary (mobilizing) and left-wing movements of
the turn of the century. Set in huge stadiums or on parade grounds,
they involved thousands of young men and women trained to move in
unison. The more complicated their maneuvers, which were often set to
rhythmic music, the more impressive the spectacle. In 1891, at the
Second National Congress of Sokol, a Czech gymnastic and physical
fitness organization promoting nationalism, no fewer than seventeen
thousand Czechs gave an elaborate display of coordinated
movement.\footnote{See Bruce M. Garver, \emph{The Young Czech Party}, 1874-1901, \emph{and the Emergence of a Multi-Party System} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 117. Peter Rutland tells me that such displays were by no means confined to political movements with authoritarian ideologies but were part of a view of machine precision and coordination from above that was applied to physical culture and shared by nationalist, bourgeois, and democratic movements, too. The tradition of coordinated “mass movement” survives, of course, in marching-band parades seen during halftimes of college football games in the United States. For more on the machine as a metaphor for social movements, see Chap. 6.} The whole idea of mass exercises was to create a
striking exhibition of order, training, and discipline from above, one
that would awe participants and spectators alike with its display of
disciplined power. Such spectacles assumed and required a single
centralized authority, which planned and executed the display.\footnote{Nicolae Ceauşescu’s nearly built Palace of the Republic in Bucharest contained many design features along these lines. The legislative assembly hall had tiered balconies encircling Ceauşescu’s “hydraulically lifted podium, and the palace’s six hundred clocks were all centrally set from a console in Ceauseşcu’s suite (\emph{New York Times}, December 5, 1991, p. 2). Lenin, in contrast, was always opposed to any cult of personality; the party itself was to be the conductor of the revolutionary orchestra.} It
is little wonder that the new mass-mobilization parties of all stripes
should have found public exhibitions of this kind compatible with
their organizational ideology. Lenin was far too realistic to imagine
that the Russian social democrats would ever resemble anything this
coherent and disciplined. Nevertheless, it was clearly the model of
centralized coordination to which he aspired and thus the yardstick by
which he measured his achievements.


Lenin and Le Corbusier, notwithstanding the great disparity in their
training and purpose, shared some basic elements of the highmodernist
outlook. While the scientific pretensions of each may seem implausible
to us, they both believed in the existence of a master science that
served as the claim to authority of a small planning elite. Le
Corbusier believed that the scientific truths of modern construction
and efficient design entitled him to replace the discordant, chaotic
historical deposit of urbanism with a utopian city. Lenin believed
that the science of dialectical materialism gave the party unique
insight into the revolutionary process and entitled it to claim the
leadership of an otherwise disorganized and ideologically misled
working class. Both were convinced that their scientific knowledge
provided correct, unitary answers to how cities should be designed and
how revolutions might be brought to fruition. Their confidence in
their method meant that neither the science of designing cities nor
that of designing revolutions had much to learn from the existing
practices and values of their intended beneficiaries. On the contrary,
each looked forward to refashioning the human material that came under
their purview. Both, of course, had the improvement of the human
condition as their ultimate goal, and both attempted to attain it with
methods that were profoundly hierarchical and authoritarian. In the
writings of both men, metaphors of the military and the machine
pervaded; for Le Corbusier, the house and city were machines for
living, and for Lenin, the vanguard party was a machine for
revolution. Appeals to centralized forms of bureaucratic
coordination—especially the factory and the parade ground—creep
naturally into their prose.\footnote{Even so, it should be noted, neither Le Corbusier nor Lenin was of a steady, methodical, bureaucratic temperament.} They were, to be sure, among the most
far-reaching and grandiose figures of high modernism, but they were at
the same time representative.

\subsection{Theory and Practice: The Revolutions of 1917}


A detailed account of the two Russian Revolutions of 1917 (February
and, above all, October) would take us too far afield. What is
possible, however, is to sketch briefly some of the principal ways in
which the actual revolutionary process resembled little the
organizational doctrines advocated in \emph{What Is to Be Done?} The
high-modernist scheme for revolution was no more borne out in practice
than were high-modernist plans for Brasília and Chandigarh borne out
in practice.


The most discordant fact about the Russian Revolution was that it was
not to any significant degree brought about by the vanguard party, the
Bolsheviks. What Lenin did succeed brilliantly in doing was in
capturing the revolution once it was an accomplished fact. As Hannah
Arendt succinctly put it, “The Bolsheviks found power lying in the
street, and picked it up.”\footnote{Hannah Arendt, \emph{On Revolution} (New York: Viking, 1965).} E. H. Carr, who wrote one of the
earliest and most complete studies of the revolutionary period,
concluded that “the contribution of Lenin and the Bolsheviks to the
overthrow of czarism was negligible” and that indeed “Bolshevism
succeeded to an empty throne.”  Nor was Lenin the prescient commander
in chief who could see the strategic situation clearly. In January
1917, a month before the February Revolution, he wrote disconsolately,
“We of the older generation may not see the decisive battles of the
coming revolution.”\footnote{E. H. Carr, \emph{The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923}, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 36; Lenin quoted on p. 80. Carr extends this judgment to all parties in the February Revolution: “The revolutionary parties played no direct part in the making of the revolution. They did not expect it, and were at first somewhat nonplussed by it. The creation at the moment of the revolution of a Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was a spontaneous act of groups of workers without central direction. It was a revival of the Petersburg Soviet which had played a brief but glorious role in the revolution of 1905” (p. 81).}


The Bolsheviks, on the eve of the revolution, did have a modest
working-class base, especially among the unskilled in Moscow and Saint
Petersburg, but Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, anarchists, and
unaffiliated workers predominated. What is more, the workers who were
affiliated with the Bolsheviks were rarely amenable to anything like
the hierarchical control envisioned in \emph{What Is to Be Done?}


Lenin’s aspiration for revolutionary practice was that the Bolsheviks
would come to form a tight, disciplined, command-and-control
structure.  Nothing could have been further from actual experience. In
all but one crucial respect, the revolution of 1917 was very much like
the miscarried revolution of 1905. Workers in revolt took over the
factories and seized municipal power, while in the countryside, the
peasantry began seizing land and attacking the gentry and tax
officials. Neither of these activities, either in 1905 or in 1917, was
brought about by the Bolsheviks or any other revolutionary
vanguard. The workers, who spontaneously formed soviets to run each
factory in 1917, disregarded at will the instructions of their own
Executive Committee of Soviets, not to mention the Bolsheviks. For
their part, the peasantry took the opportunity created by a political
vacuum at the center to restore communal control over land and enact
their local concept of justice.  Most of the peasants had not even
heard of the Bolsheviks, let alone presumed to act on their orders.


What must forcefully strike any reader of accounts of the detailed
events of late October 1917 is the utter confusion and localized
spontaneity that prevailed.\footnote{See, for example, ibid.; Sheila Fitzpatrick, \emph{The Russian Revolution} (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Marc Ferro, \emph{The Bolshevik Revolution: A Social History of the Russian Revolution}, trans. Norman Stone (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).} The very idea of centralized
coordination in this political environment was implausible. In the
course of battle, as military historians and astute observers have
always understood, the command structure typically falters. Generals
lose contact with their troops and are unable to follow the rapidly
changing tides of battle; the commands the generals do issue are
likely to be irrelevant by the time they reach the battlefield.\footnote{The best Russian depiction of this situation is in Tolstoy’s brilliant analysis of battle during the Napoleonic campaign in Russia in \emph{War and Peace} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942), pp. 713, 874, 921, 988. See also John Keegan, \emph{The Face of Battle} (New York: Viking Press, 1976).}
In Lenin’s case, the command-and-control structure could hardly
falter, as it had never existed in the first place. Ironically, Lenin
himself was out of step with the party’s leadership (many of whom were
behind bars) and was criticized on the eve of the Revolution as a
reckless putschist.


The new element in 1917 that made a revolutionary outcome far more
likely than it had been in 1905 was World War I—specifically, the
military collapse of the Russian offensive in Austria. Soldiers by the
thousands threw down their weapons to return to the cities or to seize
land in the countryside. The provisional government of Aleksandr
Kerensky had little or nothing in the way of coercive resources to
deploy in its defense. It is in this sense that the Bolsheviks
“succeeded to an empty throne,” although Lenin’s small military
uprising of October 24 proved a crucial stroke. What followed in the
years until 1921 is best described as the \emph{reconquest}, now by the
fledgling Bolshevik state, of Russia. The reconquest was not simply a
civil war against the “Whites”; it was also a war against the
autonomous forces that had seized local power in the revolution.\footnote{The role of autonomous action in driving the revolution forward even after October 1917 was recognized by Lenin when he said, in 1918, “Anarchist ideas have now taken on living form.” See Daniel Guérin, \emph{Anarchism: From Theory to Practice}, trans. Mary Klopper (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), p. 85. Much of the early Bolshevik legislation, Guérin notes, was the ex post facto legalization of autonmous actions and practices.}
It involved, first and foremost, a long struggle to destroy the
independent power of the soviets and to impose piecework, labor
control, and the abrogation of the right to strike on the workers. In
the countryside, the Bolshevik state gradually imposed political
control (in place of communal power), grain deliveries, and,
eventually, collectivization on the peasantry.\footnote{See the illuminating, detailed study, based on rich archival material, by Orlando Figes: \emph{Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917-1921} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).} The process of
Bolshevik state making entailed a great deal of violence against its
erstwhile beneficiaries, as the uprisings of Kronstadt, Tambov, and
the Maknovchina in the Ukraine attested.


The model for the vanguard party depicted so sharply in \emph{What Is to Be
Done?} is an impressive example of executive command and
control. Applied to the actual revolutionary process, however, it is a
pipe dream, bearing hardly any relation to the facts. Where the model
is descriptively accurate, alas, is in the exercise of state authority
after the revolutionary seizure of power. As it turned out, the
structure of power that Lenin hoped would characterize the making of
the revolution was more closely approximated by the long-lived
“dictatorship of the proletariat.” And in this case, of course, the
workers and peasants did not consent to the structure of power; the
state imposed it as a matter of imperative coordination.


Since the revolutionary victors get to write the official history of
how they achieved power, it matters little, in one sense, how snugly
their account fits the historical facts. Because most citizens come to
believe the neatly packaged account, whether or not it is accurate, it
further enhances their confidence in the clairvoyance, determination,
and power of their revolutionary leaders. The standard “just so” story
of the revolutionary process is perhaps the ultimate state
simplification. It serves a variety of political and aesthetic
purposes, which in turn help to account for the form it
assumes. Surely, in the first instance, the inheritors of the
revolutionary state have a vested interest in representing themselves
as the prime animators of the historical outcome. Such an account
emphasizes their indispensable role as leaders and missionaries, and
in the case of Lenin, it accorded best with the stated organizational
ideology of the Bolsheviks. The authorized histories of revolutions,
as Milovan Djilas points out, “describe the revolution as if it were
the fruit of the previously planned action of its leaders.”\footnote{Milovan Djilas, \emph{The New Class} (New York: Praeger, 1957), p. 32.} No
cynicism or mendacity need be involved. It is perfectly natural for
leaders and generals to exaggerate their influence on events; that is
the way the world looks from where they sit, and it is rarely in the
interest of their subordinates to contradict their picture.


After seizing state power, the victors have a powerful interest in
moving the revolution out of the streets and into the museums and
schoolbooks as quickly as possible, lest the people decide to repeat
the experience.\footnote{I am indebted to Peter Perdue for having pointed this out to me. Djilas makes much the same point (ibid.).} A schematic account highlighting the decisiveness
of a handful of leaders reinforces their legitimacy; its emphasis on
cohesion, uniformity, and central purpose makes it seem inevitable and
therefore, it is to be hoped, permanent. The slighting of autonomous
popular action serves the additional purpose of implying that the
working class is incapable of acting on its own without outside
leadership.\footnote{The official story, even though it may partly shape collective memory, cannot entirely supplant the individual and collective experiences of those who actually participated in the revolutionary process. For those who have no personal recollection and who thus come to the revolution via the schoolbook or patriotic speech, however, the official story will prevail unless there is another conflicting source of information.} The account is likely to take the opportunity to
identify enemies outside and inside the revolution, singling out
appropriate targets of hatred and suppression.


The standard account promoted by revolutionary elites is buttressed by
the way in which the historical process itself “naturalizes” the
world, erasing evidence of its contingency. Those who fought in “The
Russian Revolution” discovered this fact about themselves only later,
when the revolution was an accomplished fact. In the same way, none of
the historical participants in, say, World War I or the Battle of the
Bulge, not to mention the Reformation or the Renaissance, knew at the
time that they were participating in anything that could be so
summarily described. And because things \emph{do} turn out in a certain way
after all, with certain patterns or causes that are clear in
retrospect, it is not surprising that the outcome should sometimes
seem inevitable. Everyone forgets that it might all have turned out
quite differently.\footnote{This is the point of the ditty “For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the messenger was lost; for want of a message the battle was lost; for want of a victory a kingdom was lost \dots{}” (John M. Merriman, ed., \emph{For Want of a Horse: Choice and Chance in History} [Lexington, Mass.: S. Greens Press, 1985]).} In that forgetting, another step in
naturalizing the revolutionary triumph has been taken.\footnote{It is exceptionally rare to find any historical account that stresses the contingencies. The very exercise of producing an account of a past event virtually requires an often counterfactual neatness and coherence. Anyone who has ever read a newspaper account of an event in which he or she participated will recognize this phenomenon. Consider, too, the fact that a person who commits murder, say, or who takes his own life by jumping off a bridge will thereafter be known as the person who shot so-and-so or the person who jumped off such-and-such bridge. The events of that person’s life will be reread in light of that ending, with an air of inevitability being given to an act that may have been highly contingent.}


When victors such as Lenin get to impose their theories of revolution,
not so much on the revolutionary events themselves, but on the
postrevolutionary official story, the narrative typically stresses the
agency, purpose, and genius of the revolutionary leadership and
minimizes contingency.\footnote{In the case of the Bolshevik Revolution, it was also necessary that the official narrative include a genuinely popular mass movement of which the Bolsheviks eventually assumed leadership. Marxist historiography required a militant, revolutionary proletariat. This was an aspect of the February and October events that did not have to be invented. What had to be written out of the account, however, was the ferocious struggle between the new state apparatus on one hand and the autonomous soviets and peasantry on the other.} The final irony, then, was that the
official story of the Bolshevik Revolution was made, for more than
sixty years, to conform closely to the utopian directions outlined in
\emph{What Is to Be Done?}

\subsection{The Lenin of \emph{State and Revolution}}


The later Lenin of \emph{State and Revolution} is often juxtaposed to the
Lenin of \emph{What Is to Be Done?} to demonstrate a substantial shift in
his view of the relationship between the vanguard party and the
masses. Without a doubt, much of Lenin’s tone in the pamphlet, written
at breakneck speed in August and September of 1917—after the February
Revolution and just before the October Revolution—is difficult to
square with the text of 1903. There were important tactical reasons
why, in 1917, Lenin might have wanted to encourage as much autonomous
popular revolutionary action as possible. He and other Bolsheviks were
concerned that many workers, now masters of their factories, and many
Russian urbanites would lose their revolutionary ardor, allowing
Kerensky’s provisional government to gain control and block the
Bolsheviks. For Lenin’s revolutionaries, everything depended on
destabilizing the Kerensky regime, even if the crowds were not at all
under Bolshevik discipline. No wonder that, even in early November,
before the Bolsheviks had consolidated power, Lenin sounded very much
like the anarchists: “Socialism is not created by orders from
above. State bureaucratic automatism is alien to its spirit; socialism
is alive, creative—the creation of the popular masses
themselves.”\footnote{Lenin, quoted in Averich, \emph{Kronstadt, 1921}, p. 160. I believe that Lenin is consciously copying Luxemburg here, although I have no direct proof. One can find a precedent for this in Lenin’s momentary euphoria about the 1905 revolution: “Revolutions are the festival of the oppressed and the exploited\dots{} At no other time are the masses of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of a new social order as at the time of revolution. At such times, the people are capable of performing miracles” (from “Two Tactics of Social Democracy,” quoted by Richard Stites, \emph{Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution} [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989], p. 42).}


While \emph{State and Revolution} has an egalitarian and utopian tone that
echoes Marx’s picture of Communism, what is striking for our purpose
is the degree to which Lenin’s high-modernist convictions still
pervade the text. First, Lenin leaves no doubt that the application of
state coercive power is the only way to build socialism. He openly
avows the need for violence after the seizure of power: “The
proletariat needs state power, the centralized organization of force,
the organization of violence, \dots{} for the purpose of \emph{guiding} the
great mass of the population—the peasantry, the petite bourgeoisie,
the semi-proletarians—in the work of organizing Socialist
economy.”\footnote{V. I. Lenin, \emph{State and Revolution} (New York: International Publishers, 1931), p. 23 (emphasis in original). Note that those who are to be “guided” by force are not the bourgeoisie, the enemies of the revolution, but the exploited classes, with the exception of the proletariat, for whom coercion will be unnecessary. \protect\endgraf Lest one imagine that the state coercion to be applied would be decided democratically by the proletariat or its representatives, Lenin makes it clear just after the revolution that, as Leszek Kolakowski puts it, “the point about the dictatorship of the proletariat \dots{} is the absolute power, constrained by no laws, based on sheer, direct violence. And he said that there would be no freedom and no democracy (those were his very words) until the complete victory of Communism all over the world” (“A Calamitous Accident,” \emph{Times Literary Supplement}, November 6, 1992, p. 5).} Once again Marxism provides the ideas and training that
alone create a brain for the working masses: “By educating a workers’
party, Marxism educates the vanguard of the proletariat, capable of
assuming power and leading the whole people to Socialism, of directing
and organizing the new order, of being teacher, guide and leader of
all the toiling and exploited in the task of building up their social
life without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie.”\footnote{Lenin, \emph{State and Revolution}, pp. 23-24.} The
assumption is that the social life of the working class will be
organized either by the bourgeoisie or by the vanguard party, but
never by members of the working class themselves.


At the same time, Lenin waxes eloquent about a new society in which
politics will have disappeared and in which virtually anyone could be
entrusted with the administration of things. The models for Lenin’s
optimism were precisely the great human machines of his time:
industrial organizations and large bureaucracies. In his picture, the
growth of capitalism has built a nonpolitical technostructure that
rolls along of its accord: “Capitalist culture has \emph{created}
large-scale production, factories, railways, the postal service,
telephones, etc., and \emph{on this basis} the great majority of functions
of the old ‘state power’ have become so simplified and can be reduced
to such simple operations of registration, filing, and checking that
they would be quite within the reach of every literate person, and it
will be possible to perform them for working men’s wages, which
circumstance can (and must) strip those functions of every shadow of
privilege and every appearance of official grandeur.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 38 (emphasis in original).} Lenin
conjures up a vision of the perfect technical rationality of modern
production. Once the “simple operations” appropriate to each niche in
the established division of labor are mastered, there is quite
literally nothing more to discuss. The revolution ousts the
bourgeoisie from the bridge of this “ocean liner,” installs the
vanguard party, and sets a new course, but the jobs of the vast crew
are unchanged. Lenin’s picture of the technical structure, it should
be noted, is entirely static. The forms of production are either set
or, if they do change, the changes cannot require skills of a
different order.


The utopian promise of this capitalist-created state of affairs is
that anyone could take part in the administration of the state. The
development of capitalism had produced massive, socialized,
bureaucratic apparatuses as well as the “training and \emph{disciplining}
of millions of workers.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 83 (emphasis added).} Taken together, these huge, centralized
bureaucracies were the key to the new world. Lenin had seen them at
work in the wartime mobilization of Germany under Rathenau’s guiding
hand. Science and the division of labor had spawned an institutional
order of technical expertise in which politics and quarrels were
beside the point. Modern production provided the basis of a
technically necessary dictatorship.  “In regard to \dots{} the importance
of individual dictatorial powers,” Lenin observed, “it must be said
that large-scale machine industry—which is precisely \dots{} the foundation
of socialism[—]\dots{} calls for absolute and strict \emph{unity of will},
which directs the joint labours of hundreds, thousands and tens of
thousands of people\dots{} But how can strict unity of will be ensured?
By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one\dots{} We must
learn to combine the public-meeting democracy of the working
people—turbulent, surging, overflowing its banks like a spring
flood—with iron discipline while at work, with \emph{unquestioning obedience}
to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while at work
.”\footnote{Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” March-April 1918, quoted in Carmen Claudin-Urondo, \emph{Lenin and the Cultural Revolution}, trans. Brian Pearce (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1977), p. 271. It is worth noting the brief naturalistic imagery associated with “public-meeting democracy” here, as it is almost certainly borrowed from Rosa Luxemburg’s work.}


In this respect, Lenin joins many of his capitalist contemporaries in
his enthusiasm for Fordist and Taylorist production technology. What
was rejected by Western trade unions of the time as a “de-skilling” of
an artisanal workforce was embraced by Lenin as the key to rational
state planning.\footnote{See David Harvey, \emph{The Condition of Post-Modernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change} (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 126. Harvey groups Lenin, Ford, Le Corbusier, Ebenezer Howard, and Robert Moses as modernists.} There is, for Lenin, a single, objectively
correct, efficient answer to all questions of how to rationally design
production or administration.\footnote{In fact, of course, there is no rationally efficient solution to any problem of this kind that ignores human subjectivity. An efficient production design depends vitally on the positive response of the workforce. The autoworkers who hated the “efficient” mass-assembly line in Lordsville, Ohio, responded by working so sloppily that they made it an inefficient assembly line.}


Lenin goes on to imagine, in a Fourierist vein, a vast national
syndicate that will virtually run itself. He sees it as a technical
net whose mesh will confine workers to the appropriate routines by its
rationality and the discipline of habit. In a chillingly Orwellian
passage—a warning, perhaps, to anarchist or lumpen elements who might
resist its logic—Lenin indicates how remorseless the system will be:
“Escape from this national accounting will inevitably become
increasingly difficult \dots{} and will probably be accompanied by such
swift and severe punishment (for the armed workers are men of
practical life, not sentimental intellectuals and they will scarcely
allow anyone to trifle with them), that very soon the \emph{necessity} of
observing the simple, fundamental rules of social life in common will
have become a \emph{habit}.”\footnote{Lenin, \emph{State and Revolution}, pp. 84-85 (emphasis in original). Marx, Engels, and Lenin used the term “lumpen” proletariat to designate all those marginals who had escaped working-class discipline. Their contempt for lumpen elements was boundless and echoes the quasi-racist attitude of Victorian elites toward the “undeserving” poor.}


Except for the fact that Lenin’s utopia is more egalitarian and is set
in the context of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the parallels
with Le Corbusier’s high modernism are conspicuous. The social order
is conceived as a vast factory or office—a “smoothly humming machine,”
as Le Corbusier would have put it, in which “each man would live in an
ordered relation to the whole.” Neither Lenin nor Le Corbusier were
unique in sharing this vision, although they were exceptionally
influential. The parallels serve as a reminder of the extent to which
much of the socialist left as well as the right were in thrall to the
template of modern industrial organization. Comparable utopias, a
“dream of authoritarian, military, egalitarian, bureaucratic socialism
which was openly admiring of Prussian values,” could be found in Marx,
in Saint-Simon, and in the science fiction that was widely popular in
Russia at the time, especially a translation of Edward Bellamy’s
\emph{Looking Backward}.\footnote{Stites, \emph{Revolutionary Dreams}, p. 32.} High modernism was politically polymorphous;
it could appear in any political disguise, even an anarchist one.

\subsection{The Lenin of \emph{The Agrarian Question}}


In order to clinch the argument for Lenin’s consistently
high-modernist stance, we need only turn to his writings on
agriculture, a field in which high-modernist views were hotly
contested. Most of our evidence can be drawn from a single work, \emph{The
Agrarian Question}, written between 1901 and 1907.\footnote{V. I. Lenin, \emph{The Agrarian Question and the Critics of Marx}, 2nd rev. ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976). Lenin’s basic position on agriculture had been worked out long before in his 1889 book, \emph{The Development of Capitalism in Russia}. That book, however, had predicted a spontaneous development of capitalism in the countryside that had not occurred to anything like the extent he had forecast. For an important revisionist work on Marx’s analysis of rural Russia, see Teodor Shanin, ed., \emph{Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism} (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).}


This text was an unremitting condemnation of small-scale family
farming and a celebration of the gigantic, highly mechanized forms of
modern agriculture. For Lenin it was not just a question of aesthetics
of scale but a question of historical inevitability. The difference
between low-technology family farming and large-scale, mechanized
farming was precisely the difference between the hand-operated looms
of cottage-industry weavers on one hand and the mechanized looms of
large textile factories on the other. The first mode of production was
simply doomed. Lenin’s analogy was borrowed from Marx, who frequently
used it as a way of saying that the hand loom gives you feudalism and
the power loom gives you capitalism. So suggestive was this imagery
that Lenin fell back on it in other contexts, claiming, for example,
in \emph{What Is to Be Done?} that his opponents, the Economists, were
using “handicraft methods,” whereas the Bolsheviks operated as
professional (modern, trained) revolutionaries.


Peasant forms of production—not to mention the peasants
themselves—were, for Lenin, hopelessly backward. They were mere
historical vestiges that would undoubtedly be swept away, as the
cottage-industry weavers had been, by the agrarian equivalent of
large-scale machine industry. “Two decades have passed,” he wrote,
“and machinery has driven the small producer from still another of his
last refuges, as if telling those who have ears to hear and eyes to
see that the economist must always look forward, towards technical
progress, or else be left behind at once, for he who will not look
ahead turns his back on history; there is not and there cannot be any
middle path.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 45.} Here and in other writings Lenin denounced all the
cultivation and social practices associated with the customary,
communal, three-field system of land allotments that still pertained
in much of Russia. In this case, the idea of common property prevented
the full development of capitalism, which, in turn, was a condition of
revolution. “Modern agricultural technique,” he concluded, “demands
that \emph{all} the conditions of the ancient, conservative, barbarous,
ignorant, and pauper methods of economy on peasant allotments be
transformed. The three-field system, the primitive implements, the
patriarchical impecuniosity of the tiller, the routine methods of
stock breeding and crass naive ignorance of the conditions and
requirements of the market must all be thrown overboard.”\footnote{V. I. Lenin, \emph{The Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907}, 2nd rev. ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 70.}


The suitability of a logic drawn from manufacturing and applied to
agriculture, however, was very much contested. Any number of
economists had carried out detailed studies of labor allocation,
production, and expenditures for rural producer households. While some
were perhaps ideologically committed to developing a case for the
productive efficiency of small property, they had a wealth of
empirical evidence that had to be confronted.\footnote{The German and Austrian schools of empirical household surveys of farm operations were very influential at the turn of the century. The great Russian economist in this tradition was A. V. Chayanov. A careful scholar, a partisan of small property (he wrote a utopian novel of his own), and a Soviet official, he was arrested by the Stalinist police in 1932 and is believed to have been executed in 1936. Pyotr Maslov was another contemporary Russian exponent of small-farm efficiency and intensification who disputed Lenin’s position.} They argued that
the nature of much agricultural production meant that the economic
returns of mechanization were minimal when compared to the returns of
intensification (which focused on manuring, careful breeding, and so
on). The returns to scale as well, they argued, were minimal or
negative beyond the average acreage of the family farm. Lenin might
have taken these arguments less seriously had they all been based on
Russian data, where the backwardness of rural infrastructure impeded
mechanization and commercial production. But most of the data came
from Germany and Austria, comparatively developed countries, where the
small farmers in question were highly commercialized and responsive to
market forces.\footnote{Lenin, \emph{The Agrarian Question}, p. 86.}


Lenin set out to refute the data purporting to show the efficiency or
competitiveness of family agriculture. He exploited the
inconsistencies of their empirical evidence and introduced data from
other scholars, both Russian and German, to make the case against
them. Where the evidence seemed unassailable, Lenin claimed that the
small farmers who did survive managed to do so only by starving and
overworking themselves, their wives and children, their cows, and
their plow animals. Whatever profits the small farms produced were the
consequence of overwork and underconsumption. Although such patterns
of “autoexploitation” were not uncommon within peasant families,
Lenin’s evidence was not completely convincing. For his (and Marx’s)
understanding of modes of production, the survival of artisanal
handiwork and small farming had to be an incidental anachronism. We
have since learned how efficient and tenacious small-scale production
can be, but Lenin was in no doubt about what the future held. “This
inquiry demonstrates the technical superiority of large-scale
production in agriculture \dots{} [and] the overwork and underconsumption
of the small peasant and his transformation into a regular or
day-labourer for the landlord\dots{} The facts prove incontestably that
under the capitalist system the position of the small peasant in
agriculture is in every way analogous to that of the handicraftsman in
industry.”\footnote{Ibid.}


\emph{The Agrarian Question} also allows us to appreciate an additional
facet of Lenin’s high modernism: his celebration of the most modern
technology and, above all, electricity.\footnote{For an extensive treatment, see Jonathan Coppersmith, \emph{The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926} (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Kendall Bailes, \emph{Technology and Society Under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). H. G. Wells, following a visit to the Soviet Union, wrote glowingly of his conversation with Lenin in October 1920: “For Lenin, who like a good orthodox Marxist denounces all ‘Utopians,’ has succumbed at last to a Utopia, the Utopia of the electricians” (Russia in the Shadows [New York: George H. Doran, 1921], p. 158).} He was famous for
claiming that “Communism is Soviet Power plus the Electrification of
the whole countryside.” Electricity had, for him and for most other
high modernists, a nearly mythical appeal. That appeal had to do, I
think, with the unique qualities of electricity as a form of
power. Unlike the mechanisms of steam power, direct waterpower, and
the internal combustion engine, electricity was \emph{silent}, precise, and
well-nigh invisible. For Lenin and many others, electricity was
magical. Its great promise for the modernization of rural life was
that, once transmission lines were laid down, power could be delivered
over long distances and was instantly available wherever it was needed
and in the quantity required. Lenin imagined, incorrectly, that it
would replace the internal combustion engine in most farm
operations. “Machinery powered by electricity runs more smoothly and
precisely, and for that reason it is more convenient to use in
thrashing, ploughing, milking, cutting fodder.”\footnote{Lenin, \emph{The Agrarian Question}, p. 46. It is easy today to forget how breathtaking electricity was for those experiencing it for the first time. As Vladimir Mayakovsky was reported to have said, “After electricity, I lost interest in nature” (Stites, \emph{Revolutionary Dreams}, p. 52). In fact, for all the activities mentioned by Lenin, the tractor, as a moveable power source without transmission lines, has proven more practical than electricity.} By placing power
within reach of an entire people, the state could eliminate what Marx
termed the “idiocy of rural life.”


Electrification was, for Lenin, the key to breaking the pattern of
petit-bourgeois landholding and hence the only way to extirpate “the
roots of capitalism” in the countryside, which was “the foundation, the
basis, of the internal enemy.” The enemy “depends on small-scale
production, and there is only one way of undermining it, namely, to
place the economy of the country, including agriculture, on a new
technical basis, that of modern large-scale production. Only electricity
provides that basis.”\footnote{From Lenin’s report to the Eighth Congress of Soviets (December 22, 1920), at the founding of the State Commission on the Electrification of Russia (GOELRO). Quoted ip Robert C. Tucker, ed., \emph{The Lenin Anthology} (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 494.}


Much of the attraction of electricity for Lenin had to do with its
perfection, its mathematical precision. Man’s work and even the work
of the steam-driven plow or threshing machine were imperfect; the
operation of an electric machine, in contrast, seemed certain,
precise, and continuous. Electricity was also, it should be added,
centralizing.\footnote{The centralization that electrification makes possible also sets the stage for large-scale power failures and brownouts. The practice of this technical centralization is often in stark, if not comic, contrast to its utopian promise. See, for an illuminating example from the Philippines under Marcos, Otto van den Muijzenberg, “As Bright Lights Replace the Kingke: Some Sociological Aspects of Rural Electrification in the Philippines,” in Margaret M. Skutsch et al., eds., \emph{Towards a Sustainable Development} (forthcoming).} It produced a visible network of transmission lines
emanating from a central power station from which the flow of power
was generated, distributed, and controlled. The nature of electricity
suited Lenin’s utopian, centralizing vision perfectly. A map of
electric lines from the generating plant would look like the spokes of
a centralized transportation hub like Paris (see chapter 1), except
that the direction of flow was one way. Transmission lines blanketed
the nation with power in a way that overcame geography. Electricity
equalized access to an essential part of the modern world and, not
incidentally, brought light—both literally and culturally—to the
\emph{narod} (literally, the “dark people”).\footnote{As might be expected, the analogy between the light of electricity and the “enlightenment” of the narod was often evoked in Soviet rhetoric, combining, as it were, the Bolshevik technical project with its cultural project. Lenin wrote, “To the non-Party peasant masses electric light is an ‘unnatural’ light; but what we consider unnatural is that the peasants and workers should have lived for hundreds and thousands of years in such backwardness, poverty and oppression under the yoke of the landowners and the capitalists\dots{} What we must now try is to convert every electric power station we build into a stronghold of enlightenment to be used to make the masses electricity-conscious” (quoted in Tucker, \emph{The Lenin Anthology}, p. 495).} Finally, electricity
allowed and indeed required planning and calculation. The way that
electricity worked was very much the way that Lenin hoped the power of
the socialist state would work.


For Lenin, much the same developmental logic applied to the top elite
of the vanguard party, the factory, and the farm. Professionals,
technicians, and engineers would replace amateurs as leaders.
Centralized authority based on science would prevail. As with Le
Corbusier, the degree of functional specificity within the
organization, the degree of order provided by routines and the
substitutability of units, and the extent of mechanization were all
yardsticks of superior efficiency and rationality. In the case of
farms and factories, the larger and more capital intensive they were,
the better. One can already glimpse in Lenin’s conception of
agriculture the mania for machine-tractor stations, the establishment
of large state farms and eventual collectivization (after Lenin’s
death), and even the high-modernist spirit that would lead to such
vast colonization schemes as Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands initiative. At
the same time, Lenin’s views have a strong Russian lineage. They bear
a family resemblance to Peter the Great’s project for Saint Petersburg
and to the huge model military colonies set up by Alexei Arakcheev
with the patronage of Alexander I in the early nineteenth century—both
designed to drag Russia into the modern world.


By focusing on Lenin’s high-modernist side, we risk simplifying an
exceptionally complex thinker whose ideas \emph{and} actions were rich with
crosscurrents. During the revolution he was capable of encouraging the
communal seizure of land, autonomous action, and the desire of rural
Soviets “to learn from their own mistakes.”\footnote{Figes, \emph{Peasant Russia, Civil War}, p. 67.} He decided, at the
end of a devastating civil war and a grain-procurement crisis, to
shelve collectivization and encourage small-scale production and petty
trade.  Some have suggested that in his last writings he was more
favorably disposed to peasant farming and, it is speculated, would not
have forced through the brutal collectivization that Stalin ordered in
1929.


Despite the force of these qualifications, there is little reason, I
think, to believe that Lenin ever abandoned the core of his
high-modernist convictions.\footnote{Nor did he abandon his belief in the role of violence in ensuring party rule. In 1922, when religious believers in provincial Shuya openly demonstrated against the seizure of church treasures, Lenin argued for massive retaliation. “The more of them we manage to shoot the better,” he declared. “Right now we have to teach this public a lesson so that for several decades they won’t even dare think of resisting” (quoted in John Keep, “The People’s Tsar,” \emph{Times Literary Supplement}, April 7, 1995, p. 30).} This is apparent even in how he
phrases his tactical retreat following the Kronstadt uprising in 1921
and the continuing urban food crisis: “Until we have remolded the
peasant, \dots{}  \emph{until largescale machinery has recast him}, we must
assure him of the possibility of running his economy without
restrictions. We must find forms of co-existence with the small
farmer\dots{} \emph{since the remaking of the small farmer}, the reshaping of
his whole psychology and all his habits, is a task requiring
generations.”\footnote{Quoted in Averich, \emph{Kronstadt}, 1921, p. 224 (emphasis added).} If this is a tactical retreat, the acknowledgment
that the transformation of the peasants will take generations does not
exactly sound like the words of a general who expects to resume the
offensive soon. On the other hand, Lenin’s faith in mechanization as
the key to the transformation of a recalcitrant human nature is
undiminished. There is a new modesty—the fruit of effective peasant
resistance—about how tortuous and long the path to a modern,
socialized agriculture will be, but the vista, once the journey is
made, looks the same.

\section{Luxemburg: Physician and Midwife to the Revolution}


Rosa Luxemburg was more than merely a contemporary of Lenin. She was
an equally committed revolutionary and Marxist who was assassinated,
along with Karl Liebknecht, in Berlin in 1919 at the behest of her
less revolutionary allies on the left. Although Jane Jacobs was a
critic of Le Corbusier and high-modernist urban planning in general,
Le Corbusier had almost certainly never heard of Jacobs before he
died. Lenin, on the other hand, had met Luxemburg. They wrote largely
for the same audience and in the knowledge of each other’s opinions,
and indeed Luxemburg specifically refuted Lenin’s arguments about the
vanguard party and its relation to the proletariat in a revolutionary
setting. We will chiefly be concerned with the essays in which
Luxemburg most directly confronts Lenin’s high-modernist views:
“Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy” (1904),
“Mass-Strike, Party, and Trade Unions” (1906), and her posthumously
published “The Russian Revolution” (written in 1918, first published
in 1921, after the Kronstadt uprising).


Luxemburg differed most sharply with Lenin in her relative faith in
the autonomous creativity of the working class. Her optimism in
“Mass-Strike, Party, and Trade Unions” is partly due to the fact that
it was written, unlike \emph{What Is to Be Done?} after the object lesson
of worker militancy provided by the 1905 revolution. Luxemburg was
especially struck by the massive response of the Warsaw proletariat to
the revolution of 1905. On the other hand, “Organizational Questions
of Russian Social Democracy” was written before the events of 1905 and
in direct reply to \emph{What Is to Be Done?} This essay was a key text in
the refusal of the Polish party to place itself under the central
discipline of the Russian Social Democratic Party.\footnote{Rosa Luxemburg, “Mass-Strike, Party, and Trade Unions” and “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy,” in Dick Howard, ed., \emph{Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg} (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 223-70, 283-306; and Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” trans. Bertram D. Wolfe, in Mary-Alice Waters, ed., \emph{Rosa Luxemburg Speaks} (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), pp. 367-95. It is interesting to speculate how much of Luxemburg’s faith would have remained had she actually come to power in Germany. What is clear, however, is that her view when she was out of power is radically different from Lenin’s view when he was out of power.}


In emphasizing the differences between Lenin and Luxemburg, we must
not overlook the ideological common ground they took for granted. They
shared, for example, Marxist assumptions about the contradictions of
capitalist development and the inevitability of revolution. They were
both enemies of gradualism and of anything more than tactical
compromises with nonrevolutionary parties. Even at the strategic
level, they both argued for the importance of a vanguard party on the
grounds that the vanguard party was more likely to see the whole
situation (the “totality”), whereas most workers were more likely to
see only their local situation and their particular interests. Neither
Lenin nor Luxemburg had what might be called a sociology of the
party. That is, it did not occur to them that the intelligentsia of
the party might have interests that did not coincide with the workers’
interests, however defined. They were quick to see a sociology of
tradeunion bureaucracies but not a sociology of the revolutionary
Marxist party.


Luxemburg, in fact, was not above using the metaphor of the factory
manager, as did Lenin, to explain why the worker might be wise to
follow instructions in order to contribute to a larger result not
immediately apparent from where he stood. Where the difference arises,
however, is in the lengths to which this logic is pursued. For Lenin,
the totality was exclusively in the hands of the vanguard party, which
had a virtual monopoly of knowledge. He imagined an all-seeing
center—an eye in the sky, as it were—which formed the basis for
strictly hierarchical operations in which the proletariat became mere
foot soldiers or pawns.  For Luxemburg, the party might well be more
farsighted than the workers, but it would nevertheless be constantly
surprised and taught new lessons by those whom it presumed to lead.


Luxemburg viewed the revolutionary process as being far more complex
and unpredictable than did Lenin, just as Jacobs saw the creation of
successful urban neighborhoods as being far more complex and
mysterious than did Le Corbusier. The metaphors Luxemburg used, as we
shall see, were indicative. Eschewing military, engineering, and
factory parallels, she wrote more frequently of growth, development,
experience, and learning.\footnote{Elzbieta Ettinger suggests that one likely source of Luxemburg’s faith in the wisdom of ordinary workers was her love of the great Polish nationalist poet, Adam Mickiewicz, who celebrated the insight and creativity of ordinary Poles. See \emph{Rosa Luxemburg: A Life} (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), pp. 22-27.}


The idea that the vanguard party could either order or prohibit a mass
strike, the way a commander might order his soldiers to the front or
confine them to barracks, struck Luxemburg as ludicrous. Any attempt
to so engineer a strike was both unrealistic and morally
inadmissible. She rejected the instrumentalism that underlay this
view. “Both tendencies [ordering or prohibiting a mass strike] proceed
from the same, pure anarchist [\emph{sic}] notion that the mass strike is
merely a technical means of struggle which can be ‘decided’ or
‘forbidden’ at pleasure, according to one’s knowledge and conscience, a
kind of pocket-knife which one keeps clasped in his packet, ‘ready for
all emergencies,’ or decides to unclasp and use.”\footnote{Luxemburg, “Mass-Strike, Party, and Trade Unions,” p. 229. Despite Luxemburg’s dismissive reference to anarchism, her views overlap considerably with an anarchist view of the independent, creative role of ordinary actors in a revolution. See, for example, G. D. Maximoff, ed., \emph{The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism} (New York: Free Press, 1953), p. 289, in which Bakunin’s view of the limitations of leadership by a central committee prefigures Luxemburg’s own modest opinion of a central committee’s role.} A general
strike, or a revolution for that matter, was a complex social event
involving the wills and knowledge of many human agents, of which the
vanguard party was only one element.

\subsection{Revolution as a Living Process}


Luxemburg looked on strikes and political struggles as dialectical,
historical processes. The structure of the economy and the workforce
helped to shape, but never determine, the options available. Thus, if
industry was small scale and geographically scattered, strikes would
typically be small and scattered as well. Each set of strikes,
however, forced changes in the structure of capital. If workers won
higher wages, for example, the increases might provoke consolidations
in the industry, mechanization, and new patterns of supervision, all
of which would influence the character of the next round of strikes. A
strike would also, of course, teach the workforce new lessons and
alter the character of its cohesion and leadership.\footnote{This way of analyzing working-class movements grew directly out of Luxemburg’s research for her 1898 doctoral thesis at the University of Zurich, “The Industrial Development of Poland.” See J. P. Nettl, \emph{Rosa Luxemburg}, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).} This
insistence on process and human agency served Luxemburg as a warning
against a narrow view of tactics. A strike or a revolution was not
simply an end toward which tactics and command ought to be directed;
the process leading to it was at the same time shaping the character
of the proletariat. How the revolution was made mattered as much as
whether it was made at all, for the process itself had heavy
consequences.


Luxemburg found Lenin’s desire to turn the vanguard party into a
military general staff for the working class to be both utterly
unrealistic and morally distasteful. His hierarchical logic ignored
the inevitable autonomy of the working class (singly and in groups),
whose own interests and actions could never be machine-tooled into
strict conformity. What is more, even if such discipline were
conceivable, by imposing it the party would deprive itself of the
independent, creative force of a proletariat that was, after all, the
subject of the revolution. Against Lenin’s aspiration for control and
order Luxemburg juxtaposed the inevitably disorderly, tumultuous, and
living tableau of largescale social action. “Instead of a fixed and
hollow scheme of sober political action executed with a prudent plan
decided by the highest committees,” she wrote, in what was a clear
reference to Lenin, “we see a vibrant part of life in flesh and blood
which cannot be cut out of the larger frame of the revolution: The
mass strike is bound by a thousand veins to all parts of the
revolution.”\footnote{Luxemburg, “Mass-Strike, Party, and Trade Unions,” p. 236.} When contrasting her under standing to Lenin’s, she
consistently reached for metaphors from complex, organic processes,
which cannot be arbitrarily carved up without threatening the vitality
of the organism itself. The idea that a rational, hierarchical
executive committee might deploy its proletarian troops as it wished
not only was irrelevant to real political life but was also dead and
hollow.\footnote{Luxemburg was something of an aesthetic free spirit as well. Continually scolded by her lover and comrade, Leo Jogiches, for her petit-bourgeois tastes and desires, she defended the value of a private life while devoting herself to the revolution. Her élan is nicely captured by her advice on the design of the Spartacist newspaper \emph{Die Rote Fahne} (The red banner): “I do not think a newspaper should be symmetrical, trimmed like an English lawn\dots{} Rather, it should be somewhat untamed, like a wild orchard, should bristle with life and shine with young talents” (quoted in Ettinger, \emph{Rosa Luxemburg}, p. 186).}


In her refutation of \emph{What Is to Be Done?} Luxemburg made clear that
the cost of centralized hierarchy lay in the loss of creativity and
initiative from below: “The ‘discipline’ Lenin has in mind is by no
means only implanted in the proletariat by the factory, but equally by
the barracks, by the modern bureaucracy, by the entire mechanism of
the centralized bourgeois state apparatus\dots{} The ultracentrism
advocated by Lenin is permeated in its very essence by the sterile
spirit of a \emph{nightwatchman} (\emph{Nachtwachtergeist}) rather than by a
positive and creative spirit. He concentrated mostly on \emph{controlling}
the party, not on \emph{fertilizing} it, on narrowing it down, not
\emph{developing} it, on regimenting and not \emph{unifying} it.”\footnote{Luxemburg, “Organizational Questions,” p. 291 (emphasis added).}


The core of the disagreement between Lenin and Luxemburg is caught
best in the figures of speech they each use. Lenin comes across as a
rigid schoolmaster with quite definite lessons to convey—a
schoolmaster who senses the unruliness of his pupils and wants
desperately to keep them in line for their own good. Luxemburg sees
that unruliness as well, but she takes it for a sign of vitality, a
potentially valuable resource; she fears that an overly strict
schoolmaster will destroy the pupils’ enthusiasm and leave a sullen,
dispirited classroom where nothing is really learned. She argues
elsewhere, in fact, that the German Social Democrats, by their
constant efforts at close control and discipline, have demoralized the
German working class.\footnote{“An awakening of the revolutionary energy of the working class in Germany can never again be called forth in the spirit of the guardianship methods of the German Social Democracy of late-lamented memory\dots{} [The awakening of revolutionary energy could be effected] only by an insight into all the fearful seriousness, all the complexity of the tasks involved, only as a result of political maturity and independence of spirit, only as a result of \emph{a capacity for critical judgment on the part of the masses, which capacity was systematically killed by the social democracy for decades under various pretexts}” (Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” pp. 369-70; emphasis added).} Lenin sees the possibility that the pupils
might influence a weak, timorous teacher and deplores it as a
dangerous counterrevolutionary step. Luxemburg, for whom the classroom
bespeaks a genuine collaboration, implicitly allows for the
possibility that the teacher might just learn some valuable lessons
from the pupils.


Once Luxemburg began thinking of the revolution as analogous to a
complex natural process, she concluded that the role of a vanguard
party was inevitably limited. Such processes are far too complicated
to be well understood, let alone directed or planned in advance. She
was deeply impressed by the autonomous popular initiatives taken all
over Russia after the shooting of the crowd before the Winter Palace
in 1905.  Her description, which I quote at length, invokes metaphors
from nature to convey her conviction that centralized control is an
illusion.



\begin{quote}


As the Russian Revolution [1905] shows to us, the mass strike is such
a changeable phenomenon that it reflects in itself all phases of
political and economic struggle, all stages and moments of the
revolution. Its applicability, its effectiveness, and the moments of
its origin change continually. It suddenly opens new, broad
perspectives of revolution just where it seemed to have come to a
narrow pass; and it disappoints where one thought he could reckon on
it in full certitude.  Now it flows like a broad billow over the whole
land, now it divides itself into a gigantic net of thin streams; now
it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring, now it
trickles flat along the ground\dots{} All [forms of popular struggle] run
through one another, next to each other, across one another, flow in
and over one another; it is an eternal, moving, changing sea of
appearances.\footnote{Luxemburg, “Mass-Strike, Party, and Trade Unions,” p. 236.}



\end{quote}


The mass strike, then, was not a tactical invention of the vanguard
party to be used at the appropriate moment. It was, rather, the
“living pulse-beat of the revolution and at the same time its most
powerful driving-wheel\dots{} the phenomenal form of the proletarian
struggle in the revolution.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 237.} From Luxemburg’s perspective, Lenin
must have seemed like an engineer with hopes of damming a wild river
in order to release it at a single stroke in a massive flood that
would be the revolution. She believed that the “flood” of the mass
strike could not be predicted or controlled; its course could not be
much affected by professional revolutionists, although they could, as
Lenin actually did, ride that flood to power. Luxemburg’s
understanding of the revolutionary process, curiously enough, provided
a better description of how Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power
than did the utopian scenario in \emph{What Is to Be Done?}


A grasp of political conflict as process allowed Luxemburg to see well
beyond what Lenin considered to be failures and dead ends. Writing of
1905, she emphasized that “after every foaming wave of political
action a fructifying deposit remains from which a thousand stalks of
economic struggle shoot forth.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 241.} The analogy she drew to organic
processes conveyed both their autonomy and their vulnerability. To
extract from the living tissue of the proletarian movement a
particular kind of strike for instrumental use would threaten the
whole organism. With Lenin in mind she wrote, “If the contemplative
theory proposes the artificial dissection of the mass strike to get at
the ‘pure political mass strike,’ then by this dissection, as with any
other, it will not perceive the phenomenon in its living essence, but
will kill it all together.”\footnote{Ibid., pp. 241-42.} Luxemburg, then, saw the workers’
movement in much the same light as Jacobs saw the city: as an
intricate social organism whose origin, dynamics, and future were but
dimly understood. To nevertheless intervene and dissect the workers’
movement was to kill it, just as carving up the city along strict
functional lines produced a lifeless, taxidermist’s city.


If Lenin approached the proletariat as an engineer approached his raw
materials, with a view toward shaping them to his purposes, Luxemburg
approached the proletariat as a physician would. Like any patient, the
proletariat had its own constitution, which limited the kind of
interventions that could be made. The physician needed to respect the
patient’s constitution and assist according to its potential strengths
and weaknesses. Finally, the autonomy and history of the patient would
inevitably influence the outcome. The proletariat could not be
reshaped from the ground up and fitted neatly into a predetermined
design.


But the major, recurrent theme of Luxemburg’s criticism of Lenin and
the Bolsheviks generally was that their dictatorial methods and their
mistrust of the proletariat made for bad educational policy. It
thwarted the development of the mature, independent working class that
was necessary to the revolution and to the creation of socialism. Thus
she attacked both the German and Russian revolutionists for
substituting the ego of the vanguard party for the ego of the
proletariat—a substitution that ignored the fact that the objective
was to \emph{create} a self-conscious workers’ movement, not just to use
the proletariat as instruments. Like a confident and sympathetic
guardian, she anticipated false steps as part of the learning
process. “However, the nimble acrobat,” she charged, referring to the
Social Democratic Party, “fails to see that the true subject to whom
this role of director falls is the collective ego of the working class
which insists on its right to make its own mistakes and learn the
historical dialectic by itself. Finally, we must frankly admit to
ourselves that the errors made by a truly revolutionary labor movement
are historically infinitely more fruitful and valuable than the
infallibility of the best of all possible ‘central committees.’”\footnote{Luxemburg, “Organizational Questions,” p. 306.}


Nearly fifteen years later, a year after the October 1917 Bolshevik
seizure of power, Luxemburg was attacking Lenin in precisely the same
terms. Her warnings, so soon after the revolution, about the direction
in which the dictatorship of the proletariat was headed seem
prophetic.


She believed that Lenin and Trotsky had completely corrupted a proper
understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. To her, it meant
rule by the \emph{whole} proletariat, which required the broadest political
freedoms for all workers (though not for enemy classes) so that they
could bring their influence and wisdom to bear on the building of
socialism. It did not mean, as Lenin and Trotsky assumed, that a small
circle of party leaders would exercise dictatorial power merely in the
name of the proletariat. Trotsky’s proposal that the constituent
assembly not convene because circumstances had changed since its
election struck Luxemburg as a cure that was worse than the disease.
Only an active public life could remedy the shortcomings of
representative bodies. By concentrating absolute power in so few
hands, the Bolsheviks had “blocked up the fountain of political
experience and the source of this rising development [the attaining of
higher stages of socialism] by their suppression of public life.”\footnote{Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” p. 389. By constantly stressing the ethical and idealistic side of the working class, Luxemburg probably underestimated the importance of bread-and-butter concerns. Such concerns could as easily, in 1917 at least, lead to revolutionary action as to narrow trade unionism. Neither she nor Lenin had the respect for working-class materialism to be found, for example, in Orwell’s \emph{Road to Wigan Pier or Down and Out in Paris and London}. While Lenin treated the workers as truant schoolboys constantly in need of monitoring and instruction, Luxemburg probably missed, among other things, their proclivities for nationalism and their occasional timorousness.}


Beneath this dispute was not just a difference in tactics but a
fundamental disagreement about the nature of socialism. Lenin
proceeded as if the road to socialism were already mapped out in
detail and the task of the party were to use the iron discipline of
the party apparatus to make sure that the revolutionary movement kept
to that road.  Luxemburg, on the contrary, believed that the future of
socialism was to be discovered and worked out in a genuine
collaboration between workers and their revolutionary state. There
were no “ready-made prescriptions” for the realization of socialism,
nor was there “a key in any socialist party program or textbook.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 390. The reference to a textbook is not mocking; what strikes a contemporary observer of turn-of-the-century socialism is how extraordinarily bookish and pedagogical it was. The classroom metaphor prevailed in socialist thought, and formal instruction was the norm. Luxemburg spent much of her career meeting classes and grading papers at the higher party school of the SDP.}
The openness that characterized a socialist future was not a
shortcoming but rather a sign of its superiority, as a dialectical
process, over the cut-and-dried formulas of utopian socialism. The
creation of socialism was “new territory. A thousand problems—only
experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways. Only
unobstructed, effervescing life falls into a thousand new forms and
\emph{improvisations}, brings to light creative force, itself corrects all
mistaken attempts.”\footnote{Ibid. (emphasis added). Compare this with the approach of the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta, who in 1907 stated in \emph{Anarchy} that even if rule by beneficent authoritarian socialists were possible, it “would immensely diminish [productive force], because the government would restrict initiative to the few” (quoted in Irving Louis Horowitz, \emph{The Anarchists} [New York: Dell, 1964], p. 83).} Lenin’s use of decrees and terror and what
Luxemburg called the “dictatorial force of the factory overseer”
deprived the revolution of this popular creative force and experience.
Unless the working class as a whole participated in the political
process, she added ominously, “socialism will be decreed from behind a
few official desks by a dozen intellectuals.”\footnote{Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” p. 391.}


Looking ahead, so soon after the revolution, to the closed and
authoritarian political order Lenin was constructing, Luxemburg’s
predictions were chilling but accurate: “But with the repression of
political life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also
become crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted
freedom of the press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion,
life dies out in every public institution\dots{} Public life gradually
falls asleep\dots{} In reality only a dozen outstanding heads [party
leaders] do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited
to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed
resolutions unanimously—at bottom then, a clique affair\dots{} a
dictatorship in the bourgeois sense.”\footnote{Ibid.}

\section{Aleksandra Kollontay and the Workers’ Opposition to Lenin}


Aleksandra Kollontay was in effect the local voice of a Luxemburgian
critique among the Bolsheviks after the revolution. A revolutionary
activist, the head of the women’s section of the Central Committee
(Zhenotdel), and, by early 1921, closely associated with the Workers’
Opposition, Kollontay was a thorn in Lenin’s side. He regarded the
sharply critical pamphlet she wrote just before the Tenth Party
Congress in 1921 as a nearly treasonous act. The Tenth Party Congress
opened just as the suppression of the workers’ and sailors’ revolt in
Kronstadt was being organized and in the midst of the Makno uprising
in the Ukraine.  To attack the party leadership at such a perilous
moment was a treacherous appeal to “the base instincts of the masses.”


There was a direct connection between Luxemburg and her Russian
colleague. Kollontay had been deeply impressed by reading Luxemburg’s
\emph{Social Reform or Revolution} early in the century and had actually
met Luxemburg at a socialist meeting in Germany. While Kollontay’s
pamphlet echoed most of Luxemburg’s criticisms of centralized,
authoritarian socialist practice, its historical context was
distinctive. Kollontay was making her case as part of the Workers’
Opposition argument for an all-Russian congress of producers, freely
elected from the trade unions, which would direct production and
industrial planning. Alexander Shlyiapnikov, a close ally of
Kollontay, and other trade unionists were alarmed at the increasingly
dominant role of technical specialists, the bureaucracy, and the party
center and the exclusion of workers’ organizations. During the civil
war, martial-law techniques of management were perhaps
understandable. But now that the civil war was largely won, the
direction of socialist construction seemed at stake.  Kollontay
brought to her case for trade-union co-management of industry a wealth
of practical experience acquired in the frustrating job of negotiating
with state organs on behalf of working women who had organized creches
and canteens. In the end, the Workers’ Opposition was outlawed and
Kollontay was silenced, but not before leaving behind a prophetic
legacy of criticism.\footnote{Kollontay, unlike so many other dissidents, was not murdered or sent to the labor camps. She survived in a series of ceremonial and ambassadorial posts taken with the implicit understanding that she muzzle her criticism. See Beatrice Farnsworth, \emph{Alexandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution} (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980).}


Kollontay’s pamphlet attacked the party state, which she compared to
an authoritarian schoolteacher, in much the same terms used by
Luxemburg.  She complained, above all, that the relationship between
the central committee and the workers had become a stark one-way
relationship of command. The trade unions were seen as a mere
“connecting link” or transmission belt of the party’s instructions to
the workers; unions were expected to “bring up the masses” in exactly
the way a schoolteacher whose curriculum and lesson plans are mandated
from above passes those lessons on to pupils. She castigated the party
for its out-of-date pedagogical theory, which left no room for the
potential originality of the students. “When one begins to turn over
the pages of the stenographic minutes and speeches made by our
prominent leaders, one is astonished by the unexpected manifestation
of their pedagogical activities. Every author of the thesis proposes
the most perfect system of bringing up the masses. But all these
systems of ‘education’ lack provisions for freedom of experiment, for
training and for expression of creative abilities by those who are to
be taught. In this respect also all our pedagogues are behind the
times.”\footnote{Alexandra Kollontai, \emph{Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai}, trans. Alix Holt (London: Allison and Busby, 1977), p. 178. Kollontay’s essay “The Workers’ Opposition,” from which this quotation is taken, reprints a translation made in 1921 since the original Russian essay could not be found.}


There is some evidence that Kollontay’s work on behalf of women had a
direct bearing on her case for the Workers’ Opposition. Just as Jacobs
was afforded a different view of how the city functioned by virtue of
her additional roles as housewife and mother, so Kollontay saw the party
from the vantage point of an advocate for women whose work was rarely
taken seriously. She accused the party of denying women opportunities in
organization of “creative tasks in the sphere of production and
development of creative abilities” and of confining them to the
“restricted tasks of home economics, household duties, etc.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 183. The issue of the autonomy of the family was another matter. Kollontay urged Soviet mothers to think of their children not as “mine” or “yours” but as “our children, those of the Communist state.”} Her
experience of being patronized and condescended to as a representative
of the women’s section seems directly tied to her accusation that the
party was also treating the workers as infants rather than as
autonomous, creative adults. In the same passage as her charge that the
party thought women fit only for home economics, she mocked Trotsky’s
praise for the workers at a miner’s congress, who had voluntarily
replaced shop windows, as showing that he wanted to limit them to mere
janitorial tasks.


Like Luxemburg, Kollontay believed that the building of socialism
could not be accomplished by the Central Committee alone, however
farseeing it might be. The unions were not mere instruments or
transmission belts in the building of socialism; they were to a great
extent the subjects and the creators of a socialist mode of
production. Kollontay put the fundamental difference succinctly: “\emph{The
Workers’ Opposition sees in the unions the managers and creators of
the communist economy, whereas Bukharin, together with Lenin and
Trotsky, leave to them only the role of schools of communism and no
more}.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 182 (emphasis in original).}


Kollontay shared Luxemburg’s conviction that the practical experience of
industrial workers on the factory floor was indispensable knowledge that
the experts and technicians needed. She did not want to minimize the
role of specialists and officials; they were vital, but they could do
their job effectively only in a genuine collaboration with the trade
unions and workers. Her vision of the form this collaboration might take
closely resembles that of an agricultural extension service and farmers
to whose needs the service is closely tied. That is, technical centers
concerned with industrial production would be established throughout
Russia, but the tasks they addressed and the services they provided
would be directly responsive to the demands of the producers.\footnote{Ibid., p. 185.} The
experts would serve the producers rather than dictating to them. To this
end Kollontay proposed that a host of specialists and officials, who had
no practical factory experience and who had joined the party after 1919,
be dismissed—at least until they had done some manual labor.


She clearly saw, as did Luxemburg, the social and psychological
consequences of frustrating the independent initiatives of workers.
Arguing from concrete examples—workers procuring firewood,
establishing a dining hall, and opening a nursery—she explained how
they were thwarted at every turn by bureaucratic delay and
pettifoggery: “Every independent thought or initiative is treated as a
‘heresy,’ as a violation of party discipline, as an attempt to
infringe on the prerogatives of the center, which must ‘foresee’
everything and ‘decree’ everything and anything.” The harm done came
not just from the fact that the specialists and bureaucrats were more
likely to make bad decisions.  The attitude had two other
consequences. First, it reflected a “distrust towards the creative
abilities of the workers,” which was unworthy of the “professed ideals
of our party.” Second, and most important, it smothered the morale and
creative spirit of the working class. In their frustration at the
specialists and officials, “the workers became cynical and said, ‘let
[the] officials themselves take care of us.’” The end result was an
arbitrary, myopic layer of officials presiding over a dispirited
workforce putting in a “bad-faith” day on the factory floor.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 191, 188, 190.}


Kollontay’s point of departure, like Luxemburg’s, is an assumption
about what \emph{kinds} of tasks are the making of revolutions and the
creating of new forms of production. For both of them, such tasks are
voyages in uncharted waters. There may be some rules of thumb, but
there can be no blueprints or battle plans drawn up in advance; the
numerous unknowns in the equation make a one-step solution
inconceivable. In more technical language, such goals can be
approached only by a stochastic process of successive approximations,
trial and error, experiment, and learning through experience. The kind
of knowledge required in such endeavors is not deductive knowledge
from first principles but rather what Greeks of the classical period
called \emph{mētis}, a concept to which we shall return.  Usually
translated, inadequately, as “cunning,” \emph{mētis} is better understood
as the kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by long practice at
similar but rarely identical tasks, which requires constant adaptation
to changing circumstances. It is to this kind of knowledge that
Luxemburg appealed when she characterized the building of socialism as
“new territory” demanding “improvisation” and “creativity.” It is to
this kind of knowledge that Kollontay appealed when she insisted that
the party leaders were not infallible, that they needed the “everyday
experience” and “practical work of the basic class collectives” of
those “who actually produce and organize production at the same
time.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 187.} In an analogy that any Marxist would recognize, Kollontay
asked whether it was conceivable that the cleverest feudal estate
managers could have invented early capitalism by themselves. Of course
not, she answered, because their knowledge and skills were directly
tied to feudal production, just as the technical specialists of her
day had learned their lessons within a capitalist framework. There was
simply no precedent for the future now being forged.


Echoing, for rhetorical effect, a sentiment that both Luxemburg and
Lenin had uttered, Kollontay claimed that “it is impossible to decree
communism. It can be created only in the process of practical research,
through mistakes, perhaps, but only by the creative powers of the
working class itself.” While specialists and officials had a
collaborative role of vital importance, “only those who are directly
bound to industry can introduce into it animating innovations.”\footnote{Ibid., pp. 187, 160.}


\hairline


For Lenin, the vanguard party is a machine for making a revolution and
then for building socialism—tasks whose main lines have, it is
assumed, already been worked out. For Le Corbusier, the house is a
machine for living, and the city planner is a specialist whose
knowledge shows him how a city must be built. For Le Corbusier, the
people are irrelevant to \emph{the process} of city planning, although the
result is designed with their well-being and productivity in
mind. Lenin cannot make the revolution without the proletariat, but
they are seen largely as troops to be deployed. The goals of
revolution and scientific socialism are, of course, also for the
benefit of the working class. Each of these schemes implies a single,
unitary answer discoverable by specialists and hence a command center,
which can, or ought to, impose the correct solution.


Kollontay and Luxemburg, in contrast, take the tasks at hand to be
unknowable in advance. Given the uncertainty of the endeavor, a
plurality of experiments and initiatives will best reveal which lines
of attack are fruitful and which are barren. The revolution and
socialism will fare best, as will Jacobs’s city, when they are joint
productions between technicians and gifted, experienced
amateurs. Above all, there is no strict distinction between means and
ends. Luxemburg’s and Kollontay’s vanguard party is not producing a
revolution or socialism in the straightforward sense that a factory
produces, say, axles. Thus the vanguard party cannot be adequately
judged, as a factory might, by its output—by how many axles of a
certain quality it makes with a given labor force, capitalization, and
so on—no matter how it goes about producing that result. Also, the
vanguard party of Luxemburg and Kollontay is at the same time
producing a certain kind of working class—a creative, conscious,
competent, and empowered working class—that is the precondition of its
achieving any of its other goals. Put positively, the way the trip is
made matters at least as much as the destination. Put negatively, a
vanguard party can achieve its revolutionary results in ways that
defeat its central purpose.

\part{Part 3. The Social Engineering of Rural Settlement and Production}


Legibility is a condition of manipulation. Any substantial state
intervention in society—to vaccinate a population, produce goods,
mobilize labor, tax people and their property, conduct literacy
campaigns, conscript soldiers, enforce sanitation standards, catch
criminals, start universal schooling—requires the invention of units
that are visible. The units in question might be citizens, villages,
trees, fields, houses, or people grouped according to age, depending
on the type of intervention. Whatever the units being manipulated,
they must be organized in a manner that permits them to be identified,
observed, recorded, counted, aggregated, and monitored. The degree of
knowledge required would have to be roughly commensurate with the
depth of the intervention. In other words, one might say that the
greater the manipulation envisaged, the greater the legibility
required to effect it.


It was precisely this phenomenon, which had reached full tide by the
middle of the nineteenth century, that Proudhon had in mind when he
declared, “To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on,
regulated, indoctrinated, sermonized, listed and checked off,
estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about\dots{} To be ruled is at
every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered,
counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed,
corrected.”\footnote{Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “Q’est-ce que c’est la propriété?” quoted in Daniel Guerin, \emph{Anarchism: From Theory to Practice}, trans. Mary Klopper (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), pp. 15-16.}


From another perspective, what Proudhon was deploring was in fact the
great achievement of modern statecraft. How hard-won and tenuous this
achievement was is worth emphasizing. Most states, to speak broadly,
are “younger” than the societies that they purport to
administer. States therefore confront patterns of settlement, social
relations, and production, not to mention a natural environment, that
have evolved largely independent of state plans.\footnote{It may be more accurate to say that societies are likely to exhibit not only the purposes and activities of their members (including, of course, their resistance) but also traces of many previous state “projects,” each of which has laid down its particular geological stratum.} The result is
typically a diversity, complexity, and unrepeatability of social forms
that are relatively opaque to the state, often purposely so. Consider,
for a moment, the patterns in such urban settlements as Bruges or the
\emph{medina} of an old Middle Eastern city touched on earlier (see
chapter 2). Each city, each quarter, each neighborhood is unique; it
is the historical vector sum of millions of designs and
activities. While its form and function surely have a logic, that
logic is not derived from any single, overall plan. Its complexity
defies easy mapping. Any map, moreover, would be spatially and
temporally limited. The map of a single neighborhood would provide
little guidance to the unique intricacies of the next neighborhood,
and a description that was satisfactory today would be inadequate in a
few years.


If the state’s goals are minimal, it may not need to know much about
the society. Just as a woodsman who takes only an occasional load of
firewood from a large forest need have no detailed knowledge of that
forest, so a state whose demands are confined to grabbing a few carts
of grain and the odd conscript may not require a very accurate or
detailed map of the society. If, however, the state is ambitious—if it
wants to extract as much grain and manpower as it can, short of
provoking a famine or a rebellion, if it wants to create a literate,
skilled, and healthy population, if it wants everyone to speak the
same language or worship the same god—then it will have to become both
far more knowledgeable and far more intrusive.


How does the state get a handle on the society? Here and in the next
two chapters, I am especially concerned with the logic behind
large-scale attempts to redesign rural life and production from
above. Seen from the center, the royal court or the seat of state,
this process has often been described as a “civilizing process.”\footnote{The phrase comes from the title of Norbert Elias’s great work, \emph{The Civilizing Process}, vol. 1 of \emph{The History of Manners}, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1982), but it applies also, as we shall see, to the self-descriptions of the “modernizers” outside the West who have implemented these schemes. See also Elias’s \emph{Power and Civility}, the second volume of \emph{The History of Manners}.}
I prefer to see it as an attempt at domestication, a kind of social
gardening devised to make the countryside, its products, and its
inhabitants more readily identifiable and accessible to the
center. Certain elements of these efforts at domestication seem, if
not universal, at least very common, and they may be termed
“sedentarization,” “concentration,” and “radical simplification” of
both settlement and cultivation.


We shall examine in some detail two notorious schemes of agrarian
simplification—collectivization in Soviet Russia and ujamaa villages in
Tanzania—searching both for the larger political logic of their design
and for the reasons behind their manifold failures as schemes of
production. First, however, it may help to provide a schematic
illustration of this process from the history of Southeast Asia, which
reveals a great continuity of purpose that joins the projects of the
precolonial, colonial, and independence regimes together with the modern
state’s progressive capacity to realize these projects of planned
settlement and production.


\hairline


The demography of precolonial Southeast Asia was such that control of
land per se, unless it was a strategically vital estuary, strait, or
pass, was seldom decisive in state building. Control of the
population—roughly five persons per square kilometer in 1700—mattered
far more. The key to successful statecraft was typically the ability
to attract and hold a substantial, productive population within a
reasonable radius of the court. Given the relative sparseness of the
population and the ease of physical flight, the control of arable land
was pointless unless there was a population to work it. The
precolonial kingdom thus trod a narrow path between a level of taxes
and corvee exactions that would sustain a monarch’s ambitions and a
level that would precipitate wholesale flight. Precolonial wars were
more often about rounding up captives and settling them near the
central court than asserting a territorial claim. A growing,
productive population settled in the ambit of a monarch’s capital was
a more reliable indicator of a kingdom’s power than its physical
extent.


The precolonial state was thus vitally interested in the
sedentarization of its population—in the creation of permanent, fixed
settlements. The greater the concentration of people, providing that
they produced an economic surplus, the greater the ease of
appropriating grain, labor, and military service. At the crudest
level, this determinist geographical logic is nothing more than an
application of standard theories of location. As Johann Heinrich von
Thünen, Walter Christaller, and G. William Skinner have amply
demonstrated, the economics of movement, other things being equal,
tend to produce recurring geographical patterns of market location,
crop specialization, and administrative structure.\footnote{See \emph{Von Thünen’s Isolated State} (1966), trans. Carla M. Wartenberg (Oxford: Pergamon Press), and G. William Skinner, \emph{Marketing and Social Structure in China} (Tucson: Association of Asian Studies, 1975). Walter Christaller was the founder of central place theory. That theory, elaborated in his thesis at the University of Erlangen in 1932, forms the premise of Skinner’s work.} The political
appropriation of labor and grain tends to obey much the same
locational logic, favoring population concentration rather than
dispersion and reflecting a logic of appropriation based on
transportation costs.\footnote{Waterborne movement was far easier than overland movement, so proximity was measured less by physical distance, abstractly measured, than by “travel time.” As these kingdoms had a tradition of long-distance trade, they were thus interested in appropriation, often by tribute relations, of not only grain and manpower but also valuable goods, such as gems, precious metals, medicines, and resins, that were profitable and manageable for trade conducted over long distances.} In this context, much of the classical
literature on statecraft is preoccupied with the techniques of
attracting and holding a population in an environment where they can
flee to the nearby frontier or settle under the wing of another nearby
prince. The expression “to vote with one’s feet” had a literal meaning
in much of Southeast Asia.\footnote{An illustration of this is found in the following admonition directed to King Narathihapate from Queen Saw, taken from \emph{The Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma}, trans. Pe Maung Tin and G. H. Luce (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 177: “‘Consider the state of the realm. Thou hast no folk or people, no host of countrymen and countrywomen around thee\dots{} Thy countrymen and countrywomen tarry and will not enter thy kingdom. They fear thy domination; for thou, O King Alaung, art a hard master.’” \protect\endgraf The classic analysis of the phenomenon in Southeast Asia may be found in Michael Adas, “From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Pre-Colonial and Colonial Southeast Asia,” \emph{Comparative Studies in Society and History} 23, no. 2 (1981): 217-47. Coastal and riverine populations could be said to have “voted with their oars.”}


Traditional Thai statecraft hit on a novel technique for minimizing
flight and attaching commoners to the state or to their noble
lords. The Thai devised a system of tattoos for literally marking
commoners with symbols making it clear who “belonged” to whom. Such
tattooing is evidence that exceptional measures were required to
identify and fix a subject population inclined to vote with its
feet. So common was physical flight that a large number of bounty
hunters made a living coursing the forests in search of runaways to
return to their lawful owners.\footnote{The problem of population flight was hardly unique to Southeast Asia. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, after the Black Plague had reduced the population of Western Europe by nearly one-third, the nobility faced a serious problem in attracting serfs on favorable terms now that they could so easily flee to land that had been abandoned by those felled by the plague. Slave states with open frontiers have always been vulnerable on this score; in the pre-Civil War United States, escaping slaves could head to the North, Canada, or the “free states” of the West. In Russia, the majority of czarist decrees addressed the subject of runaway serfs. In general, wherever there is an open frontier, unfree forms of labor are difficult to sustain unless sufficient coercion can be mobilized to contain the population.} Similar problems beset the estates
of Roman Catholic friars in the early years of Spain’s dominion in the
Philippines. The Tagalogs who were resettled and organized for
supervised production on the Latin American model frequently fled the
harsh labor regime. They were known as \emph{remontados}, that is, peasants
who had gone “back up to the hills,” where they enjoyed more autonomy.


More generally, for precolonial and colonial Southeast Asia, it might
be helpful to think in terms of state spaces and nonstate spaces. In
the first, to put it crudely, the subject population was settled
rather densely in quasi-permanent communities, producing a surplus of
grain (usually of wet rice) and labor which was relatively easily
appropriated by the state. In the second, the population was sparsely
settled, typically practiced slash-and-burn or shifting cultivation,
maintained a more mixed economy (including, for example, polyculture
or reliance on forest products), and was highly mobile, thereby
severely limiting the possibilities for reliable state
appropriation. State spaces and nonstate spaces were not merely
preexisting ecological and geographical settings that encouraged or
discouraged the formation of states. A major objective of would-be
rulers was to \emph{create} and then expand state spaces by building
irrigation works, capturing subjects in wars, forcing settlement,
codifying religions, and so on. The classical state envisaged a
concentrated population, within easy range, producing a steady supply
of easily transportable, storable grain and tribute and providing a
surplus of manpower for security, war, and public works.


Edmund Leach’s perceptive effort to understand the frontiers of Burma
implicitly followed this logic in its reconstruction of the
traditional Burmese polity. He suggested that we look at the
precolonial Burmese state not as a physically contiguous territory, as
we would in the context of modern states, but as a complex patchwork
that followed an entirely different logic. We should picture the
kingdom, he insisted, in terms of horizontal slices through the
topography. Following this logic, Burma was, in practice, a collection
of \emph{all} the sedentary, wet-rice producers settled in valleys within
the ambit of the court center. These would be, in the terms suggested
above, the state spaces. The next horizontal stratum of the landscape
from, say, five hundred feet to fifteen hundred feet would, given its
different ecology, contain in habitants who practiced shifting
cultivation, were more widely scattered, and were therefore less
promising subjects of appropriation.  They were not an integral part
of the kingdom, although they might regularly send tribute to the
central court. Still higher elevations would constitute yet other
ecological, political, and cultural zones.  What Leach proposed, in
effect, is that we consider all relatively dense, wet-rice settlements
within range of the capital as “the kingdom” and the rest, even if
relatively close to the capital, as “nonstate spaces.”\footnote{This logic works best for inland (\emph{kraton}-style) kingdoms. It breaks down whenever there are strategic locations that function as natural monopolies or choke points and control of which can serve as a basis for appropriation. I have in mind the control of river mouths (the \emph{hulu-hilir} distinction in the Malay world), straits, mountain passes, or deposits of vital resources.}


The role of statecraft in this context becomes that of maximizing the
productive, settled population in such state spaces while at the same
time drawing tribute from, or at least neutralizing, the nonstate
spaces.\footnote{Abstracting from the Southeast Asian case, one might say that state formation is abetted by concentrated, intensive cultivation, a population who produces a consistent surplus and who finds it costly to leave (having had, for example, high sunk-costs in field creation and water control), who produce goods that, if bulky (such as food), can be stored and moved easily (such as grain) and that have relatively high value per unit volume and weight.} These stateless zones have always played a potentially
subversive role, both symbolically and practically. From the vantage
point of the court, such spaces and their inhabitants were the
exemplars of rudeness, disorder, and barbarity against which the
civility, order, and sophistication of the center could be
gauged.\footnote{Those who dwell in such spaces, of course, saw the matter differently, con trasting their freedom, mobility, and honor, to the bondage of those under the thumb of the court. An evocative and evenhanded Afghan proverb captures the distinction: “Taxes ate the valleys; honor ate the hills.”} Such spaces, it goes without saying, have served as
refuges for fleeing peasants, rebels, bandits, and the pretenders who
have often threatened kingdoms.


Of course, the ecology of different elevations is only one among many
factors that might characterize nonstate spaces. They also appear to
share one or more of the following distinctive features: they are
relatively impenetrable (wild, trackless, labyrinthine, inhospitable);
their population is dispersed or migratory; and they are unpromising
sites for surplus appropriation.\footnote{One of the best ways to conjure up such places is to ask where runaway serfs and slaves repaired to and where Maroon communities of fugitive slaves established themselves. Such places were nonstate spaces, which the authorities tried to efface if possible. In the United States, a telling example is the enormous effort made in the postbellum South to eliminate the large commons on which free blacks could eke out an independent existence and to drive the blacks into the labor market, often to work for their former masters. Most freed slaves preferred to make a precarious living by farming, fishing, hunting, trapping, and grazing a few animals on open land over the subordination of permanent wage labor. A series of fencing and trespassing laws, hunting and trapping prohibitions, grazing restrictions, vagrancy laws, and so on were, as Steven Hahn has shown, designed to eliminate this nonwage labor (and nonstate) space. See Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Post-Bellum South,” \emph{Radical History Review} 26 (1982): 37-64.} Thus marshes and swamps (one
thinks of the now beleaguered Marsh Arabs on the Iraqi-Iranian
border), ever-shifting deltas and estuaries, mountains, deserts
(favored by nomadic Berbers and Bedouins), and the sea (home to the
so-called sea gypsies of southern Burma), and, more generally, the
frontier have all served as “nonstate spaces” in the sense that I have
been using the term.\footnote{Lest this seem geographically determinist, let me emphasize that human agency plays a large role in creating and maintaining a nonstate space. At the limit, even parts of great cities may come to be nonstate spaces when the state essentially cedes control toa rebellious or resistant population.}


Contemporary development schemes, whether in Southeast Asia or
elsewhere, require the creation of state spaces where the government can
reconfigure the society and economy of those who are to be “developed.”
The transformation of peripheral nonstate spaces into state spaces by
the modern, developmentalist nation-state is ubiquitous and, for the
inhabitants of such spaces, frequently traumatic. Anna Lowenhaupt
Tsing’s sensitive account of the attempts of the Indonesian state to
capture, as it were, the nomadic Meratus hill peoples of Kalimantan
describes a striking case in point. The Meratus live, as she notes, in
an area that, “so far, has eluded the clarity and visibility required
for model development schemes.” As migratory hunter-gatherers who at the
same time practice shifting cultivation, who live in constantly
changing kinship units, who are widely dispersed over a demanding
terrain, and who are, in Indonesian eyes, pagans, the Meratus are a
tough case for development. Indonesian officials have tried, in their
desultory fashion, to concentrate the Meratus in planned villages near
the main roads. The implicit goal was to create a fixed, concentrated
population that officials in charge of the management of isolated
populations could see and instruct when touring the district.\footnote{A goal related to dispossessing the Meratus of “their” forest was to make the land more easily available for inclusion in state logging and revenue plans.} Meratus
immobility was the precondition of state supervision and development,
whereas much of the identity of the Meratus as a people depended on
“unhampered mobility.”\footnote{Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, \emph{In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. xiii, 28, 41.}


The inaccessibility of the Meratus was, in state-development parlance
and in the eyes of government officials, an index of their lamentable
backwardness. They were described by their would-be civilizers as “not
yet arranged” or “not yet ordered” (\emph{belum di-ator}), as “not yet brought
to religion” (\emph{belum berugama}), and their cultivation practices were
described as “disorderly agriculture” (\emph{pertanian yang tidak teratur}).
For their part, the Meratus grasped the essentials of what the
government had in mind for them. They had been asked to settle along the
main tracks through the forest, one local leader observed, “so the
government can see the people.” The clustered houses they were asked to
settle in were meant, they believed, to “look good if the government
came to visit.”\footnote{Ibid., pp. 48, 93.} Cast in a discourse of development, progress, and
civilization, the plans of the Indonesian state for the Meratus peoples
are at the same time a synoptic project of legibility and concentration.


It is in the context of actual rebellion where the effort to create
and sharply distinguish state spaces from nonstate spaces is carried
to its logical conclusion. The nature of military threat requires
clearly defined and easily monitored and patrolled state spaces, such
as forts, forced settlements, or internment camps. Modern examples of
this can be found in the so-called new villages in Malaya during the
Emergency following World War II, which were designed particularly to
sequester a Chinese smallholder and rubber-tapping population and
prevent it from providing manpower, food, cash, and supplies to a
largely Chinese guerrilla force in the hinterland beyond. In an
arrangement later copied in the “strategic hamlets” in Vietnam, the
reluctant residents were lodged in identical, numbered houses arrayed
in straight lines.\footnote{I recall seeing such settlements in the Philippine provinces of Tarlac and Pangasinan, where each house displayed, in large letters on the front near the steps, the names and ages of all the family members who slept there, allowing security forces on their nightly patrols to more easily identify any unauthorized visitors.} The population’s movement in and out was
strictly monitored. They were one short step away from the
concentration camps built in wartime to create and maintain a legible,
bounded, \emph{concentrated} state space and seal it off as completely as
possible from the outside. Here, direct control and discipline are
more important than appropriation. In recent times there have been
unprecedented efforts to reclaim non-state space for the state. In any
case, that is one way to characterize the massive use of Agent Orange
to defoliate large sections of forest during the Vietnam War, thus
render the forest legible and safe (for government forces, that is).


\hairline


The concept of state spaces, suitably modified for the context of a
market economy, can also help us to resolve an apparent paradox in
colonial agrarian policy in Southeast Asia. How do we explain the
decided colonial preference for plantation agriculture over
smallholder production? The grounds for the choice can certainly not
have been efficiency. For almost any crop one can name, with the
possible exception of sugarcane,\footnote{Once it is cut, sugarcane must be crushed quickly in order to avoid losses through evaporation and fermentation. The need for a large crushing mill (often called a sugar “central,” for good reason), problems relating to transportation of the cane, and the great bulk reduction through processing provide a kind of natural bottleneck that allows the mill owner to control production directly or else through tied contracts. Compared to coffee, tobacco, tea, rubber, or palm oil, sugarcane is unique in this advantage to centralized production.} smallholders have been able
historically to out-compete larger units of production. Time and time
again, the colonial states found, small producers, owing to their low
fixed costs and flexible use of family labor, could consistently
undersell state-managed or private-sector plantations.


The paradox is largely resolved, I believe, if we consider the
“efficiencies” of the plantation as a unit of taxation (both taxes on
profits and various export levies), of labor discipline and
surveillance, and of political control. Take, for example, rubber
production in colonial Malaya. At the beginning of the rubber boom in
the first decade of the twentieth century, British officials and
investors no doubt believed that rubber produced by estates, which had
better planting stock, better scientific management, and more
available labor, would prove more efficient and profitable than rubber
produced by smallholders.\footnote{The difficulties of recruiting Malays, who were independent cultivators, to work on the estates proved insurmountable, and thus it seemed more convenient to import Indian and Chinese laborers for the growing estate labor force. This fact alone favored plantations unless the colonizers were willing to risk the political dangers of creating a class of imported yeomen to compete with the Malays for land. Elsewhere, there were other solutions to creating a legible sphere of appropriation. On Java, the Culture System required the village, in lieu of taxes, to plant an export crop every so often on village lands. Where it was vital to force an economically independent peasantry into wage labor or plantation work, a universal, annual head tax payable in cash was often found to be useful.} When they discovered they were wrong,
however, officials persisted in systematically favoring rubber estates
at some considerable cost to the overall economy of the colony. The
infamous Stevenson scheme in Malaya during the worldwide depression
was a particularly blatant attempt to preserve the failing estate
sector of the rubber industry by limiting smallholder
production. Without it, most estates would have perished.


The fact that, in protecting the estate sector, the colonizers were
also protecting the interests of their countrymen and those of
metropolitan investors was only one factor in explaining their
policy. If it were the main reason, one would expect the policy to
lapse with the country’s independence. As we shall shortly see, it did
not. The plantations, although less efficient than smallholders as
producers, were far more convenient as units of taxation. It was
easier to monitor and tax large, publicly-owned businesses than to do
so for a vast swarm of small growers who were here today and gone
tomorrow and whose landholdings, production, and profits were
illegible to the state. But because plantations specialized in a
single crop, it was a simple matter to assess their production and
profits. A second advantage of estate rubber production was that it
typically provided centralized forms of residence and labor that were
far more amenable to central political and administrative
control. Estates were, in a word, far more legible communities than
were the Malay \emph{kampung}, which had its own history, leadership, and
mixed economy.


A comparable logic can be usefully applied to the establishment of
federal land schemes in independent Malaysia. Why did the Malaysian
state elect to establish large, costly, bureaucratically monitored
settlements in the 1960s and 1970s when the frontier was already being
actively pioneered by large-scale voluntary migration? Pioneer
settlement cost the state virtually nothing and had historically
created viable household enterprises that grew and marketed cash
crops. As an economic proposition, the huge rubber and palm oil
concerns established by the government made little sense. They were
enormously costly to set up, the capital expenditure per settler being
far beyond what a rational businessman would have invested.


Politically and administratively, however, the advantages of these
large, centrally planned, and centrally run government schemes were
manifold. At a time when the attempted revolution of the Malayan
Communist Party was still fresh in the minds of the country’s Malay
rulers, planned settlements had some of the advantages of strategic
hamlets. They were laid out according to a simple grid pattern and
were immediately legible to an outside official. The house lots were
numbered consecutively, and the inhabitants were registered and
monitored far more closely than in open frontier areas. Malaysian
settlers could be, and were, carefully selected for age, skills, and
political reliability; villagers in the state of Kedah, where I worked
in the late 1970s, understood that if they wanted to be selected for a
settlement scheme, they needed a recommendation from a local
politician of the ruling party.


The administrative and economic situation of the Malaysian settlers
was comparable to that of the “company towns” of early
industrialization, where everyone worked at comparable jobs, were paid
by the same boss, lived in company housing, and shopped at the same
company store. Until the plantation crops were mature, the settlers
were paid a wage. Their production was marketed through state
channels, and they could be dismissed for any one of a large number of
infractions against the rules established by the scheme’s
officials. The economic dependency and direct political control meant
that such schemes could regularly be made to produce large electoral
majorities for the ruling party. Collective protest was rare and could
usually be snuffed out by the sanctions available to the
administrators. It goes without saying that the settlements of the
Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) allowed the state to
control the mix of export crops, to monitor production and processing,
and to set producer prices in order to generate revenue.


The publicly stated rationale for planned settlement schemes was
almost always couched in the discourse of orderly development and
social services (such as the provision of health clinics, sanitation,
adequate housing, education, clean water, and infrastructure). The
public rhetoric was not intentionally insincere; it was, however,
misleadingly silent about the manifold ways in which orderly
development of this kind served important goals of appropriation,
security, and political hegemony that could not have been met through
autonomous frontier settlement. FELDA schemes were “soft” civilian
versions of the new villages created as part of counterinsurgency
policy. The dividend they paid was less an economic return than a
dividend in expanding state spaces.


State plans of sedentarization and planned settlement have rarely gone
as anticipated—in Malaysia or elsewhere. Like the scientific forest or
the grid city, the targets of development have habitually escaped the
fine-tuned control aspired to by their inventors. But we must never
overlook the fact that the effect of these schemes, however inflected
by local practice, lies as much in what they replace as in the degree
to which they live up to their own rhetoric.


The concentration of population in planned settlements may not create
what state planners had in mind, but it has almost always disrupted or
destroyed prior communities whose cohesion derived mostly from
nonstate sources. The communities thus superseded—however
objectionable they may have been on normative grounds—were likely to
have had their own unique histories, social ties, mythology, and
capacity for joint action.  Virtually by definition, the
state-designated settlement must start from the beginning to build its
own sources of cohesion and joint action. A new community is thus,
also by definition, a community demobilized, and hence a community
more amenable to control from above and outside.\footnote{Thus the morally obtuse but sociologically correct observation by Samuel Huntington during the Vietnam War: the massive bombing of the countryside and the subsequent creation of huge refugee settlements on the outskirts of major cities provided many advantages to those who wanted to influence and mobilize the electorate. Those in the camps, he reasoned, were more easily manipulable than those still living in their rural communities. The implicit but macabre logic was impeccable; the more bombs rained on the countryside, the greater the opportunities for the United States and its allies in Saigon to dominate any peaceful electoral competition that followed. From Huntington, “Getting Ready for Political Competition in South Vietnam,” paper presented at the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group of the Asia Society, circa 1970. \protect\endgraf I believe that this logic of social demobilization is the key element in the commonly observed fact that, at the beginning of industrialization, the declining rural community is often more likely to be a source of collective protest than is the newly constituted proletariat, notwithstanding standard Marxist reasoning to the contrary. Resettlement, whether forced or unforced, often eliminates a prior community and replaces it with a temporarily disaggregated mass of new arrivals. It is ironically just such a population that may, for the time being, more closely resemble the “potatoes in a sack” than the peasantry of the \emph{bocage} described by Marx in \emph{The Eighteenth Brumiare}.}

\chapter{Chapter 6. Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams}


The master builders of Soviet society were rather more like Niemeyer
designing Brasília than Baron Haussmann retrofitting Paris. A
combination of defeat in war, economic collapse, and a revolution had
provided the closest thing to a bulldozed site that a state builder
ever gets. The result was a kind of ultrahigh modernism that in its
audacity recalled the utopian aspects of its precursor, the French
Revolution.


This is not the place, nor am I the most knowledgeable guide, for an
extensive discussion of Soviet high modernism.\footnote{The best source for a discussion about Soviet high modernism is probably Richard Stites, \emph{Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution} (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Its generous bibliography appears to cover most of the available sources.} What I aim to do,
instead, is to emphasize the cultural and aesthetic elements in Soviet
high modernism. This will in turn pave the way for an examination of
an illuminating point of direct contact between Soviet and American
high modernism: the belief in huge, mechanized, industrial farms.


In certain vital respects, Soviet high modernism is not a sharp break
from Russian absolutism. Ernest Gellner has argued that of the two
facets of the Enlightenment—the one asserting the sovereignty of the
individual and his interests, the other commending the rational
authority of experts—it was the second that spoke to rulers who wanted
their “backward” states to catch up. The Enlightenment arrived in
Central Europe, he concludes, as a “centralizing rather than a
liberating force.”\footnote{This inference, we know, is not a distortion of the doctrines of liberalism. J. S. Mill, whose credentials as a liberal son of the Enlightenment are not in doubt, considered backwardness a sufficient justification for placing authoritarian powers in the hands of a modernizer. See Ernest Gellner, “The Struggle to Catch Up,” \emph{Times Literary Supplement}, December 9, 1994, p. 14. For a more detailed argument along these lines, see also Jan P. Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh, eds., \emph{The Decolonization of the Imagination: Culture, Knowledge, and Power} (London: Zed Press, 1995).}


Strong historical echoes of Leninist high modernism can thus be found
in what Richard Stites calls the “administrative utopianism” of the
Russian czars and their advisers in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.  This administrative utopianism found expression in a
succession of schemes to organize the population (serfs, soldiers,
workers, functionaries) into institutions “based upon hierarchy,
discipline, regimentation, strict order, rational planning, a
geometrical environment, and a form of welfarism.”\footnote{Stites, \emph{Revolutionary Dreams}, p. 19. Engels expressed his disdain for Communist utopian schemes like these by calling them “barracks Communism.”} Peter the
Great’s Saint Petersburg was the urban realization of this vision. The
city was laid out according to a strict rectilinear and radial plan on
completely new terrain. Its straight boulevards were, by design, twice
as wide as the tallest building, which was, naturally, at the
geometric center of the city. The buildings themselves reflected
function and hierarchy, as the facade, height, and material of each
corresponded to the social class of its inhabitants. The city’s
physical layout was in fact a legible map of its intended social
structure.


Saint Petersburg had many counterparts, urban and rural. Under
Catherine the Great, Prince Grigory Potemkin established a whole
series of model cities (such as Ekaterinoslav) and model rural
settlements. The next two czars, Paul and Alexander I, inherited
Catherine’s passion for Prussian order and efficiency.\footnote{One could say that Catherine the Great, being Prussian born and an avid correspondent with several of the Encylopedists, including Voltaire, came by her mania for rational order honestly.} Their
adviser, Alexei Arakcheev, established a model estate on which
peasants wore uniforms and followed elaborate instructions on upkeep
and maintenance, to the point of carrying “punishment books” inscribed
with records of their violations. This estate was made the basis of a
far bolder plan for a network of widely scattered, self-sufficient
military colonies, which by the late 1820s included 750,000
people. This attempt to create a new Russia, in contrast to the
disorder, mobility, and flux of a frontier society, quickly succumbed
to popular resistance, corruption, and inefficiency.  Long before the
Bolsheviks took power, in any case, the historical landscape was
littered with the wreckage of many miscarried experiments in
authoritarian social planning.


Lenin and his confederates could implement their high-modernist plans
starting from nearly zero. The war, the revolution, and the subsequent
famine had gone a long way toward dissolving the prerevolutionary
society, particularly in the cities. A general collapse of industrial
production had provoked a vast exodus from the cities and a virtual
regression to a barter economy. The ensuing four-year civil war
further dissolved existing social ties as well as schooling the
hard-pressed Bolsheviks in the methods of “war
Communism”—requisitions, martial law, coercion.


Working on a leveled social terrain and harboring high-modernist
ambitions in keeping with the distinction of being the pioneers of the
first socialist revolution, the Bolsheviks thought big. Nearly
everything they planned was on a monumental scale, from cities and
individual buildings (the Palace of Soviets) to construction projects
(the White Sea Canal) and, later, the great industrial projects of the
first Five Year Plan (Magnitogorsk), not to mention collectivization.
Sheila Fitzpatrick has appropriately called this passion for sheer
size “giganto-mania.”\footnote{Sheila Fitzpatrick, \emph{The Russian Revolution} (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 119. The term “gigantomania” was, I believe, also in use in the Soviet Union. The ultimate failure of most of the USSR’s great schemes is in itself an important story, the significance of which was captured epigrammatically by Robert Conquest, who observed that “the end of the Cold War can be seen as the defeat of Magnitogorsk by Silicon Valley” (“Party in the Dock,” Times Literary Supplement, November 6, 1992, p. 7). For an industrial, cultural, and social history of Magnitogorsk, see Stephen Kotkin, \emph{Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).} The economy itself was conceived as a
well-ordered machine, where everyone would simply produce goods of the
description and quantity specified by the central state’s statistical
bureau, as Lenin had foreseen.


A transformation of the physical world was not, however, the only item
on the Bolshevik agenda. It was a cultural revolution that they
sought, the creation of a new person. Members of the secular
intelligentsia were the most devoted partisans of this aspect of the
revolution. Campaigns to promote atheism and to suppress Christian
rituals were pressed in the villages. New “revolutionary” funeral and
marriage ceremonies were invented amidst much fanfare, and a ritual of
“Octobering” was encouraged as an alternative to baptism.\footnote{An interesting parallel can be seen in the French countryside following the Revolution, when campaigns called for “de-Christianization” and offered associated secular rituals.}
Cremation—rational, clean, economical—was promoted. Along with this
secularization came enormous and widely popular campaigns to promote
education and literacy.  Architects and social planners invented new
communal living arrangements designed to supersede the bourgeois
family pattern. Communal food, laundry, and child-care services
promised to free women from the traditional division of labor. Housing
arrangements were explicitly intended to be “social condensers.”


The “new man”—the Bolshevik specialist, engineer, or functionary—came
to represent a new code of social ethics, which was sometimes simply
called \emph{kultura}. In keeping with the cult of technology and science,
kultura emphasized punctuality, cleanliness, businesslike directness,
polite modesty, and good, but never showy, manners.\footnote{Stites, \emph{Revolutionary Dreams}, p. 119. See also Vera Sandomirsky Dunham, \emph{In Stalin’s Time: Middle-Class Values in Soviet Fiction} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), for how, under Stalin, this austerity was transformed into opulence.} It was this
understanding of kultura and the party’s passion for the League of
Time, with its promotion of time consciousness, efficient work habits,
and clock-driven routine, that were so brilliantly caricatured in
Eugene Zamiatin’s novel \emph{We} and that later became the inspiration for
George Orwell’s \emph{1984}.


What strikes an outside observer of this revolution in culture and
architecture is its emphasis on public form—on getting the visual and
aesthetic dimensions of the new world straight. One can perhaps see
this best in what Stites calls the “festivals of mustering” organized
by the cultural impresario of the early Soviet state, Anatoly
Lunacharsky.\footnote{Stites, “Festivals of the People,” chap. 4 of \emph{Revolutionary Dreams}, pp. 79-97.} In the outdoor dramas he produced, the revolution
was reenacted on a scale that must have seemed as large as the
original, with cannons, bands, searchlights, ships on the river, four
thousand actors, and thirty-five thousand spectators.\footnote{Ibid., p. 95. Through Sergey Eisenstein’s films, these public theatrical reenactments are the visual images that remain embedded in the consciousness of many of those who were not participants in the actual revolution.} Whereas the
actual revolution had all the usual messiness of reality, the
reenactment called for military precision, and the various actors were
organized by platoon and mobilized with semaphore and field
telephones. Like mass exercises, the public spectacle gave a
retroactive order, purpose, and central direction to the events, which
were designed to impress the spectator, not to reflect the historical
facts.\footnote{Composers and filmmakers were also expected to be “engineers of the soul.”} If one can see in Arakcheev’s military colonies an attempt
to prefigure, to represent, a wished-for order, then perhaps
Lunacharsky’s staged revolution can be seen as a representation of the
wished-for relationship between the Bolsheviks and the proletarian
crowd. Little effort was spared to see that the ceremony turned out
right. When Lunacharsky himself complained that churches were being
demolished for the May Day celebrations, Lazar Kaganivich, the city
boss of Moscow, replied, “And \emph{my} aesthetics demand that the
demonstration processions from the six districts of Moscow should all
pour into Red Square at the same time.”\footnote{Quoted in Stites, \emph{Revolutionary Dreams}, p. 243.} In architecture, public
manners, urban design, and public ritual, the emphasis on a visible,
rational, disciplined social facade seemed to prevail.\footnote{Lenin, almost certainly influenced by another of his favorite books, Campanella’s \emph{City of the Sun}, wanted public sculptures of revolutionaries, complete with inspiring inscriptions, to be erected throughout the city: a propaganda of monuments. See Anatoly Lunacharsky, “Lenin and Art,” \emph{International Literature} 5 (May 1935): 66-71.} Stites
suggests that there is some inverse relation between this public face
of order and purpose and the near anarchy that reigned in society at
large: “As in the case of all such utopias, its organizers described
it in rational, symmetrical terms, in the mathematical language of
planning, control figures, statistics, projections and precise
commands. As in the vision of military colonies, which the utopian
plan faintly resembled, its rational facade barely obscured the oceans
of misery, disorder, chaos, corruption and whimsicality that went with
it.”\footnote{Stites, \emph{Revolutionary Dreams}, p. 242.}


One possible implication of Stites’s assertion is that, in some
circumstances, what I call the miniaturization of order may be
substituted for the real thing. A facade or a small, easily managed
zone of order and conformity may come to be an end in itself; the
representation may usurp the reality. Miniatures and small experiments
have, of course, an important role in studying larger phenomena. Model
aircraft built to scale and wind tunnels are essential steps in the
design of new airplanes. But when the two are confused—when, say, the
general mistakes the parade ground for the battlefield itself—the
consequences are potentially disastrous.

\section{A Soviet-American Fetish: Industrial Farming}


Before plunging into a discussion of the practice and logic of Soviet
collectivization, we should recognize that the rationalization of
farming on a huge, even national, scale was part of a faith shared by
social engineers and agricultural planners throughout the world.\footnote{This entire section is based on chaps. 2, 4, and 6 of a remarkable forthcoming book by Deborah Fitzgerald, \emph{Yeoman No More: The Industrialization of American Agriculture}, to which I am greatly indebted. The chapter and page numbers that follow refer to the draft manuscript.}
And they were conscious of being engaged in a common endeavor. Like
the architects of the Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne,
they kept in touch through journals, professional conferences, and
exhibitions. The connections were strongest between American
agronomists and their Russian colleagues—connections that were not
entirely broken even during the Cold War. Working in vastly different
economic and political environments, the Russians tended to be envious
of the level of capitalization, particularly in mechanization, of
American farms while the Americans were envious of the political scope
of Soviet planning. The degree to which they were working together to
create a new world of large-scale, rational, industrial agriculture
can be judged by this brief account of their relationship.


The high tide of enthusiasm for applying industrial methods to
agriculture in the United States stretched roughly from 1910 to the
end of the 1930s. Agricultural engineers, a new specialty, were the
main carriers of this enthusiasm; influenced by currents in their
parent discipline, industrial engineering, and most particularly by
the doctrines of the prophet of time-motion studies, Frederick Taylor,
they reconceptualized the farm as a “food and fiber factory.”\footnote{Ibid., chap. 2, p. 21.}
Taylorist principles of scientifically measuring work processes in
order to break them down into simple, repetitive motions that an
unskilled worker could learn quickly might work well enough on the
factory floor,\footnote{As many commentators have emphasized, this redesigning of work processes wrested the control of production from skilled artisans and laborers and placed it in the hands of management, whose ranks and prerogatives grew as the labor force was “de-skilled.”} but their application to the variegated and
nonrepetitive requirements of growing crops was
questionable. Agricultural engineers therefore turned to those aspects
of farm operation that might be more easily standardized. They tried
to rationalize the layout of farm buildings, to standardize machinery
and tools, and to promote the mechanization of major grain crops.


The professional instincts of the agricultural engineers led them to
try to replicate as much as possible the features of the modern
factory.  This impelled them to insist on enlarging the scale of the
typical small farm so that it could mass-produce standard agricultural
commodities, mechanize its operation, and thereby, it was thought,
greatly reduce the unit cost of production.\footnote{Around 1920, much of the market for agricultural machinery made by U.S. manufacturers was not in the United States, where farm sizes were still relatively small, but outside the country, in such places as Canada, Argentina, Australia, and Russia, where farms were considerably larger. Fitzgerald, \emph{Yeoman No More}, chap. 2, p. 31.}


As we shall see later, the industrial model was applicable to some,
but not all, of agriculture. It was nonetheless applied
indiscriminately as a creed rather than a scientific hypothesis to be
examined skeptically.  The modernist confidence in huge scale,
centralization of production, standardized mass commodities, and
mechanization was so hegemonic in the leading sector of industry that
it became an article of faith that the same principles would work,
pari passu, in agriculture.


Many efforts were made to put this faith to the test. Perhaps the most
audacious was the Thomas Campbell “farm” in Montana, begun—or, perhaps
I should say, founded—in 1918.\footnote{For a fascinating and more complete account of the Campbell enterprise, see “The Campbell Farm Corporation,” chap. 5, ibid. It’s worth adding here that the economic depression for agriculture in the United States began at the end of World War I, not in 1930. The time was thus ripe for bold experimentation, and cost of buying or leasing land was cheap.} It was an industrial farm in more
than one respect. Shares were sold by prospectuses describing the
enterprise as an “industrial opportunity”; J. P. Morgan, the
financier, helped to raise \$2 million from the public. The Montana
Farming Corporation was a monster wheat farm of ninety-five thousand
acres, much of it leased from four Native American tribes. Despite the
private investment, the enterprise would never have gotten off the
ground without help and subsidies from the Department of Interior and
the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).


Proclaiming that farming was about 90 percent engineering and only
10 percent agriculture, Campbell set about standardizing as much of
his operation as possible. He grew wheat and flax, two hardy crops
that needed little if any attention between planting and harvest
time.\footnote{Wheat and flax are, in the terminology developed later in this chapter, “proletarian” crops as opposed to “petit-bourgeois” crops.} The land he farmed was the agricultural equivalent of the
bulldozed site of Brasília. It was virgin soil, with a natural
fertility that would eliminate the need for fertilizer. The topography
also vastly simplified matters: it was flat, with no forests, creeks,
rocks, or ridges that would impede the smooth course of machinery over
its surface. In other words, the selection of the simplest, most
standardized crops and the leasing of something very close to a blank
agricultural space were calculated to favor the application of
industrial methods. In the first year Campbell bought thirty-three
tractors, forty binders, ten threshing machines, four combines, and
one hundred wagons; he employed about fifty men most of the year, but
hired as many as two hundred during the peak season.\footnote{Fitzgerald, \emph{Yeoman No More}, chap. 4, pp. 15-17.}


This is not the place to chronicle the fortunes of the Montana Farming
Corporation, and in any event Deborah Fitzgerald has done so
splendidly.\footnote{See above, nn. 14 and 18.} Suffice it to note that a drought in the second year
and the elimination of a government support for prices the following
year led to a collapse that cost J. P. Morgan \$1 million. The Campbell
farm faced other problems besides weather and prices: soil
differences, labor turnover, the difficulty of finding skilled,
resourceful workers who would need little supervision. Although the
corporation struggled on until Campbell’s death in 1966, it provided
no evidence that industrial farms were superior to family farms in
efficiency and profitability. The advantages industrial farms did have
over smaller producers were of another kind. Their very size gave them
an edge in access to credit, political influence (relevant to taxes,
support payments, and the avoidance of foreclosure), and marketing
muscle. What they gave away in agility and quality labor they often
made up for in their considerable political and economic clout.


Many large industrial farms managed along scientific lines were
established in the 1920s and 1930s.\footnote{Another such farm, and one with direct links to New Deal experimentation in the 1930s, was the Fairway Farms Corporation. Founded in 1924 by M. L. Wilson and Henry C. Taylor, both of whom were trained in institutional economics at the University of Wisconsin, the corporation was designed to turn landless farmers into scientific, industrial farmers. The capital for the new enterprise came, through intermediaries, from John D. Rockefeller. “Fair Way” Farms would become the model for many of the New Deal’s more ambitious agricultural programs as Wilson, Taylor, and many of their progressive colleagues in Wisconsin moved to influential positions in Washington under Roosevelt. A more searching account of the connection is in Jess Gilbert and Ellen R. Baker, “Wisconsin Economists and New Deal Agricultural Policy: The Legacy of Progressive Professors” (unpublished paper, 1995). The 1920s were a fertile time for agricultural experimentation, partly because the economic slump for agricultural commodities after World War I prompted policy initiatives designed to alleviate the crisis.} Some of them were the
stepchil dren of depression foreclosures that left banks and insurance
companies holding many farms they could not sell. Such “chain farms,”
consisting of as many as six hundred farmsteads organized into one
integrated operation (one farm to farrow pigs, say, and another to
feed them out, along the lines of contemporary “contract farming” for
poultry), were quite common, and buying into them was a speculative
investment.\footnote{Fitzgerald, \emph{Yeoman No More}, chap. 4, pp. 18-27. For an account of indus trial farming in Kansas and its link to the ecological disaster known as the dust bowl, see Donald Worster, \emph{Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s} (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).} They proved no more competitive to the family farm
than did Campbell’s corporation. In fact, they were so highly
capitalized that they were vulnerable to unfavorable credit markets
and lower farm gate prices, given their high fixed costs in payroll
and interest. The family farm could, by contrast, more easily tighten
its belt and move into a subsistence mode.


The most striking proposal designed to reconcile the American
small-property regime with huge economies of scale and scientific,
centralized management was that of Mordecai Ezekial and Sherman
Johnson in 1930. They outlined a “national farming corporation” that
would incorporate all farms. It would be vertically integrated and
centralized and “could move raw farming materials through the
individual farms of the country, could establish production goals and
quotas, distribute machinery, labor and capital, and move farm
products from one region to another for processing and use. Bearing a
striking resemblance to the industrial world, this organizational plan
was a sort of gigantic conveyor belt.”\footnote{Fitzgerald, \emph{Yeoman No More}, chap. 4, p. 33. The plan’s outline can be found in Mordecai Ezekial and Sherman Johnson, “Corporate Farming: The Way Out?” New Republic, June 4, 1930, pp. 66-68.} Ezekial was no doubt
influenced by his recent tour of Russian collective farms as well as
by the plight of the depression-stricken economy. Johnson and Ezekial
were hardly alone in calling for centralized industrial farming on a
massive scale, not just as a response to economic crisis but as a
matter of confidence in an ineluctable high-modernist future. The
following expression of that confidence is fairly representative:
“Collectivization is posed by history and economics. Politically, the
small farmer or peasant is a drag on progress. Technically, he is as
antiquated as the small machinists who once put automobiles together
by hand in little wooden sheds. The Russians have been the first to
see this clearly, and to adapt themselves to historical
necessity.”\footnote{Michael Gold, “Is the Small Farmer Dying?” \emph{New Republic}, October 7, 1931, p. 211, cited in Fitzgerald, \emph{Yeoman No More}, chap. 2, p. 35.}


Behind these admiring references to Russia was less a specifically
political ideology than a shared high-modernist faith. That faith was
reinforced by something on the order of an improvised, high-modernist
exchange program. A great many Russian agronomists and engineers came
to the United States, which they regarded as the Mecca of industrial
farming. Their tour of American agriculture nearly always included a
visit to Campbell’s Montana Farming Corporation and to M. L. Wilson,
who in 1928 headed the Department of Agricultural Eco nomics at
Montana State University and later became a high-level official in the
Department of Agriculture under Henry Wallace. The Russians were so
taken with Campbell’s farm that they said they would provide him with
1 million acres if he would come to the Soviet Union and demonstrate
his farming methods.\footnote{Ibid., chap. 6, p. 13. See also Deborah Fitzgerald, “Blinded by Technology: American Agriculture in the Soviet Union, 1928-1932,” \emph{Agricultural History} 70, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 459-86.}


Traffic in the other direction was just as brisk. The Soviet Union had
hired thousands of American technicians and engineers to help in the
design of various elements of Soviet industrial production, including
the production of tractors and other farm machinery. By 1927, the
Soviet Union had also purchased twenty-seven thousand American
tractors. Many of the American visitors, such as Ezekial, admired
Soviet state farms, which by 1930 offered the promise of collectivized
agriculture on a massive scale. The Americans were impressed not just
by the sheer size of the state farms but also by the fact that
technical specialists—agronomists, economists, engineers,
statisticians—were, it seemed, developing Russian production along
rational, egalitarian lines. The failure of the Western market economy
in 1930 reinforced the attractiveness of the Soviet
experiment. Visitors traveling in either direction returned to their
own country thinking that they had seen the future.\footnote{Enthusiastic visitors included the likes of John Dewey, Lincoln Steffens, Rexford Tugwell, Robert LaFollette, Morris Llewellyn Cooke (at the time the foremost exponent of scientific management in the United States), Thurman Arnold, and, of course, Thomas Campbell, who called the Soviet experiment “the biggest farming story the world has ever heard.” Typical of the praise for Soviet plans for a progressive, modernized rural life was this appraisal by Belle LaFollette, the wife of Robert LaFollette: “If the Soviets could have their way, all land would be cultivated by tractors, all the villages lighted by electricity, each community would have a central house serving for the purpose of school, library, assembly hall, and theatre. They would have every convenience and advantage which they plan for the industrial workers in the city” (quoted in Lewis S. Feuer, “American Travelers to the Soviet Union, 1917-1932: The Formation of a Component of New Deal Ideology,” \emph{American Quarterly} 14 [Spring 1962]: 129). See also David Caute, \emph{The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism}, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).}


As Deborah Fitzgerald and Lewis Feuer argue, the attraction that
collectivization held for American agricultural modernizers had little
to do with a belief in Marxism or an affinity for Soviet life.\footnote{Feuer, “American Travelers to the Soviet Union,” pp. 119-49, cited in Fitzgerald, Yeoman No More, chap. 6, p. 4.}
“Rather it was because the Soviet idea of growing wheat on an
industrial scale and in an industrial fashion was similar to American
ideas about the direction American agriculture should take.”\footnote{Fitzgerald, \emph{Yeoman No More}, chap. 6, p. 6.}
Soviet collectivization represented, to these American viewers, an
enormous demonstration project without the political inconveniences of
American institutions; “that is, the Americans viewed the giant Soviet
farms as huge experiment stations on which Americans could try out
their most radical ideas for increasing agricultural production, and,
in particular, wheat production. Many of the things they wished to
learn more about simply could not be tried in America, partly because
it would cost too much, partly because no suitable large farmsite was
available, and partly because many farmers and farm laborers would be
alarmed at the implications of this experimentation.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 37.} The hope
was that the Soviet experiment would be to American industrial
agronomy more or less what the Tennessee Valley Authority was to be to
American regional planning: a proving ground and a possible model for
adoption.


Although Campbell did not accept the Soviet offer of a vast
demonstration farm, others did. M. L. Wilson, Harold Ware (who had
extensive experience in the Soviet Union), and Guy Riggin were invited
to plan a huge mechanized wheat farm of some 500,000 acres of virgin
land. It would be, Wilson wrote to a friend, the largest mechanized
wheat farm in the world. They planned the entire farm layout, labor
force, machinery needs, crop rotations, and lockstep work schedule in
a Chicago hotel room in two weeks in December 1928.\footnote{Ibid., p. 14.} The fact that
they imagined that such a farm \emph{could} be planned in a Chicago hotel
room underlines their presumption that the key issues were abstract,
technical interrelationships that were context-free. As Fitzgerald
perceptively explains: “Even in the U.S., those plans would have been
optimistic, actually, because they were based on an unrealistic
idealization of nature and human behavior. And insofar as the plans
represented what the Americans would do if they had millions of acres
of flat land, lots of laborers, and a government commitment to spare
no expense in meeting production goals, \emph{the plans were designed for
an abstract, theoretical kind of place}. This agricultural place,
which did not correspond to America, Russia, or any other actual
location, obeyed the laws of physics and chemistry, recognized no
political or ideological stance.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 39 (emphasis added).}


The giant \emph{sovkhoz}, named Verblud, which they established near
Rostov-on-Don, one thousand miles south of Moscow, comprised 375,000
acres that were to be sown to wheat. As an economic proposition, it
was an abject failure, although in the early years it did produce
large quantities of wheat. The detailed reasons for the failure are of
less interest for our purposes than the fact that most of them could
be summarized under the rubric of \emph{context}. It was the specific
context of this specific farm that defeated them. The farm, unlike the
plan, was not a hypothecated, generic, abstract farm but an
unpredictable, complex, and particular farm, with its own unique
combination of soils, social structure, administrative culture,
weather, political strictures, machinery, roads, and the work skills
and habits of its employees. As we shall see, it resembled Brasília in
being the kind of failure typical of ambitious high-modernist schemes
for which local knowledge, practice, and context are considered
irrelevant or at best an annoyance to be circumvented.

\section{Collectivization in Soviet Russia}



\begin{quote}


What we have here isn’t a mechanism, it’s people living here. You can’t
get them squared around until they get themselves arranged. I used to
think of the revolution as a steam engine, but now I see that it’s not.



\end{quote}


— Andrei Platonov, \emph{Chevengur}


The collectivization of Soviet agriculture was an extreme but
diagnostic case of authoritarian high-modernist planning. It
represented an unprecedented transformation of agrarian life and
production, and it was imposed by all the brute force at the state’s
disposal. The officials who directed this massive change, moreover,
were operating in relative ignorance of the ecological, social, and
economic arrangements that underwrote the rural economy. They were
flying blind.


Between early 1930 and 1934, the Soviet state waged a virtual war in
the countryside. Realizing that he could not depend on the rural
Soviets to “liquidate the \emph{kulaks}” and collectivize, Stalin
dispatched twenty-five thousand battle-tested, urban Communists and
proletarians with full powers to requisition grain, arrest resistors,
and collectivize. He was convinced that the peasantry was trying to
bring down the Soviet state.  In reply to a personal letter from
Mikhail Sholokhov (author of \emph{And Quiet Flows the Don}) alerting him
to the fact that peasants along the Don were on the verge of
starvation, Stalin replied, “The esteemed grain growers of your
district (and not only of your district alone) carried on an ‘Italian
strike’ (\emph{ital’ianka}), sabotage!, and were not loathe to leave the
workers and the Red Army without bread. That the sabotage was quiet
and outwardly harmless (without bloodshed) does not change the fact
that the esteemed grain growers waged what was virtually a ‘quiet’ war
against Soviet power. A war of starvation, dear comrade
Sholokhov.”\footnote{Quoted in Robert Conquest, \emph{The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine} (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 232. An even more explicit recognition that this was a “war” appears in this statement by M. M. Khateyevich: “A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime. It’s a struggle to the death. This year was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who was master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay, we’ve won the war” (quoted in ibid., p. 261).}


The human costs of that war are still in dispute, but they were
undeniably grievous. Estimates of the death toll alone, as a result of
the “dekulakization” and collectivization campaigns and the ensuing
famine, range from a “modest” 3 or 4 million to, as some current
Soviet figures indicate, more than 20 million. The higher estimates
have, if anything, gained more credibility as new archival material
has become available. Behind the deaths rose a level of social
disruption and violence that often exceeded that of the civil war
immediately following the revolution. Millions fled to the cities or
to the frontier, the infamous gulag was vastly enlarged, open
rebellion and famine raged in much of the countryside, and more than
half of the nation’s livestock (and draft power) was slaughtered.\footnote{The so-called Great Leap Forward in China was at least as deadly and may be analyzed in comparable terms. I have chosen to concentrate on Soviet Russia largely because events there occurred some thirty years before the Great Leap Forward and hence have received much more scholarly attention, especially during the past seven years, when the newly opened Russian archives have greatly expanded our knowledge. For a recent popular account of the Chinese experience, see Jasper Becker, \emph{Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine} (London: John Murray, 1996).}


By 1934, the state had “won” its war with the peasantry. If ever a war
earned the designation “Pyrrhic victory,” this is the one. The
\emph{sovkhoz} (state farms) and \emph{kolkhoz} (collective farms) failed to
deliver on any of the specifically socialist goals envisioned by
Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and most Bolsheviks. They were an evident
failure in raising the level of grain production or of producing cheap
and abundant foodstuffs for an urban, industrializing workforce. They
failed to become the technically efficient and innovative farms that
Lenin had anticipated. Even in the realm of electrification, Lenin’s
touchstone of modernization, only one in twenty-five collective farms
had electricity by the eve of World War II. By no measure had the
collectivization of agriculture created “new men and women” in the
countryside or abolished the cultural difference between the country
and the city. For the next half-century, the yields per hectare of
many crops were stagnant or actually inferior to the levels recorded
in the 1920s or the levels reached before the Revolution.\footnote{In cases where yields were high among state farms and show projects, they were typically achieved with such costly inputs of machinery, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides that the results were economically irrational.}


At another level, collectivization was, in a curious state-centric
way, a qualified success. Collectivization proved a rough-and-ready
instrument for the twin goals of traditional statecraft: appropriation
and political control. Though the Soviet kolkhoz may have failed badly
at generating huge surpluses of foodstuffs, it served well enough as a
means whereby the state could determine cropping patterns, fix real
rural wages, appropriate a large share of whatever grain was produced,
and politically emasculate the countryside.\footnote{For an exceptionally perceptive account of collectivization and its results, see Moshe Lewin, \emph{The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia} (New York: Pantheon, 1985), especially part 2, pp. 89-188.}


The great achievement, if one can call it that, of the Soviet state in
the agricultural sector was to take a social and economic terrain
singularly unfavorable to appropriation and control and to create
institutional forms and production units far better adapted to
monitoring, managing, appropriating, and controlling from above. The
rural society that the Soviet state inherited (and for a time
encouraged) was one in which the allies of the czarist state, the
great landlords and the aristocratic officeholders, had been swept
away and been replaced by smallholding and middle peasants, artisans,
private traders, and all sorts of mobile laborers and lumpen
elements.\footnote{I use the term “lumpen” here to designate a huge floating population of great variety and shifting occupations. Although Marx and Lenin always used the term scornfully, implying both criminal tendencies and political opportunism, I intend no such denigration.} Confronting a tumultuous, footloose, and “headless”
(acephalous) rural society which was hard to control and which had few
political assets, the Bolsheviks, like the scientific foresters, set
about redesigning their environment with a few simple goals in
mind. They created, in place of what they had inherited, a new
landscape of large, hierarchical, state-managed farms whose cropping
patterns and procurement quotas were centrally mandated and whose
population was, by law, immobile. The system thus devised served for
nearly sixty years as a mechanism for procurement and control at a
massive cost in stagnation, waste, demoralization, and ecological
failure.


That collectivized agriculture persisted for sixty years was a tribute
less to the plan of the state than to the improvisations, gray
markets, bartering, and ingenuity that partly compensated for its
failures. Just as an “informal Brasília,” which had no legitimate
place in official plans, arose to make the city viable, so did a set
of informal practices lying outside the formal command economy—and
often outside Soviet law as well—arise to circumvent some of the
colossal waste and inefficiencies built into the system. Collectivized
agriculture, in other words, never quite operated according to the
hierarchical grid of its production plans and procurements.


What seems clear, in the brief account that follows, is that
collectivization per se cannot be laid solely at the feet of Stalin,
though he bore much responsibility for its exceptional speed and
brutality.\footnote{Stalin, it is now believed, was personally responsible for drafting in August 1932 a secret decree branding all those who withheld grain, now declared to be “sacred and untouchable” state property, as “enemies of the people” and ruling that they should be summarily arrested and shot. The same Stalin, at the Second Congress of Outstanding Kolkhozniks in 1935, championed the retaining of adequate private plots: “The majority of kolkhozniks want to plant an orchard, cultivate a vegetable garden or keep bees. The kolkhozniks want to live a decent life, and for that this 0.12 hectares is not enough. We need to allocate a quarter to half a hectare, and even as much as one hectare in some districts” (quoted in Sheila Fitzpatrick, \emph{Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization} [New York: Oxford University Press, 1995], pp. 73, 122).} A collectivized agriculture was always part of the
Bolshevik map of the future, and the great procurement struggles of
the late 1920s could hardly have had any other outcome in the context
of the decision to pursue forced-draft industrialization. The party’s
high-modernist faith in great collectivist schemes survived long after
the desperate improvisations of the early 1930s. That faith, which
claimed to be both aesthetic and scientific, is clearly visible in a
much later agrarian highmodernist dream: namely, Khrushchev’s virgin
lands scheme, launched well after Stalin’s death and after his crimes
during collectivization had been publicly denounced. What is
remarkable is how long these beliefs and structures prevailed, in
spite of the evidence of their manifold failings.

\subsection{Round One: The Bolshevik State and the Peasantry}



\begin{quote}


It sometimes seems to me that if I could persuade everyone to say
“systematize” each time he wanted to say “liberate” and to say
“mobilization” every time he wanted to say “reform” or “progress” I
would not have to write long books about government-peasant
interaction in Russia.



\end{quote}


— George Yaney, \emph{The Urge to Mobilize}


In the particular book quoted above, Yaney was writing about
prerevolutionary Russia, but he could just as easily have been writing
about the Bolshevik state. Until 1930, the continuities between the
rural policy of the Leninist state and its czarist predecessor are
more striking than their differences. There is the same belief in
reform from above and in large, modern, mechanized farms as the key to
productive agriculture. There is also, alas, the same high level of
ignorance about a very complex rural economy coupled, disastrously,
with heavyhanded raids on the countryside to seize grain by
force. Although the continuities persisted even after the
institutional revolution of 1930, what is new about the all-out drive
to collectivize is the revolutionary state’s willingness to completely
remake the institutional landscape of the agrarian sector, and at
whatever cost.


The new Bolshevik state faced a rural society that was significantly
more opaque, resistant, autonomous, and hostile than the one
encountered by the czarist bureaucracy. If the czarist officials had
provoked massive defiance and evasion in their “crude Muscovite
tribute-collecting methods” during World War I,\footnote{Ibid., p. 432.} there was every
reason to suspect that the Bolsheviks would have an even harder time
squeezing grain from the countryside.


If much of the countryside was hostile to the Bolsheviks, the
sentiment was abundantly reciprocated. For Lenin, as we have seen, the
Land Decree, which gave to the peasants the land that they had seized,
had been a strategic maneuver designed to buy rural quiescence while
power was consolidated; he had no doubt that peasant smallholdings
must eventually be abolished in favor of large, socialized farms. For
Trotsky, the sooner what he called “the Russia of icons and
cockroaches” was transformed and “urbanized,” the better. And for many
of the newly urbanized, rank-and-file Bolsheviks, the abolition of the
“dark and backward peasant world” was a “vital part of their own
emerging personal and working-class identity.”\footnote{Orlando Figes, “Peasant Aspirations and Bolshevik State-Building in the Countryside, 1917-1925,” paper presented at the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, New Haven, April 14, 1995, p. 24. Figes also links these views to socialist tracts that date from at least the 1890s and that pronounced the peasantry doomed by economic progress (p. 28).}


The peasantry was virtually terra incognita to the Bolsheviks. At the
time of the revolution, the party had throughout Russia a grand total of
494 “peasant” members (most of them probably rural intelligentsia).\footnote{R. W. Davies, \emph{The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture, 1929-1930} (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 51.}
Most villagers had never seen a Communist, although they may well have
heard of the Bolshevik decree confirming peasant ownership of the land
that had been seized. The only revolutionary party with any rural
following was the Social Revolutionaries, whose populist roots tended to
make them unsympathetic to Lenin’s authoritarian outlook.


The effects of the revolutionary process itself had rendered rural
society more opaque and hence more difficult to tax. There had already
been a sweeping seizure of land, dignified, retrospectively, by the
inappropriate term “land reform.” In fact, after the collapse of the
offensive into Austria during the war and the subsequent mass
desertions, much of the land of the gentry and church, as well as
“crown land,” had been absorbed by the peasantry. Rich peasants
cultivating independent farmsteads (the “separators” of the Stolypin
reforms) were typically forced back into the village allotments, and
rural society was in effect radically compressed. The very rich had
been dispossessed, and many of the very poor became smallholders for
the first time in their lives. According to one set of figures, the
number of landless rural laborers in Russia dropped by half, and the
average peasant holding increased by 20 percent (in the Ukraine, by
100 percent). A total of 248 million acres was confiscated, almost
always by local initiative, from large and small landlords and added
to peasant holdings, which now averaged about 70 acres per
household.\footnote{Conquest, \emph{Harvest of Sorrow}, p. 43.}


From the perspective of a tax official or a military procurement unit,
the situation was nearly unfathomable. The land-tenure status in each
village had changed dramatically. Prior landholding records, if they
existed at all, were entirely unreliable as a guide to current land
claims. Each village was unique in many respects, and, even if it could
in principle have been “mapped,” the population’s mobility and military
turmoil of the period all but guaranteed that the map would have been
made obsolete in six months or sooner. The combination, then, of
smallholdings, communal tenure, and constant change, both spatial and
temporal, operated as an impenetrable barrier to any finely tuned tax
system.


Two additional consequences of the revolution in the countryside
compounded the difficulties of state officials. Before 1917, large
peasant farms and landlord enterprises had produced nearly three-fourths
of the grain marketed for domestic use and export. It was this sector of
the rural economy that had fed the cities. Now it was gone. The bulk of
the remaining cultivators were consuming a much larger share of their
own yield. They would not surrender this grain without a fight. The new,
more egalitarian distribution of land meant that extracting anything
like the czarist “take” in grain would bring the Bolsheviks in conflict
with the subsistence needs of small and middle peasants.\footnote{Also, the collapse of urban enterprises, which would normally have supplied consumer goods and farm implements to the rural areas, meant that there was less incentive for the peasantry to sell grain in order to make purchases in the market.}


The second and perhaps decisive consequence of the revolution was that
it had greatly enhanced the determination and capacity of peasant
communities to resist the state. Every revolution creates a temporary
power vacuum when the power of the ancien regime has been destroyed
but the revolutionary regime has not yet asserted itself throughout
the territory. Inasmuch as the Bolsheviks were largely urban and found
themselves fighting an extended civil war, the power vacuum in much of
the countryside was unusually pronounced. It was the first time, as
Orlando Figes reminds us, that the villages, although in straitened
circumstances, were free to organize their own affairs.\footnote{See Orlando Figes’s remarkably perceptive and detailed book, \emph{Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917-1921} (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Even near revolutions create a similar vacuum. Following the 1905 revolution, it took the czarist government nearly two years to reassert its control over the countryside.} As we
have seen, the villagers typically forced out or burned out the
gentry, seized the land (including rights to common land and forests),
and forced the separators back into the communes. The villages tended
to behave as autonomous republics, well disposed to the Reds as long
as they confirmed the local “revolution,” but strongly resistant to
forced levies of grain, livestock, or men from any quarter. In this
situation, the fledgling Bolshevik state, arriving as it often did in
the form of military plunder, must have been experienced by the
peasantry as a reconquest of the countryside by the state—as a brand
of colonization that threatened their newly won autonomy.


Given the political atmosphere in rural Russia, even a government
having detailed knowledge of the agricultural economy, a local base of
support, and a knack for diplomatic tact would have confronted great
difficulties. The Bolsheviks lacked all three. A tax system based on
income or wealth was possible only with a valid cadastral map and an
up-to-date census, neither of which existed. Farm income, moreover,
varied greatly with regard to yields and prices from year to year, so
any income tax would have had to have been exceptionally sensitive to
these conditions in local harvests. Not only did the new state lack
the basic information it needed to govern efficiently, it had also
largely destroyed the czarist state apparatus of local officials,
gentry, and specialists in finance and agronomy who had managed,
however inadequately, to collect taxes and grain during the war. Above
all, the Bolsheviks generally lacked the village-level native trackers
who could have helped them to find their way in a hostile and
confusing environment. The village soviets that were supposed to play
this role were typically headed by villagers loyal to local interests
rather than to the center. An alternative organ, the Committee of the
Rural Poor (\emph{kombedy}), which purported to represent the rural
proletariat in local class struggles, was either successfully coopted
by the village or locked in often violent conflict with the village
soviet.\footnote{The relative unity of the village was itself enhanced by the revolutionary process. The richest landlords had left or been burned out, and the poorest, landless families had typically gotten some land. As a result, the villagers were more socioeconomically similar and therefore more likely to respond similarly to external demands. Since many of the independent farmers were pressured to return to the commune, they were now dependent on the entire village for their household’s allotment of the communal lands. Thus it is not hard to understand why, in those instances where the kombedy was an instrument of Bolshevik policy, it faced determined opposition from the more representative village soviet. “One government official from Samara Province claimed, with conscious irony, that the conflicts between the kombedy and the Soviets represented the main form of ‘class struggle’ in the rural areas during this period” (ibid., p. 197). In the larger villages, some support for Bolshevik agrarian plans could be found among educated youth, schoolteachers, and veterans who had become Bolsheviks while serving with the Red Army during World War I or the civil war (and who might have imagined themselves occupying leading roles in the new collective farms). See Figes, “Peasant Aspirations and Bolshevik State-Building.”}


The inscrutability of the mir to most Bolshevik officials was not
simply a result of their urban social origins and the admitted
complexity of village affairs. It was also the product of a conscious
local strategy, one that had demonstrated its protective value in
earlier conflicts with the gentry and the state. The local commune had
a long history of underreporting its arable land and overreporting its
population in order to appear as poor and untaxable as possible.\footnote{There was also a tendency to hide income from craft, artisanal, and trading sidelines as well as “garden” crops. During this same period, it should be added, insufficient resources-manpower, draft animals, manure, and seed-meant that some of the arable either could not be planted or could only produce yields that were far lower than usual.}
As a result of such deception in the census of 1917, the arable land
in Russia had been underestimated by about 15 percent. Now, in
addition to the woodland, pastures, and open land that the peasantry
had earlier converted into cropland without reporting it, they had an
interest in hiding much of the land they had just seized from the
landlords and the gentry. Village committees did, of course, keep
records for allocating allotment land, organizing communal plow teams,
fixing grazing schedules, and so on, but none of these records was
made available either to officials or to the kombedy. A popular saying
of the period captures the situation nicely: the peasant “owned by
decree” (that is, the Land Decree) but “lived secretly.”


How did the hard-pressed state find its way in this labyrinth? Where
possible, the Bolsheviks did try to establish large state farms or
collective farms. Many of these were “Potemkin collectives” designed
merely to give cover of legitimacy to existing practices. But where they
were not a sham, they revealed the political and administrative
attractiveness of a radical simplification of the landholding and tax
paying unit in the countryside. Yaney’s summary of the logic entailed is
impeccable.



\begin{quote}


From a technical point of view it was infinitely easier to plough up
large units of land without regard for individual claims than it was
to identify each family allotment, measure its value in the peasants’
traditional terms, and then painfully transpose it from scattered
strips into a consolidated farm. Then, too, a capital city
administrator could not help but prefer to supervise and tax large
productive units and not have to deal with separate farmers\dots{} The
collective had a dual appeal to authentic agrarian reformers. They
represented a social ideal for rhetorical purposes, and at the same
time they seemed to simplify the technical problems of land reform and
state control.\footnote{Yaney, \emph{The Urge to Mobilize}, pp. 515-16. For Yaney, the continuity in aspirations from what he terms “messianic social agronomists” under the czarist regime to the Bolshevik collectivizers was striking. In a few cases, they were the same people.}



\end{quote}


In the turmoil of 1917-21, not many such agrarian experiments were
possible, and those that were attempted generally failed badly. They
were, however, a straw in the wind for the full collectivization
campaign a decade later.


Unable to remake the rural landscape, the Bolsheviks turned to the
same methods of forced tribute under martial law that had been used by
their czarist predecessors during the war. The term “martial law,”
however, conveys an orderliness that was absent from actual
practice. Armed bands (\emph{otriady})—some authorized and others formed
spontaneously by hungry townsmen—plundered the countryside during the
grain crisis of spring and summer 1918, securing whatever they
could. Insofar as grain procurement quotas were set at all, they were
“purely mechanical accounting figures originating from an unreliable
estimate of arable and assuming a good harvest.” They were, from the
beginning, “fictional and unfulfillable.”\footnote{Figes, \emph{Peasant Russia, Civil War}, p. 250.} The procurement of
grain looked more like plunder and theft than delivery and
purchase. Over 150 distinct uprisings, by one estimate, erupted
against the state’s grain seizures. Since the Bolsheviks had, in March
1918, renamed themselves the Communist Party, many of the rebels
claimed to be for the Bolsheviks and the Soviets (whom they associated
with the Land Decree) and against the Communists.  Lenin, referring to
the peasant uprisings in Tambov, the Volga, and the Ukraine, declared
that they posed more of a threat than all the Whites put
together. Desperate peasant resistance had in fact all but starved the
cities out of existence,\footnote{Hunger and flight from the towns had reduced the number of urban industrial workers from 3.6 million in 1917 to no more than 1.5 million in 1920 (Fitzpatrick, \emph{The Russian Revolution}, p. 85).} and in early 1921, the party, for the
first time, turned its guns on its own rebellious sailors and workers
in Kronstadt. At this point the beleaguered party beat a tactical
retreat, abandoning War Communism and inaugurating the New Economic
Policy (NEP), which condoned free trade and small property. As Figes
notes, “Having defeated the White Army, backed by eight Western
powers, the Bolshevik government surrendered before its own
peasants.”\footnote{Figes, \emph{Peasant Russia, Civil War}, p. 321.} It was a hollow victory. The deaths from the hunger
and epidemics of 1921-22 nearly equaled the toll claimed by World War
I and the civil war combined.

\subsection{Round Two: High Modernism and Procurement}


The conjunction of a high-modernist faith in what agriculture should
look like in the future and a more immediate crisis of state
appropriation helped to spark the all-out drive to collectivization in
the winter of 1929-30. In focusing on just these two issues, we must
necessarily leave to others (and they are a multitude) the gripping
issues of the human costs of collectivization, the struggle with the
“right” opposition led by Bukharin, and whether Stalin intended to
liquidate Ukrainian culture as well as many Ukrainians.


There is no doubt that Stalin shared Lenin’s faith in industrial
agriculture. The aim of collectivization, he said in May 1928, was “to
transfer from small, backward, and fragmented peasant farms to
consolidated, big, public farms, provided with machines, equipped with
the data of science, and capable of producing the greatest quantity of
grain for the market.”\footnote{Quoted in Fitzpatrick, \emph{Stalin’s Peasants}, p. 39.}


This dream had been deferred in 1921. There had been some hope that a
gradually expanding collective sector in the 1920s could provide as
much as one-third of the country’s grain needs. Instead, the
collectivized sector (both the state farms and the collective farms),
which absorbed 10 percent of the labor force, produced a dismal 2.2 percent
of gross farm production.\footnote{In theory, at least, the most “advanced” were the state farms-the proletarian, industrial, collective farms in which workers were paid wages and no private plots were allowed. These farms also received the bulk of state investment in machinery in the early years. For production statistics, see Davies, \emph{The Socialist Offensive}, p. 6.} When Stalin decided on a crash
industrialization program, it was clear that the existing socialist
agricultural sector could not provide either the food for a rapidly
growing urban workforce or the grain exports necessary to finance the
imported technology needed for industrial growth. The middle and rich
peasants, many of them newly prosperous since the New Economic Policy,
had the grain he needed.


Beginning in 1928, the official requisition policy put the state on a
collision course with the peasantry. The mandated delivery price of
grain was one-fifth of the market price, and the regime returned to
using police methods as peasant resistance stiffened.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 82-113.} When the
procurements faltered, those who refused to deliver what was required
(who, along with anyone else opposing collectivization, were called
kulaks, regardless of their economic standing) were arrested for
deportation or execution, and all their grain, equipment, land, and
livestock were seized and sold. The orders sent to those directly in
charge of grain procurement specified that they were to arrange
meetings of poor peasants to make it seem as if the initiative had
come from below. It was in the context of this war over grain, and not
as a carefully planned policy initiative, that the decision to force
“total” (\emph{sploshnaia}) collectivization was made in late
1929. Scholars who agree on little else are in accord on this point:
the overriding purpose of collectivization was to ensure the seizure
of grain. Fitzpatrick begins her study of the collectives with this
assertion: “The main purpose of collectivization was to increase state
grain procurements and reduce the peasants’ ability to withhold grain
from the market. This purpose was obvious to peasants from the start,
since the collectivization drive of the winter of 1929-30 was the
culmination of more than two years of bitter struggle between the
peasants and the state over grain procurements.”\footnote{Fitzpatrick, \emph{Stalin’s Peasants}, p. 4.} Robert Conquest
concurs: “The collective farms were essentially a chosen mechanism for
extracting grain and other products.”\footnote{Conquest, \emph{Harvest of Sorrow}, p. 183.}


It appears that this was also how the vast majority of the peasantry
saw it, judging from their determined resistance and what we know of
their views. The seizure of grain threatened their survival. The
peasant depicted in Andrei Platonov’s novel about collectivization
sees how the seizure of grain negates the earlier land reform: “It’s a
sly business.  First you hand over the land, and then you take away
the grain, right down to the last kernel. You can choke on land like
that! The muzhik doesn’t have anything left from the land except the
horizon. Who are you fooling?”\footnote{Andrei Platonov, \emph{Chevengur}, trans. Anthony Olcott (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978).} At least as threatening was the
loss of what little margin of social and economic autonomy the
peasantry had achieved since the revolution. Even poor peasants were
afraid of collectivization, because “it would involve giving up one’s
land and implements and working with other families, under orders, not
temporarily, as in the army, but forever—it means the barracks for
life.”\footnote{M. Hindus, \emph{Red Breed} (London, 1931), quoted in Davies, \emph{The Socialist Offensive}, p. 209.} Unable to rely on any significant rural support, Stalin
dispatched twenty-five thousand “plenipotentiaries” (party members)
from the towns and factories “to destroy the peasant commune and
replace it by a collective economy subordinate to the state,” whatever
the cost.\footnote{Davies, \emph{The Socialist Offensive}, p. 205.}

\subsection{Authoritarian High-Modernist Theory and the Practice of Serfdom}


If the move to “total” collectivization was directly animated by the
party’s determination to seize the land and the crops sown on it once
and for all, it was a determination filtered through a high-modernist
lens. Although the Bolsheviks might disagree about means, they did
think they knew exactly what modern agriculture should look like in
the end; their understanding was as much visual as scientific. Modern
agriculture was to be large in scale, the larger the better; it was to
be highly mechanized and run hierarchically along scientific,
Taylorist principles. Above all, the cultivators were to resemble a
highly skilled and disciplined proletariat, not a peasantry. Stalin
himself, before practical failures discredited a faith in colossal
projects, favored collective farms (“grain factories”) of 125,000 to
250,000 acres, as in the American-assisted scheme described
earlier.\footnote{The size of collective farms remained enormous, even by American standards, throughout the Soviet period. Fred Pryor calculates that in 1970 the average state farm comprised more than 100,000 acres, while the average collective farm comprised over 25,000 acres. The state farms were greatly favored in access to inputs, machinery, and other subsidies. See Frederick Pryor, \emph{The Red and the Green: The Rise and Fall of Collectivized Agriculture in Marxist Regimes} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), table 7, p. 34.}


The utopian abstraction of the vision was matched, on the ground, by
wildly unrealistic planning. Given a map and a few assumptions about
scale and mechanization, a specialist could devise a plan with little
reference to local knowledge and conditions. A visiting agricultural
official wrote back to Moscow from the Urals in March 1930 to complain
that, “on the instruction of the Raion Executive Committee, twelve
agronomists have been sitting for twenty days composing an
operational-production plan for the non-existent raion commune without
ever leaving their offices or going out into the field.”\footnote{Fitzgerald, \emph{Stalin’s Peasants}, p. 105.} When
another bureaucratic monstrosity in Velikie Lukie in the west proved
unwieldy, the planners simply reduced the scale without sacrificing
abstraction.  They divided the 80,000-hectare scheme into thirty-two
equal squares of 2,500 hectares each, with one square constituting a
kolkhoz. “The squares were drawn on a map without any reference to
actual villages, settlements, rivers, hills, swamps or other
demographic and topological characteristics of the land.”\footnote{Ibid., pp. 105-6. One imagines that the soils and existing cropping patterns were also ignored.}


Semiotically, we cannot understand this modernist vision of
agriculture as an isolated ideological fragment. It is always seen as
the negation of the existing rural world. A kolkhoz is meant to
replace a mir or village, machines to replace horse-drawn plows and
hand labor, proletarian workers to replace peasants, scientific
agriculture to replace folk tradition and superstition, education to
replace ignorance and \emph{malokulturnyi}, and abundance to replace bare
subsistence.  Collectivization was meant to spell the end of the
peasantry and its way of life. The introduction of a socialist economy
entailed a cultural revolution as well; the “dark” narod, the peasants
who were perhaps the great remaining, intractable threat to the
Bolshevik state, were to be replaced by rational, industrious,
de-Christianized, progressive-thinking kolkhoz workers.\footnote{As the Bolsheviks explained, “The kolkhozy are the only means by which the peasantry can escape from poverty and darkness” (Davies, \emph{The Socialist Offensive}, p. 282). Perhaps the best visual images of the culturally transforming properties of electricity, machinery, and collectivization are found in Sergey Eisenstein’s film \emph{The General Line}, a veritable technological romance set in rural Russia. The film masterfully conveys the utopian aspirations of high modernism by contrasting the plodding dark narod with his horse and scythe with images of electric cream separators, tractors, mowing machines, engines, skyscrapers, engines, and airplanes.} The scale
of collectivization was intended to efface the peasantry and its
institutions, thereby narrowing the gulf between the rural and urban
worlds. Underlying the whole plan, of course, was the assumption that
the great collective farms would operate like factories in a
centralized economy, in this case fulfilling state orders for grain
and other agricultural products.  As if to drive the point home, the
state confiscated roughly 63 percent of the entire harvest in 1931.


From a central planner’s perspective, one great advantage of
collectivization is that the state acquired control over how much of
each crop was sown. Starting with the state’s needs for grains, meat,
dairy products, and so on, the state could theoretically build those
needs into its instructions to the collective sector. In practice, the
sowing plans imposed from above were often wholly unreasonable. The
land departments, which prepared the plans, knew little about the
crops they were mandating, the inputs needed to grow them locally, or
local soil conditions. Nevertheless, they had quotas to fill, and fill
them they did. When, in 1935, A. Iakovlev, the head of the Central
Committee’s agricultural department, called for collective farms to be
managed by “permanent cadres” who “genuinely knew their fields,” he
implied that the present incumbents did not.\footnote{Fitzpatrick, \emph{Stalin’s Peasants}, p. 194.} We catch a glimpse
of the disasters from the Great Purges of 1936-37, when a certain
amount of peasant criticism of kolkhoz officials was briefly
encouraged in order to detect “wreckers.” One kolkhoz was instructed
to plow meadows and open land, without which they could not have fed
their livestock. Another received sowing orders that doubled the
previous acreage allotted for hay fields by taking in private plots
and quicksands.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 306-9.}


The planners clearly favored monoculture and a far-reaching, strict
division of labor. Entire regions, and certainly individual
\emph{kolkhozy}, were increasingly specialized, producing only, say, wheat,
livestock, cotton, or potatoes.\footnote{For an account of how an even more extreme version of regional specialization was imposed on the Chinese countryside, in violation of local soil and climatological conditions, see Ralph Thaxton, \emph{Salt of the Earth: The Political Origins of Peasant Protest and Communist Revolution in China} (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).} In the case of livestock
production, one kolkhoz would produce fodder for beef cattle or hogs
while another would raise and breed them. The logic behind kolkhoz and
regional specialization was roughly comparable to the logic behind
functionally specific urban zones. Specialization reduced the number
of variables that agronomists had to consider; it also increased the
administrative routinization of work and hence the power and knowledge
of central officials.


Procurement followed a comparable centralizing logic. Starting with
the needs of the plan and a usually unreliable estimate of the
harvest, a series of quotas for every Oblast, \emph{raion}, and kolkhoz was
mechanically derived. Each kolkhoz then claimed that its quota was
impossible to fulfill and appealed to have it lowered. Actually
meeting a quota, they knew from bitter experience, only raised the
ante for the next round of procurements. In this respect collective
farmers were in a more precarious situation than industrial workers,
who still received their wages and ration cards whether or not the
factory met its quota. For the \emph{kolkhozniki}, however, meeting the
quota might mean starvation. Indeed, the great famine of 1933-34 can
only be called a collectivization and procurement famine. Those who
were tempted to make trouble risked running afoul of a more grisly
quota: the one for kulaks and enemies of the state.


For much of the peasantry, the authoritarian labor regime of the
kolkhoz seemed not only to jeopardize their subsistence but to revoke
many of the freedoms they had won since their emancipation in
1861. They compared collectivization to the serfdom their grandparents
remembered.  As one early sovkhoz worker put it, “The \emph{sovkhozy} are
always forcing the peasant to work; they make the peasants weed their
fields. And they don’t even give us bread or water. What will come of
all this? It’s like \emph{barschina} [feudal labor dues] all over
again.”\footnote{Figes, \emph{Peasant Russia, Civil War}, p. 304. The analogy took concrete form in many of the early revolts against collectivization, during which the peasantry destroyed all the records of labor dues, crop deliveries, debts, and so on, just as they had under serfdom.} The peasants began to say that the acronym for the
All-Union Communist Party—VKP—stood for \emph{vtoroe krepostnoe pravo}, or
“second serfdom.”\footnote{Conquest, \emph{Harvest of Sorrow}, p. 152.} The parallel was not a mere figure of speech;
the resemblances to serfdom were remarkable.\footnote{The resemblances to serfdom are spelled out in some detail in Fitzgerald, \emph{Stalin’s Peasants}, pp. 128-39. For a careful and informed discussion of serfdom and comparisons to slavery, see Peter Kolchin, \emph{Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom} (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).} The kolkhoz members
were required to work on the state’s land at least half-time for
wages, in cash or kind, that were derisory. They depended largely on
their own small private plots to grow the food they needed (other than
grain), although they had little free time to cultivate their
gardens.\footnote{For an astute account by a Soviet journalist and human rights campaigner in the 1980s, indicating that the basic pattern had not greatly changed, see Lev Timofeev, \emph{Soviet Peasants}, or \emph{The Peasants’ Art of Starving}, trans. Jean Alexander and Alexander Zaslavsky, ed. Armando Pitassio and Alexander Zaslavsky (New York: Telos Press, 1985).} The quantity to be delivered and price paid for kolkhoz
produce was set by the state. The kolkhozniki owed annual corvée labor
dues for roadwork and cartage. They were obliged to hand over quotas
of milk, meat, eggs, and so on from their private plots. The
collective’s officials, like feudal masters, were wont to use kolkhoz
labor for their private sidelines and had, in practice if not in law,
the arbitrary power to insult, beat, or deport the peasants. As they
were under serfdom, they were legally immobilized. An internal
passport system was reintroduced to clear the cities of “undesirable
and unproductive residents” and to make sure that the peasantry did
not flee. Laws were passed to deprive the peasantry of the firearms
they used for hunting. Finally, the kolkhozniki living outside the
village nucleus (khutor dwellers), often on their old farmsteads, were
forcibly relocated, beginning in 1939.  This last resettlement
affected more than half a million peasants.


The resulting labor rules, property regime, and settlement pattern did
in fact resemble a cross between plantation or estate agriculture on
one hand and feudal servitude on the other.


As a vast, state-imposed blueprint for revolutionary change,
collectivization was at least as notable for what it destroyed as for
what it built. The initial intent of collectivization was not just to
crush the resistance of well-to-do peasants and grab their land; it
was also to dismantle the social unit through which that resistance
was expressed: the mir. The peasant commune had typically been the
vehicle for organizing land seizures during the revolution, for
orchestrating land use and grazing, for managing local affairs
generally, and for opposing procurements.\footnote{I am persuaded by the historical accounts that characterize the mir as the peasantry’s adaptation to a gentry and state that treated it as a collective unit for the purposes of taxation, conscription, and some forms of servile dues. The periodic redivision of land among the households ensured that all had the means of paying their share of the head taxes, which were levied on the commune collectively. That is, the relative solidarity of the Russian repartitional commune is itself a result of a distinct history of relations with overlords. This claim is perfectly compatible with the fact that such solidarity, once in place, can serve other purposes, including resistance.} The party had every
reason to fear that if the collectives were based on the traditional
village, they would simply reinforce the basic unit of peasant
resistance. Hadn’t the village soviets quickly escaped the state’s
control? Huge collectives, then, had the decided advantage of
bypassing village structures altogether. They could be run by a board
consisting of cadres and specialists. If the giant kolkhoz was then
divided into sections, one specialist could be named manager of each,
“‘\emph{like the bailiffs in the old days}’ [of serfdom] as [one]
\dots{} report wryly noted.”\footnote{Fitzgerald, \emph{Stalin’s Peasants}, p. 106 (emphasis added).} Eventually, except in frontier areas,
practical considerations prevailed and a majority of the kolkhozy
coincided roughly with the earlier peasant commune and its lands.


The kolkhoz was not, however, just window dressing hiding a
traditional commune. Almost everything had changed. All the focal
points for an autonomous public life had been eliminated. The tavern,
rural fairs and markets, the church, and the local mill disappeared;
in their places stood the kolkhoz office, the public meeting room, and
the school.  Nonstate public spaces gave way to the state spaces of
government agencies, albeit local ones.


The concentration, legibility, and centralization of social
organization and production can be seen in the map of the state farm
at Verchnyua Troitsa (Upper Trinity) in Tver Oblast (figure 28).\footnote{I am immensely grateful to my colleague Teodor Shanin and his research teams, who are conducting comparative work on more than twenty collective farms, for making available to me the maps and photographs for this chapter. Particular thanks to Galya Yastrebinskaya and Olga Subbotina for the photograph of the older village of Utkino, founded in 1912 and located twenty miles from the city of Vologda.}
Much of the old village has been removed from the center and relocated
on the outskirts (legend reference 11).\footnote{Notice that the old-style houses that were not moved (legend reference 12) are themselves laid out on roughly equal plots along the main road. I do not know whether there were administrative reasons behind these forms in the eighteenth century, when the village was founded, or whether the original pioneers themselves laid out the grid. How the older houses that have been relocated were originally disposed is also a mystery.} Two-story apartment
houses containing sixteen flats each have been clustered near the
center (legend references 13, 14, 15; see also figure 29), while the
local administration and trade center, school, and community building,
all public institutions run by the state, lie close to the center of
the new grid. Even allowing for the exaggerated formalism of the map,
the state farm is a far cry from the sprawl and autonomous
institutional order of the precollectivized village; a photograph
showing the old-style housing and a lane illustrates the stark visual
contrast (see figure 30).


Compared to Haussmann’s retrofitting of the physical geography of
Paris to make it legible and to facilitate state domination, the
Bolsheviks’ retrofitting of rural Russia was far more
thoroughgoing. In place of an opaque and often obstinate mir, it had
fashioned a legible kolkhoz. In place of myriad small farms, it had
created a single, local economic unit.\footnote{The same logic, of course, applied to industry, in which large units are favored over small factories or artisanal production. As Jeffrey Sachs has observed: “Central planners had no desire to coordinate the activities of hundreds or thousands of small firms in a sector if one large firm could do the job. A standard strategy, therefore, was to create one giant firm wherever possible” (\emph{Poland’s Jump into the Market Economy} [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993]). In the context of the Soviet economy, the largest industrial unit was the huge steel complex at Magnitogorsk. It is now a stunning example of an industrial and ecological ruin. See also Kotkin, \emph{Magnetic Mountain}.} With the establishment of
hierarchical state farms, a quasi-autonomous petite bourgeoisie was
replaced with dependent employees. In place, therefore, of an
agriculture in which planting, harvesting, and marketing decisions
were in the hands of individual households, the party-state had built
a rural economy where all these decisions would be made centrally. In
place of a peasantry that was technically independent, it had created
a peasantry that was directly dependent on the state for combines and
tractors, fertilizer, and seeds.  In place of a peasant economy whose
harvests, income, and profits were well-nigh indecipherable, it had
created units that were ideal for simple and direct appropriation. In
place of a variety of social units with their own unique histories and
practices, it had created homologous units of accounting that could
all be fitted into a national administrative grid. The logic was not
unlike the management scheme at McDonald’s: modular, similarly
designed units producing similar products, according to a common
formula and work routine. Units can easily be duplicated across the
landscape, and the inspectors coming to assess their operations enter
legible domains which they can evaluate with a single checklist.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-29.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 28. Plan of the state farm at Verchnyua Troitsa (Upper Trinity) in Tver Oblast, showing the following sites: 1, community center; 2, monument; 3, hotel; 4, local administration and trade center; 5, school; 6, kindergarten; 7-8, museums; 9, shop; 10, bathhouse; 11, old wooden house moved from new construction area; 12, old village; 13-15, two- and three-story houses; 16, garage (private); and 17, agricultural sites (farm, storage, water tower, and so on)}
\end{figure}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-30.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 29. At Verchnyua Troitsa, one of the new village’s two-story houses, each containing sixteen flats}
\end{figure}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-31.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 30. Houses along a lane in the old village at Verchnyua Troitsa}
\end{figure}


Any comprehensive assessment of sixty years of collectivization would
require both archival material only now becoming available and abler
hands than my own. What must strike even a casual student of
collectivization, however, is how it largely failed in \emph{each} of its
highmodernist aims, despite huge investments in machinery,
infrastructure, and agronomic research. Its successes, paradoxically,
were in the domain of traditional statecraft. The state managed to get
its hands on enough grain to push rapid industrialization, even while
contending with staggering inefficiencies, stagnant yields, and
ecological devastation.\footnote{For a more extensive treatment of the ecological effects of Soviet agriculture, see Murray Feshbach, \emph{Ecological Disaster: Cleaning Up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime} (New York: 1995), and Ze’ev Wolfson (Boris Komarov), \emph{The Geography of Survival: Ecology in the Post-Soviet Era} (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).} The state also managed, at great human
cost, to eliminate the social basis of organized, public opposition
from the rural population. On the other hand, the state’s capacity for
realizing its vision of large, productive, efficient, scientifically
advanced farms growing high-quality products for market was virtually
nil.


The collectives that the state had created manifested in some ways the
facade of modern agriculture without its substance. The farms \emph{were}
highly mechanized (by world standards), and they \emph{were} managed by
officials with degrees in agronomy and engineering. Demonstration
farms really did achieve large yields, although often at prohibitive
costs.\footnote{I worked for six weeks in 1990 on a cooperative (ex-collective) farm in eastern Germany, on the Mecklenburg Plain, not too far from Neubrandenburg. The local officials were exceptionally proud of their world-class yields per hectare in rye and potatoes with high starch content grown for industrial uses. It was clear, however, that as an economic matter, the market cost of the inputs (labor, machin ery, and fertilizer) needed to produce these yields made this enterprise an inefficient producer by any cost accounting standard.} But in the end none of this could disguise the many
failures of Soviet agriculture. Only three sources of these failures
are noted here, because they will concern us later.\footnote{There is no doubt that a number of bureaucratic “pathologies” amplified the disaster of Soviet collectivization. They include the tendency of administrators to concentrate on specified, quantifiable results (e.g., grain yields, tons of potatoes, tons of pig iron) rather than on quality and the fact that long chains of specialization and command shielded many officials from the larger consequences of their behavior. Also, the difficulty of making officials accountable to their clientele, as opposed to their superiors, meant that the pathology of group “commandism,” on one hand, or individual corruption and self-serving, on the other, were rampant. Highmodernist schemes in revolutionary, authoritarian settings like that of the Soviet Union are thus likely to go off the rails more easily and remain off the rails far longer than in a parliamentary setting.} First, having
taken from the peasants both their (relative) independence and
autonomy as well as their land and grain, the state created a class of
essentially unfree laborers who responded with all the forms of
foot-dragging and resistance practiced by unfree laborers
everywhere. Second, the unitary administrative structure and
imperatives of central planning created a clumsy machine that was
utterly unresponsive to local knowledge or to local
conditions. Finally, the Leninist political structure of the Soviet
Union gave agriculture officials little or no incentive to adapt to,
or negotiate with, its rural subjects. The very capacity of the state
to essentially reenserf rural producers, dismantle their institutions,
and impose its will, in the crude sense of appropriation, goes a long
way toward explaining the state’s failure to realize anything but a
simulacrum of the highmodernist agriculture that Lenin so prized.

\section{State Landscapes of Control and Appropriation}


Drawing on the history of Soviet collectivization, I shall now venture
a few more frankly speculative ideas about the institutional logic of
authoritarian high modernism. Then I shall suggest a way of grasping
why such massive social bulldozing may have worked tolerably well for
some purposes but failed dismally for others—an issue to which we
shall return in later chapters.


The headlong drive to collectivization was animated by the shortterm
goal of seizing enough grain to push rapid industrialization.\footnote{The rush toward collectivization was momentarily halted by Stalin’s famous “Dizzy with Success” speech of March 1930, which prompted many to leave the collectives; however, it was not long before the pace of collectivization resumed. In order to have enough capital for rapid industrialization, 4.8 million tons of grain were exported in 1930 and 5.2 million tons in 1931, helping to set the stage for the famine of the years immediately following. See Lewin, \emph{The Making of the Soviet Sys- tern}, p. 156.}
Threats and violence had worked, up to a point, for the harvests of
1928 and 1929, but each annual turn of the screw elicited more evasion
and resistance from the peasantry. The bitter fact was that the Soviet
state faced an exceptionally diverse population of commune-based
smallholders whose economic and social affairs were nearly
unintelligible to the center. These circumstances offered some
strategic advantages to a peasantry waging a quiet guerrilla war
(punctuated by open revolt) against state claims. The state, under the
existing property regime, could only look forward to a bruising
struggle for grain each year, with no assurance of success.


Stalin chose this moment to strike a decisive blow. He imposed a
designed and legible rural landscape that would be far more amenable
to appropriation, control, and central transformation. The social and
economic landscape he had in mind was of course the industrial model
of advanced agriculture—large, mechanized farms run along factory
lines and coordinated by state planning.


It was a case of the “newest state” meeting the “oldest class” and
attempting to remake it into some reasonable facsimile of a
proletariat.  Compared to the peasantry, the proletariat was already
relatively more legible as a class, and not just because of its
central place in Marxist theory. The proletariat’s work regimen was
regulated by factory hours and by man-made techniques of
production. In the case of new industrial projects like the great
steel complex at Magnitogorsk, the planners could start virtually from
zero, as with Brasília. The peasants, on the other hand, represented a
welter of small, individual household enterprises. Their settlement
pattern and social organization had a historical logic far deeper than
that of the factory floor.


One purpose of collectivization was to destroy these economic and
social units, which were hostile to state control, and to force the
peasantry into an institutional straitjacket of the state’s
devising. The new institutional order of collective farms would now be
compatible with the state’s purposes of appropriation and directed
development. Given the quasi-civil war conditions of the countryside,
the solution was as much a product of military occupation and
“pacification” as of “socialist transformation.”\footnote{Compare this with Bakunin’s forecast of what state socialism would amount to: “They will concentrate all of the powers of government in strong hands, because the very fact that the people are ignorant necessitates strong, solicitous care by the government. They will create a single state bank, concentrating in its hands all the commercial, industrial, agricultural, and even scientific producers, and they will divide the masses of people into two armies—industrial and agricultural armies under the direct command of the State engineers who will constitute the new privileged scientific-political class” (quoted in W. D. Maximoff, \emph{The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism} [New York: Free Press, 1953], p. 289).}


It is possible, I believe, to say something more generally about the
“elective affinity” between authoritarian high modernism and certain
institutional arrangements.\footnote{The term “elective affinity” comes from Max Weber’s analysis of the relation between capitalist norms and institutions on one hand and Protestantism on the other. His argument is not one of direct causation but of “fit” and symbiosis.} What follows is rather crude and
provisional, but it will serve as a point of departure. High-modernist
ideologies embody a doctrinal preference for certain social
arrangements. \emph{Authoritarian} high-modernist \emph{states}, on the other
hand, take the next step. They attempt, and often succeed, in imposing
those preferences on their population. Most of the preferences can be
deduced from the criteria of legibility, appropriation, and
centralization of control. To the degree that the institutional
arrangements can be readily monitored and directed from the center and
can be easily taxed (in the broadest sense of taxation), then they are
likely to be promoted. The implicit goals behind these comparisons are
not unlike the goals of premodern statecraft.\footnote{See books 4 and 5 in vol. 2 of Gabriel Ardant, \emph{Theorie sociologique de l’impôt} (Paris: CEVPEN, 1965).} Legibility, after
all, is a prerequisite of appropriation as well as of authoritarian
transformation. The difference, and it is a crucial one, lies in the
wholly new scale of ambition and intervention entertained by high
modernism.


The principles of standardization, central control, and synoptic
legibility to the center could be applied to many other fields; those
noted in the accompanying table are only suggestive. If we were to
apply them to education, for example, the most illegible educational
system would be completely informal, nonstandardized instruction
determined entirely by local mutuality. The most legible educational
system would resemble Hippolyte Taine’s description of French
education in the nineteenth century, when “the Minister of Education
could pride himself, just by looking at his watch, which page of
Virgil all schoolboys of the Empire were annotating at that exact
moment.”\footnote{Quoted in Michel Crozier, \emph{The Bureaucratic Phenomenon} (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 239. As Abram de Swaan has noted, “The nineteenthcentury school regime does reveal some unmistakable similarities with the factory regime of that time: standardization, formalization and the imposition of punctuality and discipline were paramount in both” (\emph{In Care of the State}, p. 61).} A more exhaustive table would replace the dichotomies
with more elaborate continua (open commons landholding, for example,
is less legible and taxable than closed commons landholding, which in
turn is less legible than private freeholding, which is less legible
than state ownership). It is no coincidence that the more legible or
appropriable form can more readily be converted into a source of
rent-either as private property or as the monopoly rent of the state.

\section{The Limits of Authoritarian High Modernism}


When are high-modernist arrangements likely to work and when are they
likely to fail? The abject performance of Soviet agriculture as an
efficient producer of foodstuffs was, in retrospect, “overdetermined”
by many causes having little to do with high modernism per se: the
radically mistaken biological theories of Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s
obsessions, conscription during World War II, and the weather. And it
is apparent that centralized high-modernist solutions can be the most
efficient, equitable, and satisfactory for many tasks. Space
exploration, the planning of transportation networks, flood control,
airplane manufacturing, and other endeavors may require huge
organizations minutely coordinated by a few experts. The control of
epidemics or of pollution requires a center staffed by experts
receiving and digesting standard information from hundreds of
reporting units.


Legibility of Social Groups, Institutions, and Practices

\bigskip
\noindent
 \begin{minipage}[t]{\textwidth}
\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{|X|X|X|}
\hline
\relax              &  Illegible  &  Legible  \\
\hline
\relax  \textbf{Settlements}  &   Temporary encampments of hunter-gatherers, nomads, slash-and-burn cultivators, pioneers, and gypsies  &  Permanent villages, estates, and plantations of sedentary peoples  \\
\relax               &   Unplanned cities and neighborhoods: Bruges in 1500, medina of Damascus, Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Paris, in 1800  &  Planned grid cities and neighborhoods: Brasília, Chicago  \\
\relax  \textbf{Economic units}  &  Small property, petite bourgeoisie  &  Large property  \\
\relax   &  Small peasant farms  &  Large farms  \\
\relax   &  Artisanal production  &  Factories (proletariat)  \\
\relax   &  Small shops  &  Large commercial establishments  \\
\relax   &  Informal economy, “off the books”  &  Formal economy, “on the books”  \\
\relax  \textbf{Property regimes}  &  Open commons, communal property  &  Collective farms  \\
\relax    &  Private property  &  State property  \\
\relax    &  Local records  &  National cadastral survey  \\
\relax  \textbf{Technical and resource organizations}  &   &    \\
\relax  Water  &  Local customary use, local irrigation societies  &  Centralized dam, irrigation control  \\
\relax  Transportation  &  Decentralized webs and netwoks  &  Centralized hubs  \\
\relax  Energy  &  Cow pats and brushwood gathered locally or local electric generating stations  &  Large generating stations in urban centers  \\
\relax  Identification  &  Unregulated local naming customs  &  Permanent patronyms  \\
\relax   &  No state documentation of citizens  &  National system of identification cards, documents, or passports  \\
\hline
\end{tabularx}
\end{minipage}
\bigskip


On the other hand, these methods seem singularly maladroit at such
tasks as putting a really good meal on the table or performing
surgery. This issue will be addressed at length in chapter 8, but some
valuably suggestive evidence can be gleaned from Soviet
agriculture. If we think of particular crops, it is apparent that
collective farms were successful at growing some crops, especially the
major grains: wheat, rye, oats, barley, and maize. They were notably
inefficient at turning out other products, especially fruits,
vegetables, small livestock, eggs, dairy products, and flowers. Most
of these crops were supplied from the minuscule private plots of the
kolkhoz members, even at the height of collectivization.\footnote{For a detailed account of the relationship between the private plot and the collective just prior to 1989, see Timofeev, \emph{Soviet Peasants}, or \emph{The Peasants’ Art of Starving}.} The
systematic differences between these two categories of crops helps to
explain why their institutional setting might vary.


Let us take wheat as an example of what I will call a “proletarian crop”
and compare it with red raspberries, which I think of as the ultimate
“petit-bourgeois crop.” Wheat lends itself to extensive largescale
farming and mechanization. One might say that wheat is to collectivized
agriculture what the Norway spruce is to centrally managed, scientific
forestry. Once planted, it needs little care until harvest, when a
combine can cut and thresh the grain in one operation and then blow it
into trucks bound for granaries or into railroad cars. Relatively sturdy
in the ground, wheat remains sturdy once harvested. It is relatively
easy to store for extended periods with only small losses to spoilage.
The red raspberry bush, on the other hand, requires a particular soil to
be fruitful; it must be pruned annually; it requires more than one
picking, and it is virtually impossible to pick by machine. Once packed,
raspberries last only a few days under the best conditions. They will
spoil within hours if packed too tightly or if stored at too high a
temperature. At virtually every stage the raspberry crop needs delicate
handling and speed, or all is lost.


Little wonder, then, that fruits and vegetables—petit-bourgeois
crops—were typically not grown as kolkhoz crops but rather as
sidelines produced by individual households. The collective sector in
effect ceded such crops to those who had the personal interest,
incentive, and horticultural skills to grow them successfully. Such
crops can, in principle, be grown by huge centralized enterprises as
well, but they must be enterprises that are elaborately attentive to
the care of the crops and to the care of the labor that tends
them. Even where such crops are grown on large farms, the farms tend
to be family enterprises of smaller size than wheat farms and are
insistent on a stable, knowledgeable workforce. In these situations,
the small family enterprise has, in the terms of neoclassical
economics, a comparative advantage.


Another way in which wheat production is different from raspberry
production is that the growing of wheat involves a modest number of
routines that, because the grain is robust, allow some slack or play.
The crop will take some abuse. Raspberry growers, because successful
cultivation of their crop is complex and the fruit is delicate, must
be adaptive, nimble, and exceptionally attentive. Successful raspberry
growing requires, in other words, a substantial stock of local
knowledge and experience. These distinctions will prove germane to the
Tanzanian example, to which we now turn, and later to our
understanding of local knowledge.

\chapter{Chapter 7. Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania: Aesthetics and Miniaturization}


The ujamaa village campaign in Tanzania from 1973 to 1976 was a
massive attempt to permanently settle most of the country’s population
in villages, of which the layouts, housing designs, and local
economies were planned, partly or wholly, by officials of the central
government.  We shall examine the Tanzanian experience for three
reasons. First, the campaign was by most accounts the largest forced
resettlement scheme undertaken in independent Africa up to that time;
at least 5 million Tanzanians were relocated.\footnote{Julius Nyerere claimed that over 9 million people had been moved to ujamaa villages, but since a good many of these villages were administrative fictions and others had preexisting population bases that were probably included in the selfcongratulatory government statistics, a more modest figure is probably closer to the truth. See Goran Hyden, \emph{Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 130 n. 2.} Second,
documentation of the villagization process is abundant, thanks to the
international interest in the experiment and the relatively open
character of Tanzanian political life. Finally, the campaign was
undertaken largely as a development and welfare project and not, as
has often been the case, as part of a plan of punitive appropriation,
ethnic cleansing, or military security (as in South Africa’s forced
removals and homeland schemes under apartheid).  Compared with Soviet
collectivization, the ujamaa village campaign was a case of
large-scale social engineering by a relatively benign and weak state.


Many other large-scale resettlement schemes can be subjected to much
the same analysis. If, in the Tanzanian case, Chinese and Russian
models as well as Marxist-Leninist rhetoric play an important
ideological role, we should not imagine that these were the only
sources of inspiration for such schemes.\footnote{During his presidency, Nyerere visited almost every socialist-bloc state. For an enlightening survey of Marxism-inspired development plans throughout the Third World, see Forrest D. Colburn, \emph{The Vogue of Revolution in Poor Countries} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).} We could as easily have
examined the huge forced removals under apartheid policies in South
Africa, which were far more brutal and economically destructive. We
could also have analyzed any number of the many large-scale capitalist
schemes for production, often requiring substantial population
movements, that have been undertaken with international assistance in
poor countries.\footnote{For a searching critique focusing on the returns to scale and to mechanization in agriculture in five such projects, see Nancy L. Johnson and Vernon W. Ruttan, “Why Are Farms So Small?” \emph{World Development} 22, no. 5 (1994): 691-706.} Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s head of state, viewed
the permanent resettlement in ways that were strikingly continuous
with colonial policy, as we shall see, and his ideas about both
mechanization and economies of scale in agriculture were part and
parcel of international development discourse at the time.  That
discourse of modernization was, in turn, heavily influenced by the
model of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the development of
capital-intensive agriculture in the United States, and the lessons of
economic mobilization from World War II.\footnote{These influences were quite direct, as we have noted, for many of the personnel in the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank, and development agencies from the United Nations were American economists, agronomists, engineers, and bureaucrats.}


In contrast to Soviet collectivization, Tanzanian villagization was
not conceived as an all-out war of appropriation. Nyerere made a point
of warning against the use of administrative or military coercion,
insisting that no one should be forced, against his or her will, into
the new villages. And in fact the disruptions and inhumanities of
Nyerere’s program, however serious for its victims, were not in the
same league as those inflicted by Stalin. Even so, the ujamaa campaign
was coercive and occasionally violent. It proved, moreover, a failure,
ecologically as well as economically.


Even in this “softer” version of authoritarian high modernism, certain
family resemblances stand out. The first is the logic of
“improvement.”  As in the “unimproved” forest, the existing patterns
of settlement and social life in Tanzania were illegible and resistant
to the narrow purposes of the state. Only by radically simplifying the
settlement pattern was it possible for the state to efficiently
deliver such development services as schools, clinics, and clean
water. Mere administrative convenience was hardly the only objective
of state officials, and that is our second point. The thinly veiled
subtext of villagization was also to reorganize human communities in
order to make them better objects of political control and to
facilitate the new forms of communal farming favored by state
policy. In this context, there are striking parallels between what
Nyerere and Tanzanian African National Union (TANU) envisioned and the
program of agriculture and settlement initiated by the colonial
regimes in East Africa. The parallels suggest that we have stumbled
across something generic about the projects of the modern
developmentalist state.


Beyond this second criterion of bureaucratic management, however, lay
a third resemblance that had nothing directly to do with
efficiency. As in the Soviet case, there was also, I believe, a
powerful aesthetic dimension. Certain visual representations of order
and efficiency, although they may have made eminent sense in some
original context, are detached from their initial
moorings. High-modernist plans tend to “travel” as an abbreviated
visual image of efficiency that is less a scientific proposition to be
tested than a quasi-religious faith in a visual sign or representation
of order. As Jacobs suggested, they may substitute an apparent visual
order for the real thing. The fact that they look right becomes more
important than whether they work; or, better put, the assumption is
that if the arrangement looks right, it will also, ipso facto,
function well. The importance of such representations is manifested in
a tendency to miniaturize, to create such microenvironments of
apparent order as model villages, demonstration projects, new
capitals, and so on.


Finally, like Soviet collectives, ujamaa villages were economic and
ecological failures. For ideological reasons, the designers of the new
society had paid virtually no attention to the local knowledge and
practices of cultivators and pastoralists. They had also forgotten the
most important fact about social engineering: its efficiency depends
on the response and cooperation of real human subjects. If people find
the new arrangement, however efficient in principle, to be hostile to
their dignity, their plans, and their tastes, they can \emph{make} it an
inefficient arrangement.

\section{Colonial High-Modernist Agriculture in East Africa}



\begin{quote}


For the colonial state did not merely aspire to create, under its
control, a human landscape of perfect visibility; the condition of this
visibility was that everyone, everything, had (as it were) a serial
number.



\end{quote}


— Benedict Anderson, \emph{Imagined Communities}


Colonial rule has always been meant to be profitable for the
colonizer.  This implied, in a rural society, stimulating cultivation
for the market. A variety of such means as head taxes payable in cash
or in valuable crops, private-sector plantations, and the
encouragement of white settlers were deployed to this end. Beginning
during World War II and especially after it, the British in East
Africa turned to planning largescale development projects and
mobilizing the required labor. A straw in the wind was the
conscription of nearly thirty thousand laborers for work on
plantations (particularly sisal plantations) during the war. Postwar
schemes, although they often had prewar precedents, were far more
ambitious: a gigantic groundnut (peanut) scheme; various rice,
tobacco, cotton, and cattle schemes; and, above all, elaborate
soilconservation plans mandating a strict regimen of practices.
Resettlement and mechanization were integral parts of many
schemes.\footnote{See, for example, Lionel Cliffe and Griffiths L. Cunningham, “Ideology, Organization, and the Settlement Experience of Tanzania,” in Lionel Cliffe and John S. Saul, eds., Policies, vol. 2 of \emph{Socialism in Tanzania: An Interdisciplinary Reader} (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973), pp. 131-40.} The vast majority of these projects were neither popular
nor successful. In fact, one of the standard explanations for the
successes of TANU in the countryside was precisely the widespread
popular resentment against colonial agricultural policy—particularly
forced conservation measures and such livestock regulations as
destocking and cattle dipping.\footnote{Lionel Cliffe, “Nationalism and the Reaction to Enforced Agricultural Change in Tanganyika During the Colonial Period,” in Lionel Cliffe and John S. Saul, eds., \emph{Politics}, vol. 1 of \emph{Socialism in Tanzania: An Interdisciplinary Reader} (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973), pp. 18, 22. For a brilliant treatment of peasant-state relations, see Steven Feierman, \emph{Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania} (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).}


The most searching account of the logic underlying these schemes of
“welfare colonialism” is William Beinert’s study of neighboring Malawi
(then Nyasaland).\footnote{William Beinert, “Agricultural Planning and the Late Colonial Technical Imagination: The Lower Shire Valley in Malawi, 1940-1960,” in \emph{Malawi: An Alternative Pattern of Development}, proceedings of a seminar held at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, May 14 and 25, 1984 (Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 95-148.} Although the ecology is different in Malawi,
the broad lines of its agricultural policy varied little from that
attempted elsewhere in British East Africa. For our purposes, what is
most striking is the degree to which the assumptions of the colonial
regime matched those of the independent, and far more legitimate,
socialist state of Tanzania.


The point of departure for colonial policy was a complete faith in
what officials took for “scientific agriculture” on one hand and a
nearly total skepticism about the actual agricultural practices of
Africans on the other. As a provincial agricultural officer in the
Shire (Tchiri) Valley put it, “The African has neither the training,
skill, nor equipment to diagnose his soil erosion troubles nor can he
plan the remedial measures, which are based on scientific knowledge,
and this is where I think we rightly come in.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 103.} Although the
officer’s sentiment was no doubt perfectly sincere, one cannot fail to
note how it justified, at the same time, the importance and authority
of agricultural experts over mere practitioners.


In keeping with the planning ideology of the time, the experts were
inclined to propose elaborate projects—a “total development scheme,” a
“comprehensive land usage scheme.”\footnote{Such schemes often included, as Beinert explains, “storm drains, contour bunding, ridging, protection of stream banks, compulsory grass fallows, restorative crops and eventually a full system of rotational strip cropping” (ibid., p. 104).} But there were enormous
obstacles to imposing a complicated and draconian set of regulations
on a population of cultivators well aware of environmental constraints
and convinced of the logic of their own farming practices. Pushing
ahead autocratically only courted protest and evasion. It was in just
such contexts that the strategy of resettlement was so
appealing. Opening new land or repurchasing the estates of white
settlers allowed officials to start from scratch with compact village
sites and consolidated individual plots. The newly recruited settlers
could then be relocated to a prepared, legible site replacing the
scattered residences and complex tenure patterns found elsewhere. The
more the planners filled in the details—that is, the more that huts
were built or specified, sites demarcated, fields cleared and plowed,
and plants selected (and sometimes sown)—the greater the chance of
controlling the scheme and keeping it to its designed form.


The planning of the lower Shire Valley along these lines, Beinert
makes clear, was not an entirely scientific exercise. The scheme’s
designers were deploying a set of technical beliefs associated with
modern agriculture, very few of which had been verified in the context
of local conditions. They were also deploying a set of aesthetic and
visual standards, some of them obviously originating in the temperate
West, which had come to symbolize an ordered and productive
agriculture.\footnote{There is nothing odd about this displacement, which occurs almost unconsciously. The “look” of agriculture is stamped with specific, historically contingent features that tend to be forgotten in practice until one’s visual expectations are upset. When, for example, I first visited northern Bohemia before 1989, I was taken aback by huge collectivized maize fields that extended two or three miles, unbroken by fences or lines of trees. I realized that my visual expectations about the countryside included the physical evidence of small private properties: tree lines, fences, smaller and more irregular plots, the physical features of independent farmsteads. (Had I grown up in, say, Kansas, I would not have been quite so surprised.)} They were driven by what Beinert called the
“technical imagination of what might be possible.”



\begin{quote}


In the case of ridging and bunding in the lower river, the imagination
had an almost pictorial quality: they looked forward to a valley of
regular fields, neatly ridged, between long straight contour bunds,
below a line of storm drains topped by forests. It was a rectangular
contoured order which would render the environment susceptible to
control, facilitate technical transformation of, and controls over,
peasant agriculture and, perhaps, accord with their sense of planned
beauty. It was this solution which would make adequate production
possible. But driven by their technical conviction and imagination,
they were unresponsive to the effects of their interventions on
peasant society and peasant culture.\footnote{Beinert, “Agricultural Planning,” p. 113.}



\end{quote}


Aesthetic order in the agricultural and forest landscape was
replicated in the human geography as well.\footnote{For an exceptionally perceptive account of the differences between the geography of traditional, chiefly power and the Cartesian logic of colonial planning in southern Africa, see Isable Hofmyer, \emph{They Spend Their Lives as a Tale That Is Told} (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994).} A series of model
villages, spread evenly across the rectangular grid of fields and
linked by roads, would become the center of technical and social
services. The fields themselves were so arrayed as to facilitate the
dryland rotational farming built into the scheme. In fact, the Shire
Valley project was to be a miniature version of the Tennessee Valley
Authority, complete with dams along the river and sites indicated for
capital-intensive processing plants. A three-dimensional model, along
the lines of an architect’s model of a new town, was constructed to
show, in miniature, what the whole project would look like when
completed.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 138-39.}


The plans for human settlement and land use in the lower Shire Valley
“failed almost completely.” The reasons for their failure presage the
fiasco of the ujamaa villages. Local cultivators, for example,
resisted the generic colonial solution to soil erosion: ridging. As
later research showed, in this context their resistance was both
economically and ecologically sound. Ridging on sandy soil was
unstable, tending to create larger erosion gullies in the rainy
season, and ridging caused the soil to dry out quickly during the dry
season, encouraging white ants to attack the roots of crops. Would-be
settlers hated the regimentation of the government schemes; a “model
settlement with communal farming” drew no voluntary migrants and had
to be converted into a government maize farm using wage labor. The
prohibitions on farming the settlement’s rich marshland (\emph{dimba})
deterred volunteers.  Later, officials conceded that they, and not the
peasants, had been mistaken in this respect.


The lower Shire Valley project miscarried for two larger reasons that
are crucial to our understanding of the limits of high-modernist
planning. The first is that the planners operated with a model of the
agricultural environment that was standardized for the entire
valley. It was precisely this assumption that made it possible to
specify the generic, and apparently permanent, solution of a
particular dryland rotation for all cultivators. The solution was a
static, freeze-frame answer to a dynamic and variegated valley
environment. In contrast, the peasants possessed a flexible repertoire
of strategies depending on the timing and extent of the floods, the
microlocal soil compositions, and so on—strategies that were to some
degree unique to each farmer, each plot of land, and to each growing
season. The second reason behind the failure was that the planners
also operated with a standardized model of the cultivators themselves,
assuming that all peasants would desire roughly the same crop mix,
techniques, and yields. Such an assumption completely ignored key
variables, such as family size and composition, sideline occupations,
gender divisions of labor, and culturally conditioned needs and
tastes. The fact was that each family had its own particular mix of
resources and goals that would affect its agricultural strategy year
by year in ways that the overall plan did not provide for.  As a plan,
it was both aesthetically pleasing to its inventors and also precise
and consistent within its own strict parameters. As a scheme for
development, however, it was the kind of environmental and social
taxidermy that doomed it almost from the start. Ironically,
successful, voluntary pioneer settlement outside the government’s
purview and without any financial assistance continued apace. This
disorderly, illegible, but more productive settlement was castigated
as squatting and severely reproved, although without much practical
effect.


The abject failure of the ambitious groundnuts scheme in Tanganyika
just after World War II is also instructive as a dress rehearsal for
massive villagization.\footnote{For a sampling of accounts, see J. Phillips, \emph{Agriculture and Ecology in Africa} (London: Faber and Faber, 1959); F. Samuel, “East African Groundnut Scheme,” \emph{United Empire} 38 (May-June 1947): 133-40; S. P. Voll, \emph{A Plough in Field Arable} (London: University Presses of New England, 1980); Alan Wood, \emph{The Groundnut Affair} (London: Bodley Head, 1950); Johnson and Ruttan, “Why Are Farms So Small?” pp. 691-706; Andrew Coulson, “Agricultural Policies in Mainland Tanzania,” \emph{Review of African Political Economy} 10 (September-December 1977): 74-100.} The joint venture between the United
African Company (a subsidiary of Unilever) and the colonial state
proposed the clearing of no fewer than 3 million acres of bush that
would, when cultivated, yield more than half a million tons of peanuts
to be converted to cooking oil for export. The scheme was conceived
during the postwar high tide of faith in the economic prowess of a
command economy joined to large capitalist firms. By 1950, when less
than 10 percent of the acreage had been cleared and not as many nuts
had been grown as seeds had been sown, the project was abandoned.


The reasons for the failure were legion. In development circles, in
fact, the groundnuts scheme is one of a handful of legendary failures
cited as examples of what not to do. At least two of the ingredients
of this disaster relate to the failure of the lower Shire Valley
project and to the later disaster of large-scale villagization. First,
the design for the scheme was narrowly agronomic and abstract. Very
general figures for the tractor hours needed to clear land, the
amounts of fertilizer and pesticide needed to attain a given yield per
acre, and so forth were applied to the new terrain. No detailed
mapping of soils, rainfall patterns, or topography and certainly no
experimental trials had been undertaken. Field reconnaissance was
allotted a mere nine weeks, much of it conducted from the air! The
general figures proved wildly erroneous precisely because they were
heedless of the particularities of the locality: clayey soil that
compacted in the dry season, irregular rainfall, crop diseases for
which there were no resistant plant varieties, inappropriate machinery
for the soil and terrain.


The second fatal premise in the design of the scheme was its “blind
faith in machinery and large-scale operation.”\footnote{Coulson, “Agricultural Policies in Mainland Tanzania,” p. 76.} The project’s
founder, Frank Samuel, had a motto: “No operation will be performed by
hand for which mechanical equipment is available.”\footnote{Johnson and Ruttan, “Why Are Farms So Small?” p. 694. Samuel’s motto notwithstanding, the scheme was designed to employ a workforce of thirty-two thousand Africans.} The scheme was
essentially a quasi-military operation perhaps derived from wartime
experience and designed to be technically self-contained. The plan’s
level of abstraction resembles that of the Soviet collective wheat
farm laid out by Wilson, Ware, and Riggin in their Chicago hotel room
in 1928 (see chapter 6). The groundnuts scheme intentionally bypassed
African smallholders in order to create a colossal industrial farm
under European management. As such, the project might have reflected
relative factor prices on, say, the plains of Kansas, but surely not
in Tanganyika. Had it succeeded in growing peanuts in any quantities,
it would have grown them on grossly uneconomic terms. Capitalist high
modernism of the utopian kind that inspired the groundnuts scheme was
no more appropriate to Tanzania than would be the template of
villagization and collectivist, socialist production that inspired
Nyerere.

\section{Villages and “Improved” Farming in Tanzania Before 1973}


The vast majority of the Tanzanian rural population was, in terms of
legibility and appropriation, outside the reach of the state. At
independence, an estimated 11 out of 12 million rural dwellers lived
“scattered” across the landscape. With the exception of densely
settled areas in the cool, wet highlands where substantial amounts of
coffee and tea were grown and marketed, much of the population
practiced subsistence farming or pastoralism. Much of what they did
sell was offered at local markets largely outside the ambit of state
supervision and taxation. The objective of colonial agricultural
policy and also of the independent state of Tanzania (and seconded,
early on, by the World Bank) was to assemble more of the population
into fixed, permanent settlements and to promote forms of agriculture
that would yield a greater marketable surplus, especially for
export.\footnote{Permanent settlement was also a keystone of colonial health and veterinary policy in Tanganyika. See, in this context, Kirk Arden Hoppe, “Lords of the Flies: British Sleeping Sickness Policies as Environmental Engineering in the Lake Victoria Region, 1900-1950,” Working Papers in African Studies no. 203 (Boston: Boston University African Studies Center, 1995).} Whether these policies took the form of private ventures
or socialized agriculture, they were strategies designed, as Goran
Hyden has said, “to capture the peasantry.”\footnote{Goran Hyden, \emph{Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania} (London: Heineman, 1980).} The nationalist
regime of TANU was, of course, much more legitimate than its colonial
predecessor. But we should not forget that much of the popularity of
TANU in rural areas rested on its endorsement of resistance to the
onerous and mandatory agricultural regulations of the colonial
state.\footnote{During the independence struggle and immediately afterward, peasants tore down the terraces that they had been ordered to build and refused to destock or to dip their cattle. See Andrew Coulson, \emph{Tanzania: A Political Economy} (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 117.} As in Russia, the peasantry had taken advantage of the
interregnum at independence to ignore or defy policies declared in the
capital.


At the outset, villagization was a central goal of Nyerere and of
TANU.  The purpose of village formation was at this stage threefold:
the delivery of services; the creation of a more productive, modern
agriculture; and the encouragement of communal, socialist forms of
cooperation. Nyerere outlined the importance of village living as
early as 1962, in his inaugural address to Tanzania’s parliament.



\begin{quote}


And if you ask me why the government wants us to live in villages, the
answer is just as simple: unless we do we shall not be able to provide
ourselves with the things we need to develop our land and to raise our
standard of living. We shall not be able to use tractors; we shall not
be able to provide schools for our children; we shall not be able to
build hospitals, or have clean drinking water; it will be quite
impossible to start small village industries, and instead we shall
have to go on depending on the towns for all our requirements; and if
we had a plentiful supply of electric power we should never be able to
connect it up to each isolated homestead.\footnote{From “President’s Inaugural Address” (December 10, 1962), in Julius K. Nyerere, \emph{Freedom and Unity: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1952-1965} (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 184. I owe much of my early appreciation for the Tanzanian material to Joel Gao Hiza’s exceptionally perceptive senior essay in anthropology, “The Repetition of ‘Traditional’ Mistakes in Rural Development: Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania,” April 1993, and to his invaluable bibliographic assistance. He was unfailingly generous in sharing his analytical judgment and his command of the literature.}



\end{quote}


By 1967, in a major policy statement called “Socialism and Rural
Development,” Nyerere elaborated on the specifically socialist aspect
of the campaign for village living. It was clear to him that if the
present pattern of capitalist development continued, Tanzania would
eventually develop a class of wealthy “kulak” (the Russian term then
in vogue in TANU circles) farmers who would reduce their neighbors to
the status of wage laborers. Ujamaa villages (that is, socialist
cooperatives) would set the rural economy on a different path. “What
is here being proposed,” Nyerere explained, “is that we in Tanzania
should move from being a nation of individual peasant producers who
are gradually adopting the incentives and ethics of the capitalist
system. Instead we should gradually become a nation of ujamaa villages
where the people co-operate directly in small groups and where these
small groups cooperate together for joint enterprises.”\footnote{Julius K. Nyerere, “Socialism and Rural Development” (September 1967), in Nyerere, \emph{Freedom and Socialism: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1965-1967} (Dares Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 365. It is worth noting here that the abolition of individual freehold title shortly after independence was one of the legal preconditions for forced villagization, as, in Nyerere’s words, “all land now belong[ed] to the nation” (p. 307). Nyerere justified this move in terms of African traditions of “communal ownership,” thus eliding the difference between communal ownership and state ownership.}


For Nyerere, village living, development services, communal
agriculture, and mechanization were a single indissoluble
package. Farmers who were scattered hither and yon could not easily be
educated or treated for common illnesses, could not learn the
techniques of modern agriculture, could not even cooperate, unless
they first moved to villages. He declared: “The first and absolutely
essential thing to do, therefore, if we want to be able to start using
tractors for cultivation, is to begin living in \emph{proper}
villages\dots{} We shall not be able to use tractors [if we have no
villages].”\footnote{Quoted in Coulson, \emph{Tanzania}, p. 237 (emphasis added).} Modernization required, above all, physical
concentration into standardized units that the state might service and
administer. Little wonder that electrification and tractors, those
emblems of development, were on the tip of Nyerere’s tongue as well as
Lenin’s.\footnote{One imagines that Nyerere had a powerful visual image of what a “proper” village should look like—its layout, tractors crisscrossing communal fields, a clinic, a school, a government service center, small village industries, and perhaps, looking ahead, electric engines and lights. Where did this image come from? From Russia, China, the West?} There is, I believe, a powerful aesthetic of
modernization at play here. A modern population must live in
communities with a certain physical layout—not just villages, but
\emph{proper} villages.


Nyerere, unlike Stalin, at first insisted that the creation of ujamaa
villages be gradual and completely voluntary. He imagined that a few
families would move their houses to be closer together and would plant
their crops nearby, after which they might open a communal
plot. Success would attract others. “Socialist communities cannot be
established by compulsion,” he declared. They “can only be established
with willing members; the task of leadership and of Government is not
to try and force this kind of development, but to explain, encourage,
and participate.”\footnote{Quoted in Nyerere, \emph{Freedom and Socialism}, p. 356.} Later on, in 1973, having gauged the general
resistance to villagization on government terms, Nyerere would change
his mind. By then the seeds of coercion had been sown, by a
politicized, authoritarian bureaucracy and also by Nyerere’s
underlying conviction that the peasants did not know what was good for
them. Thus, immediately after disavowing “compulsion” in the sentence
just quoted, Nyerere concedes, “It may be possible—\emph{and sometimes
necessary}—to insist on all farmers in a given area growing a certain
acreage of a particular crop until they realize that this brings them
a more secure living, and then do not have to be \emph{forced} to grow
it.”\footnote{Ibid. (emphasis added).} If the peasants could not be persuaded to act in their own
interest, they might have to be coerced.  This logic was a replication
of that in the 1961 World Bank report associated with Tanganyika’s
first five-year plan. That report was laced with the era’s standard
discourse about having to overcome the habits and superstitions of a
backward and obstinate peasantry. The report also doubted whether
persuasion alone would get the job done. While its authors hoped that
“social emulation, cooperation, and the expansion of community
development services” would transform attitudes, they warned darkly
that “where incentives, emulation and propaganda are ineffective,
enforcement or coercive measures of an appropriate sort will be
considered.”\footnote{Quoted from the 1961 World Bank report (p. 19), in Coulson, \emph{Tanzania}, p. 161.}


Scores of village settlements and cultivation schemes were initiated
in the 1960s. Despite their great variety—some were joint ventures
between the state and foreign firms, some were government or
parastatal schemes, and others were spontaneous popular
initiatives—most were judged to be failures and closed down, either by
decree or by attrition. Three aspects of these schemes seem especially
relevant to understanding the all-out villagization campaign that
began in 1973.


The first was a penchant for creating pilot schemes. In itself this
approach made sense, since policy makers could learn what would work
and what would not before embarking on more ambitious plans. Many such
schemes, however, became showpiece demonstration farms absorbing huge
amounts of scarce equipment, funds, and personnel. For a time, a few
of these precious miniatures of progress and modernization were
maintained.  One influential scheme involving a mere three hundred
settlers managed to acquire four bulldozers, nine tractors, a field
car, seven lorries, a maize mill, an electric generator, and a cadre
of about fifteen administrators and specialists, 150 laborers, and
twelve artisans.\footnote{Cliffe and Cunningham, “Ideology, Organization, and the Settlement Experience,” p. 135. The authors omit the actual location and name of the village, almost certainly for political reasons. Although I have no way of proving it, I would guess that this Xanadu was close to the capital at Dar es Salaam so that officials could visit and admire it.} It was, after a fashion, a successful example of
a modern farm, providing that one overlooked its truly legendary
inefficiency and the fact that it was irrelevant to the Tanzanian
situation.


The second aspect prefiguring the Tanzanian experience was that, given
single-party rule, an authoritarian administrative tradition, and a
dictator (albeit a rather benevolent one)\footnote{By the contemporary standards of rule in neighboring states like Ethiopia, Uganda, South Africa, Mozambique, and Zaire, Nyerere’s Tanzania was paradise itself. Nevertheless, TANU routinely suborned the legal system or circumvented it altogether. The Preventive Detention Act of 1962 provided no safeguards against flagrant abuse. In early 1964, after an army mutiny, it was used liberally to round up about five hundred opponents of the regime, most of whom had no connection to the conspiracy. In addition to the Preventive Detention Act, the regime also had frequent recourse to a number of authoritarian colonial laws. See, in this connection, Cranford Pratt, \emph{The Critical Phase in Tanzania, 1945-1968: Nyerere and the Emergence of a Socialist Strategy} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 184-89.} who wanted results, the
normal bureaucratic pathologies were exaggerated. Sites for new
settlements were often chosen, not by economic logic, but by finding
“blank spots” on the map (preferably near roads) where the settlers
might be dumped.\footnote{Jannik Boesen, Birgit Storgaard Madsen, and Tony Moody, \emph{Ujamaa: Socialism from Above} (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1977), p. 38. The reference is to the Makazi Mapya settlement program prior to 1969 in the West Lake region.} In the West Lake (west of Lake Victoria) region
(1970), a member of Parliament and five technical specialists
descended briefly to design a four-year plan (1970-1974) for all
ujamaa villages in the region. They were obviously under great
pressure to please their superiors by promising huge increases in
cultivation and production which were “utterly unrealistic and
completely out of touch with any possible development in the
village.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 77.} The plans were promulgated without any real
consultation and were based on abstract assumptions about machine use,
days of labor, rates of land clearance, and a new crop regimen, not
unlike the groundnut scheme or the Soviet collective hatched in a
Chicago hotel room.


Finally, where the pressure was greatest to create new villages, TANU
activists and officials ignored Nyerere’s advice against compulsion.
Thus, when he decided in 1970 that the entire population of Dodoma (a
drought-prone region in central Tanzania) should be relocated to
ujamaa villages within fourteen months, officials sprang into
action. Relying on everyone’s sharp memories of a regional famine in
1969, the officials let it be understood that only those dwelling in
ujamaa villages would ever receive famine relief. Those who already
lived in ujamaa villages with fewer than the stipulated minimum of
250 families were often forced to amalgamate with another settlement
to reach the required size.  Communal plots were built into the new
settlements, as were, in theory, labor regulations and cropping
schedules. When an agricultural officer insisted that there be no
discussion of the official decision to enlarge one village’s communal
field to 170 acres, absorbing the adjacent private plots, he was
thrown out of the village meeting in a rare open revolt. An M.P. who
sided with the village was barred from running again and placed under
surveillance, while the district’s TANU chairman, who did likewise,
was removed and placed under house arrest. Dodoma was a preview of
what was to come.


Lest there be any doubt that villagization meant central control and
not simply village formation and communal farming, the sorry fate of
the Ruvuma Development Association (RDA) settled the matter.\footnote{See Cliffe and Cunningham, “Ideology, Organization, and the Settlement Experience,” pp. 137-39; Lionel Cliffe, “The Policy of Ujamaa Vijijini and the Class Struggle in Tanzania,” in Cliffe and John S. Saul, eds., Policies, vol. 2 of \emph{Socialism in Tanzania: An Interdisciplinary Reader} (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973), pp. 195-211; and Coulson, “Agricultural Policies in Mainland Tanzania,” pp. 74-100. The last-mentioned article is a splendid synthetic treatment of rural policy in Tanzania.} The
RDA was an umbrella organization representing fifteen communal
villages scattered over one hundred miles in the Songea, a remote and
poor district in the southwestern part of the country. Unlike most
ujamaa villages, these were the spontaneous creation of young local
militants in TANU. They began in 1960, long before Nyerere’s policy
declaration of 1967, with each village inventing its own forms of
communal enterprise.  Early on, Nyerere singled out one of the
villages, Litowa, heralding it as a place where he could send people
to see rural socialism in action.\footnote{Cliffe and Cunningham, “Ideology, Organization, and the Settlement Experience,” p. 139.} Its school, milling
cooperative, and marketing association were the envy of neighboring
villages. Given the high level of patronage and financial backing the
villagers attracted, it is hard to tell how economically sound their
enterprises were. They did, however, anticipate Nyerere’s declared
policy of local control and nonauthoritarian cooperation. The
villagers were, on the other hand, independent and assertive vis-à-vis
the state. Having won over many of the local party officials and
having pioneered village cooperation on their own, they were not about
to let themselves simply be absorbed into bureaucratic party
routines. When each family in these villages was ordered to grow one
acre of fire-cured tobacco, a crop they considered to be
labor-intensive and without profit, they openly protested through
their organization. In 1968, following a high-level visit by TANU’s
central committee, the RDA was officially banned as an illegal
organization, its assets seized, and its functions assumed by the
party and bureaucracy.\footnote{Coulson, “Agricultural Policies in Mainland Tanzania.” p. 91.} Although it put into practice Nyerere’s
espoused goals, its refusal to fit into the centralized scheme of the
party was fatal.

\section{“To Live in Villages Is an Order”}


With his order of December 1973,\footnote{Nyerere made the order in a speech delivered via radio, and the content of his speech is instructive. He reminded his audience of “all that the TANU Government had done for the people after the Arusha Declaration: abolishing the poll tax, abolishing primary school fees, building permanent, clean water supplies in the villages, expanding the number of health clinics and dispensaries in the rural areas, increasing primary school facilities. He then went on to ask what the peasants had done in return for these favors. In answering that question, President Nyerere suggested that they had done virtually nothing. They had remained idle and evaded their responsibility to make a contribution to the country’s socialist development. He concluded his speech by saying that he knew he could not turn people into socialists by force, but what his government could do was to ensure that everybody lived in village. He said he wanted that to be done before the end of 1976” (Hyden, \emph{Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania}, p. 130).} Nyerere ended a period of
villagization marked by sporadic but unauthorized coercion and put the
entire machinery of the state behind compulsory, universal
villagization.\footnote{The stage had already been set when, in early October, the Sixteenth Biennial Conference of TANU ended with an urgent call to the government to “map village areas” with a view to making the ujamaa village movement national rather than relying on local initiative (\emph{Daily News} [Dar es Salaam], October 2, 1973). Accordingly, there were calls in the next months for land officers and professional surveyors to train local cadres in the simpler techniques of surveying so that they could lay out new villages (\emph{Daily News} [Dar es Salaam], January 30, 1974). “Frontal” approaches to ujamaa villages, however, had been urged from at least 1969 by TANU, the Ministry of Rural Development, and the second five-year plan. See Bismarck U. Mwansasu and Cranford Pratt, \emph{Towards Socialism in Tanzania} (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 98.} Whatever restraining influence that his public
disavowal of the use of force had provided was now nullified; it was
replaced by the desire of the party and bureaucracy to produce the
quick results he wanted. Villagization was, after all, for their own
benefit, as Juma Mwapachu, an official in charge of forced settlement
in the district of Shinyanga, explained. “The 1974 Operation [Planned]
Villages was not to be a matter of persuasion but of coercion. As
Nyerere argued, the move had to be compulsory because Tanzania could
not sit back seeing the majority of its people leading a ‘life of
death.’ The State, had, therefore, to take the role of the ‘father’ in
ensuring that its people chose a better and more prosperous life for
themselves.”\footnote{Quoted in Coulson, “Agricultural Policies in Mainland Tanzania,” p. 74. See also Juma Volter Mwapachu, “Operation Planned Villages in Rural Tanzania: A Revolutionary Strategy of Development,” \emph{African Review} 6, no. 1 (1976): 1-16. The discourse begs for closer analysis. The subject of the last two sentences is the impersonal actor “the State” or “Tanzania,” represented in practice, of course, by Nyerere and the TANU elite. In the context of coercion the linguistic fiction of choice is still maintained. Finally, using the phrase “life of death” to describe the lives most Tanzanians are leading elevates Nyerere and the party to the role of saviors raising their people from the dead, as Jesus did with Lazarus.} New villages and communal farming had been an
official policy priority at least since 1967, but the results had been
a disappointment. Now it was time to insist on village living, Nyerere
claimed, as the only way to promote development and increased
production. The official term employed after 1973 was “planned”
villages (not “ujamaa” villages), presumably to distinguish them both
from the communal-production regime of ujamaa villages, which had
failed, and from the unplanned settlements and homesteads in which
Tanzanians now resided.


The actual campaign was called \emph{Operation} Planned Villages, conjuring
in the popular mind images of military operations. And so it was. The
operational plan specified, by the book, a six-phase sequence:
“educate [or ‘politicize’] the people, search for a suitable site,
inspect the location, plan the village and demarcate the land clearly,
train the officials in the methodology of ujamaa, and
resettlement.”\footnote{See Dean E. McHenry, Jr., \emph{Tanzania’s Ujamaa Villages: The Implementation of a Rural Development Strategy}, Research Series no. 39 (Berkeley: Berkeley Institute of International Studies, 1979), p. 136; Mwapachu, “Operation Planned Villages”; Katabaro Miti, \emph{Whither Tanzania?} (New Delhi: Ajanta, 1987), pp. 73-89.} The sequence was both inevitable and
involuntary. Given the “crash” nature of the campaign, educating the
people did not mean asking their consent; it meant telling them that
they had to move and why it was in their best interest. The pace was,
moreover, double-quick. The dress rehearsal in Dodoma in 1970 had
allowed planning teams one day per village plan; the new campaign
stretched the planning apparatus even thinner.


Nor was the speed of the operation a mere by-product of administrative
haste. The planners felt that the shock of lightning-quick settlement
would have a salutary effect. It would rip the peasantry from their
traditional surroundings and networks and would put them down in
entirely new settings where, it was hoped, they could then be more
readily remade into modern producers following the instructions of
experts.\footnote{In the antiseptic terminology of the 1961 World Bank report, “When people move to new areas, they are likely to be more receptive of change than when they remain in their familiar surroundings” (quoted in Coulson, \emph{Tanzania}, p. 75). This was presumably the psychological premise behind forced settlement. I was told by a World Bank official that early in the campaign to transplant thousands of Javanese on the outer islands of Indonesia, it was thought better to move them by airplane rather than by boat, which would have been cheaper, because their first experience of flight would suitably disorient them and convey to them the revolutionary and permanent nature of their relocation.} In a larger sense, of course, the purpose of forced
settlement is always disorientation and then reorientation. Colonial
schemes for state farms or private plantations, as well as the many
plans to create a class of progressive yeoman farmers, operated on the
assumption that revolutionizing the living arrangements and working
environments of people would transform them fundamentally. Nyerere was
fond of contrasting the loose, autonomous work rhythms of traditional
cultivators with the tight-knit, interdependent discipline of the
factory.\footnote{Quoted in Coulson, \emph{African Socialism in Practice: The Tanzanian Experience} (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1979), pp. 31-32.} Densely settled villages with cooperative production
would move the Tanzanian population toward that ideal.


Rural Tanzanians were understandably reluctant to move into new
communities planned by the state. Their past experience, whether
before independence or after, warranted their skepticism. As
cultivators and pastoralists, they had developed patterns of
settlement and, in many cases, patterns of periodic movements that
were finely tuned adaptations to an often stingy environment which
they knew exceptionally well. The state-mandated movement threatened
to destroy the logic of this adaptation. Administrative convenience,
not ecological considerations, governed the selection of sites; they
were often far from fuelwood and water, and their population often
exceeded the carrying capacity of the land. As one specialist foresaw:
“Unless villagization can be coupled with infrastructural inputs to
create a novel technology to master the environment, the nucleated
settlement pattern may, by itself, be counter-productive in economic
terms and destructive of the ecological balance maintained under the
traditional settlement pattern. Nucleated settlement will mean
over-crowding \dots{} with people and domestic animals and the
accompanying soil erosion, gully formation, and dust bowls which are
common features in situations where the human initiative has suddenly
overtaxed the carrying capacity of the land.”\footnote{Helge Kjekhus, “The Tanzanian Villagization Policy: Implementation Lessons and Ecological Dimensions”, Canadian Journal of African Studies* 11 (1977): 282, cited in Rodger Yaeger, \emph{Tanzania: An African Experiment}, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), p. 62.}


Given the resistance of the population and the bureaucratic-military
imperative of a crash program, violence was inevitable. Threats were
all but universal. Those slated to move were again told that famine
relief would be accorded only to those who moved peacefully. The
militia and the army were mobilized to provide transport and to compel
compliance.  People were told that if they did not pull down their
houses and load them into the government trucks, the authorities would
pull down the houses. In order to prevent those forcibly moved from
returning, many homes were burned. Typical of the reports that came out
of Tanzania was the following description by a student in the poor
region of Kigoma: “Force and brutality was used. The police were the
ones empowered together with some government officials. For example at
Katanazuza in Kalinzi,\dots{} the police had to take charge physically. In
some areas where peasants refused to pack their belongings and board
the Operation lorries and trucks, their houses were destroyed through
burning or pulling them down. House destruction was witnessed in
Nyange village. It became a routine order of the day. And the peasants
had unconditionally to shift. It was a forceful villagization in some
villages.”\footnote{A. P. L. Ndabakwaje, Student Report, University of Dar es Salaam, 1975, quoted in McHenry, \emph{Tanzania’s Ujamaa Villages}, pp. 140-41. In one celebrated case, a cultivator who was incensed that his land was being seized for a new village replied in kind by shooting and killing the regional commissioner. See B. C. Nindi, “Compulsion in the Implementation of Ujamaa,” in Norman O’Neill and Kemal Mustafa, eds., \emph{Capitalism, Socialism, and the Development Crisis in Tanzania} (Avebury: Aldershot, 1990), pp. 63-68, cited in Bruce McKim, “Bureaucrats and Peasants: Ujamaa Villagization in Tanzania, 1967-1976” (term paper, Department of Anthropology, Yale University, April 1993), p. 14.} When the peasantry realized that open resistance was
dangerous and probably futile, they saved what they could, often
fleeing the new village at the first opportunity.\footnote{For a forthright account, under the circumstances, of the fear and suspicion surrounding the forced movement to new villages, see P. A. Kisula, “Prospects of Building Ujamaa Villages in Mwanza District,” (Ph.D. dirs., Department of Political Science, University of Dar es Salaam, 1973). I am grateful to David Sperling for bringing this paper to my attention. In many areas, flight from ujamaa villages was closely monitored by the security forces.}


Such incentives as clinics, piped water, and schools were offered to
those who went peacefully. Sometimes they did, although they tried to
insist on a written contract with officials and to require that the
new services promised them be established \emph{before} they
moved. Positive inducements were, apparently, more typical of the
early, voluntary phase of villagization than the later, compulsory
phase. A few regions were little affected; officials there simply
designated many existing settlements as planned villages and left it
at that. There was both an economic and political logic to the
exclusions. Wealthy, densely settled areas such as West Lake and
Kilimanjaro were largely spared for three reasons: farmers there were
already living in populous villages; their undisturbed productivity in
cash crops was vital for state revenues and foreign exchange; and the
groups residing in these areas were overrepresented among the
bureaucratic elite. Some critics suggested that the higher the
proportion of government officials from an area, the later (and more
desultory) its villagization.\footnote{Ibid., p. 134. One could argue that it is far easier to impose high-modernist schemes of transformation on a population that is somehow constructed as “the other” than on a group that is part of “us” This would help to explain why villagization was imposed first in poor areas such as Kigoma and Dodoma and why it went particularly hard on the pastoral Maasai.}


When Nyerere learned exactly how thin was the fiction of persuasion
and how widespread were the brutalities, he expressed his dismay. He
decried the failure to compensate peasants for their destroyed huts
and allowed that some officials had moved people to unsuitable
locations that lacked water or sufficient arable land. “Despite our
official policies and despite all our democratic institutions, some
leaders do not listen to the people,” he admitted. “They find it much
easier to tell people what to do.”\footnote{Quoted in Coulson, \emph{African Socialism in Practice}, p. 66.} But it was “absurd to pretend
that these cases were typical of villagization,”\footnote{Ibid.} let alone to
call off the campaign. Nyerere wanted local authorities to be
knowledgeable, close to the people, and persuasive in putting across
state policy; he did not, any more than Lenin did, want them to obey
the people’s wishes. Not surprisingly, the sources agree that
virtually all village meetings were one way affairs of lectures,
explanations, instructions, scoldings, promises, and warnings. The
assembled villagers were expected to be what Sally Falk Moore has
appropriately called “ratifying bodies public,” giving populist
legitimacy to decisions made elsewhere.\footnote{Sally Falk Moore, \emph{Social Facts and Fabrications: “Customary” Law on Kilintunjuro, 1880-1980} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 314.} Far from achieving this
populist legitimacy, the villagization campaign created only an
alienated, skeptical, demoralized, and uncooperative peasantry for
which Tanzania would pay a huge price, both financially and
politically.\footnote{Here, incidentally, is where I think Goran Hyden’s otherwise interesting book misses the boat altogether. The resistance of the Tanzanian peasantry seems less a consequence of some age-old “economy of affection” than a rational response to painful memories of the dire consequences of many state schemes, most of which had miscarried.}

\subsection{A Streamlined People and Their Crops}


The planned new villages followed both a bureaucratic logic and an
aesthetic logic. Nyerere and his planners had a visual idea of just
how a modern village should look. Such visual ideas become powerful
tropes.  Take the word “streamline,” for example. “Streamlining” has
become a powerful image for modern forms, conveying economy,
sleekness, efficiency, and minimal friction or resistance. Politicians
and administrators hasten to cash in on the symbolic capital behind
the term by declaring that they will streamline this agency or that
corporation, allowing the audience’s visual imagination to fill in the
details of a bureaucratic equivalent of a sleek locomotive or
jet. Thus it is that a term that has a specific, contextual meaning in
one field (aerodynamics) comes to be generalized to subjects where its
meaning is more visual and aesthetic than scientific. Above all, as we
shall see, the aesthetic of the new village was a negation of the
past. First, however, to the administrative logic.


What greeted Nyerere when he visited new villages in the district of
Shinyanga (northwest Tanzania) in early 1975 was fairly typical of
bureaucratic haste and insensibility.\footnote{Elsewhere, in Tanga for example, there are cases of “Potemkin villages” being created for a Nyerere visit and dismantled later. See Hyden, \emph{Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania}, pp. 101-8.} Some of the villages were
laid out as “one long street of houses stretching for miles like the
wagons of a locomotive.”\footnote{Mwapachu, “Operation Planned Villages,” quoted in Coulson, \emph{African Socialism in Practice}, p. 121.} It appeared to Nyerere that this was a
crude case of simply “dumping” the settlers. But such linear villages
did have a curious logic behind them. Administrators had a penchant
for locating new villages along the major roads, where they could be
most easily reached and monitored.\footnote{Henry Bernstein, “Notes on State and the Peasantry: The Tanzanian Case,” \emph{Review of African Political Economy} 21 (May-September 1981): 57.} Roadside siting rarely made
economic sense; it did, on the other hand, demonstrate how the goal of
extending the state’s control over the peasantry often trumped the
state’s other goal of raising agricultural production. As Stalin had
learned, a captured peasantry was not necessarily a productive
peasantry.


The visual aesthetics of how a proper new village should look combined
elements of administrative regularity, tidiness, and legibility linked
to an overall Cartesian order. This was the modern administrative
village, and it was implicitly associated with a modern, disciplined,
and productive peasantry. One astute observer, sympathetic to the aims
of villagization, noted the overall effect. “The new approach,” he
explained, “was more in line with bureaucratic thinking and with what
a bureaucracy can do effectively: enforced movement of the peasants
into new ‘modern’ settlements, i.e., settlements with houses placed
close together, in straight lines, along the roads, and with the
fields outside the nucleated village, organized in block farms, each
block containing the villager’s individual plots, but with only one
type of crop, and readily accessible for control by the agricultural
extension officer and eventual cultivation by government
tractors.”\footnote{Jannik Boesen, quoted in Coulson, \emph{Tanzania}, p. 254.}


As the exercise of village creation was repeated, the administrative
image of the modern village became increasingly codified, a known
protocol that almost any bureaucrat could reproduce. “The first
response of the West Lake leaders, when they were called upon to
implement ujamaa in the Region, was to think of resettlement. Creating
new settlements had several advantages. They were highly visible, and
easy to organize right from the beginning in the orderly, nice looking
way preferred by bureaucrats with the houses and shambas [gardens,
farms] in straight lines, etc.”\footnote{Boesen, Madsen, and Moody, \emph{Ujamaa}, p. 165.} Reconstructing the historical
lineage of this composite picture of modern rural life would be
fascinating, although tangential to our purposes. No doubt it owes
something to colonial policy and hence to the look of the modern
European rural landscape, and we also know that Nyerere was impressed
with what he saw on his trips to the Soviet Union and to China. What
is significant, however, is that the modern planned village in
Tanzania was essentially a point-by-point negation of existing rural
practice, which included shifting cultivation and pastoralism;
polycropping; living well off the main roads; kinship and lineage
authority; small, scattered settlements with houses built
higgledy-piggledy; and production that was dispersed and opaque to the
state. The logic of this negation seemed often to prevail over sound
ecological or economic considerations.

\subsection{Communal Farming and Intensive Production}


Collecting Tanzanians into villages was seen from the very beginning
as a necessary step in establishing completely new forms of
agricultural production in which the state would play the major
role. The first five-year plan was explicit.



\begin{quote}


Although the improvement approach [as opposed to the transformation
approach] can contribute to increasing production in \dots{} zones [with
low and irregular rainfall], it cannot in all events give rise to very
substantial results because of the dispersal of the farm producers,
the impoverishment of the soils by the practice of bush burning and
considerable difficulties in marketing products. The policy which
Government has decided to pursue with respect to all these zones
consists in \emph{re-grouping} and \emph{re-settling} farmers on the most
favorable soil, installing there a system of private or collective
ownership and introducing \emph{supervised crop rotation and mixed farming}
that would permit the maintenance of soil fertility.\footnote{Coulson, “Agricultural Policies in Mainland Tanzania,” p. 88 (emphasis added).}



\end{quote}


The population concentrated in planned villages would, by degrees,
grow cash crops (as specified by the agricultural experts) on communal
fields with state-supplied machinery. Their housing, their local
administration, their agricultural practices, and, most important,
their workdays would be overseen by state authorities.


The forced villagization campaign itself had such a disastrous effect
on agricultural production that the state was in no position to press
ahead immediately with full-scale communal farming. Huge imports of
food were necessary from 1973 through 1975.\footnote{See Phil Raikes, “Eating the Carrot and Wielding the Stick: The Agricultural Sector in Tanzania,” in Jannik Boesen et at., \emph{Tanzania: Crisis and Struggle for Survival} (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1986), p. 119. Unfavorable price and currency movements meant that a five-fold increase in the volume of imports from 1973 to 1975 now represented a \emph{thirty-fold} increase in value.} Nyerere declared that
the 1.2 billion shillings spent for food imports would have bought one
cow for every Tanzanian family. Roughly 60 percent of the new villages
were located on semiarid land unsuitable for permanent cultivation,
requiring peasants to walk long distances to reach viable plots. The
chaos of the move itself and the slow process of adapting to a new
ecological setting meant further disruptions of production.\footnote{Here the key is perhaps the difference between subsistence production and production for the market. I am grateful to Bruce McKim for emphasizing that the macroeconomic incentives for market production were minimal. Producer prices, which were set by the state marketing boards, were all but confiscatory, and in any case the shops contained few goods on which the proceeds could have been spent.}


Until 1975, the state’s effort to control production outside its own
state schemes took the classic colonial form: laws mandating that each
household grow certain crops on a minimum number of acres. A variety
of fines and penalties were deployed to enforce these measures. In one
region, officials announced that no one would be allowed to go to
market or ride a bus unless he could prove that he was cultivating the
required seven and one-half acres of land. In another case, famine
relief was withheld until each villager had planted one acre of
cassava in accordance with the minimum acreage law.\footnote{The intention of this law, which had a long colonial history, was to force the peasantry into planting crops that did well under and conditions, thus lowering the government’s food relief expenditures during times of famine.} One major
source of the conflict leading to the dissolution of the Ruvuma ujamaa
villages was the forced cultivation of fire-cured tobacco at what the
villagers took to be confiscatory prices. As the colonizers had
understood long before, forced cultivation of this kind could be
successfully imposed only on a peasantry that was physically
concentrated and therefore able to be monitored and, if necessary,
disciplined.\footnote{The system of cotton cultivation in Mozambique was a draconian model of this policy. The Portuguese made great efforts to concentrate the population (concentraçaoes) so that officials or concessionaires could enforce cotton cultivation and delivery. In one variant, plots were marked off by surveyors, and every family was assigned a plot. The scheme was enforced by a system in which personalized passes indicated whether their bearers had acquitted their cotton quotas for the year; those found in default could be arrested, beaten, or sent off as draft labor to the dreaded sisal plantations. For an exceptionally detailed and comprehensive account, see Allen Isaacman, \emph{Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty: Peasants, Work, and Rural Struggle in Colonial Mozambique, 1938-1961} (Portsmouth, N. H.: Heinemann, 1996).}


The next step was regulated, communal production.\footnote{Officials aspired to control not only production but also consumption. In mid-1974 in the Dodoma district, for example, all private retail trade in essential food items was banned in favor of the monopoly formed by the state’s consumer cooperative societies and Ujamaa shops. See “Only Co-ops Will Sell Food in Dodoma,” \emph{Daily News} (Dar es Salaam), June 6, 1974. This move was probably provoked by the losses experienced by “official” shops, which were usually run by party cadres and lower-level officials. It would be surprising if such a monopoly over retail trade in food ever became much more than an aspiration.} This form of
cultivation was anticipated in the Villages and Ujamaa Villages Act
(1975), which established “village collective farms” and required
village authorities to draw up annual work plans and production
targets.


In practice, the size of each communal field and its production plan
were typically set by an agricultural field officer (who was eager to
please his superiors) and the village chief, with little or no wider
consultation.\footnote{Boesen, Madsen, and Moody, \emph{Ujamaa}, p. 105.} The result was a labor plan that bore no relation
to the seasonal supply of local labor, let alone the peasants’ own
goals.  Work on the collective village farm was experienced as little
different from corvee labor. Villagers had no choice in the matter,
and it was rare for their work to yield a profit. Even though
extension agents were directed to devote their efforts exclusively to
the communal fields, the crops were often unsuitable, the soil
infertile, the seed and fertilizer late to arrive, and the promised
tractor with plow nowhere in sight.  These shortcomings, plus the
provision that any profit (a very rare event) from the communal field
could be counted as revenue for the village committee, meant that the
work was deeply resented.


In theory, the system of political and labor control was thorough and
inescapable. Villages were divided into sections (\emph{mitaa}) and each
section into several cells (\emph{mashina}, made up of ten households). The
residential order was replicated on the communal fields. Each section
was responsible for the cultivation of a segment of the communal
field, and within that segment, each cell was responsible for a
corresponding fragment. Again in theory, the cell leader was
responsible for labor mobilization and surveillance.\footnote{Graham Thiele, “Villages as Economic Agents: The Accident of Social Reproduction,” in R. G. Abrahams, ed., \emph{Villagers, Villages, and the State in Modern Tanzania}, Cambridge African Monograph Series, no. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 81-109.}
Structurally, then, the parallels in the residential and
labor-disciplinary hierarchies were designed to make them perfectly
transparent and legible to the authorities.


In practice, the system broke down quickly. The areas actually under
communal cultivation were typically far smaller than the figures
officially reported.\footnote{For early examples of these figures for five crops, see Boesen, Madsen, and Moody, \emph{Ujamaa}, p. 102.} Most section and village authorities were
content to go through the motions when it came to communal
cultivation. And they were reluctant to impose fines on their
neighbors who neglected the labor rules in order to tend to their
all-important private plots.


As a response to such pervasive foot-dragging, many communal fields
were divided up, and each household was made responsible for
cultivating, say, half an acre.\footnote{Graham Thiele, “Villages as Economic Agents,” pp. 98-99. See also Don Hassett, “The Development of Village Co-operative Enterprise in Mchinga II Village, Lindi Region,” in Abrahams, \emph{Villagers, Villages,} pp. 16-54.} It was no longer necessary to
coordinate labor for working a single large field, and the
responsibility for cultivation, and hence sanctions, could now be
pinpointed. The new system resembled the colonial forced cultivation
system, with one difference: the plots were physically consolidated
for easier supervision. Still, the absence of any appreciable return
from this labor meant that each household focused on its private
holding and treated the communal plot as an onerous residual activity,
despite occasional official warnings that the priorities should be
inverted.\footnote{Thus Ndugu Lyander, the regional part secretary for the Kilombero district along the Great Uhuru Railway (built with Chinese assistance), reminded the people that each family must cultivate its two assigned acres, warning them (in language suggestive of the resistance that he was meeting) “that action will be taken against anyone who does not have a farm and no excuses will be entertained” (“100,000 Move to Uhuru Line Villages,” \emph{Daily News} [Dar es Salaam], October 28, 1974).} The disparity in yields naturally reflected the
disparity in attention.


The aim of Tanzanian rural policy from 1967 through the early 1980s
was to reconfigure the rural population into a form that would allow
the state to impose its development agenda and, in the process, to
control the work and production of cultivators. Nowhere is this more
explicit than in the document for the third five-year plan (1978): “In
the rural sector, the Party has had great success in resettling the
rural peasantry in villages \emph{where it is now possible to identify
able-bodied individuals able to work} and also to identify the acreage
available for agricultural purposes\dots{} The plan intends to make sure
that in every workplace, rural or urban, \emph{our implementing organs set
specific work targets each year}\dots{} The village government will see
to it that all Party policies in respect of development programmes are
adhered to.”\footnote{Bernstein, “Notes on State and the Peasantry,” p. 48.} In case the purpose of visibility and control was
doubted, the plan went on to explain that agricultural development “in
our present conditions” calls for “setting up work timetables and
production targets.”\footnote{Ibid. Bernstein points out astutely that the Tanzanian state faced an imposing fiscal crisis at the time. The growth of the state budget and personnel had for a long time outpaced the growth of the economy and of government revenues, including foreign exchange. The effort to regiment the peasant economy in the hope of both raising production and increasing state revenues was virtually the only alternative available.} Communal farms (now called village
government farms) were mandated. But as Henry Bernstein notes, with
the incomplete collectivization of land and the unwillingness to
resort to truly draconian enforcement measures, these communal farms
were bound to founder.\footnote{There had also been considerable growth in parastatal corporations where production was carried out by wage labor. A good many of these corporations took to farming (grains, sugar, and fodder for dairy cows). These operations, especially the sugar parastatal plantations, were large and capital intensive, as were the nationalized sisal and tea plantations.}


The underlying premise of Nyerere’s agrarian policy, for all its
rhetorical flourishes in the direction of traditional culture, was
little different from that of colonial agrarian policy. That premise
was that the practices of African cultivators and pastoralists were
backward, unscientific, inefficient, and ecologically irresponsible.
Only close supervision, training, and, if need be, coercion by
specialists in scientific agriculture could bring them and their
practices in line with a modern Tanzania. They were the problem to
which the agricultural experts were the solution.


It was precisely the assumption, to quote a Tanzanian civil servant,
of a “traditional outlook and unwillingness to change”\footnote{Quoted in Coulson, \emph{Tanzania}, p. 255.} that
\emph{required} the entire series of agricultural schemes, from ujamaa
villages to forced relocation to the supervised cultivation launched
by the colonial and the independent regimes. This view of the
peasantry permeates the 1964 World Bank report and the first
Tanganyikan five-year plan. Although the plan notes that “significant
inroads have been made into the conservatism of the rural population,
who as they become organized into co-operatives, respond
encouragingly,”\footnote{Ibid., p. 161.} it argues that more extensive measures are called
for. Thus the 1964 plan declares: “How to overcome the \emph{destructive
conservatism of the people}, and generate the drastic agrarian reforms
which must be effected if the country is to survive is one of the most
difficult problems the political leaders of Tanzania have to
face.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 92.}


Nyerere entirely agreed with the majority of the extension officials,
who believed that their job was to “overcome [the farmers’] apathy and
attachment to outmoded practices.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 158.} He and the World Bank saw
eye-to-eye in having the first plan provide for sixty new settlement
schemes in which farmers who followed the rules would receive
land. There is no mistaking this picture of a willfully ignorant and
less than diligent class of cultivators in Nyerere’s first broadcast
as prime minister in 1961: “If you have cotton unpicked on your
shamba, if you have cultivated half an acre less than you could
cultivate, if you are letting the soil run needlessly off your land,
or if your shamba is full of weeds, if you deliberately ignore the
advice given you by the agricultural experts, then you are a traitor
in the battle.”\footnote{Nyerere, “Broadcast on Becoming Prime Minister” (May 1961), in Nyerere, \emph{Freedom and Unity}, p. 115.}


The logical counterpart to the lack of faith of the ordinary
cultivator was the hyperfaith of the agricultural experts and the
“blind faith in machines and large scale operations.”\footnote{Coulson, “Agricultural Policies in Mainland Tanzania,” p. 76.} Just as the
planned village was a vast “improvement” in legibility and control
over past settlement practices, the planned agriculture offered by the
experts was, in its legibility and order, an “improvement” on the
infinite variety and muddle of smallholdings and their existing
techniques.\footnote{As might well be expected, the aftermath of ujamaa villagization has seen a huge number of land disputes between settlements, individuals, and kin groups—disputes with important environmental consequences. See the excellent analysis by Achim von Oppen, “Bauern, Boden, and Baeume: Landkonflikte and ihre Bedeutung fuer Ressourcenschutz in tanzanischen Doerfern nach \emph{Ujamaa},” \emph{Afrika-Spectrum} (February 1993).} In the new villages, the settlers’ private plots
(\emph{shambas}) were generally mapped out by surveyors and were trim,
square or rectangular plots of equal size, placed side by side in
straight rows (figure 31). Their design followed the same logic as the
segmented communal plots: a logic of clarity and administrative ease
rather than agronomic sense. Thus when a scheme for tea cultivation
was begun, the smallholders were required to plant their tea in a
single block “because it was easier for the extension staff to work on
tea that was planted in the same place.”\footnote{Boesen, Madsen, and Moody, \emph{Ujamaa}, p. 115.}


The order of the fields was replicated in the order of the plants
within the fields. Tanzanian farmers often planted two or more crops
together in the same field (a technique variously called polycropping,
intercropping, or relay cropping). In the coffee-growing areas, for
example, coffee was often interplanted with bananas, beans, and other
annuals. For most agronomists, this practice was anathema. As one
dissenting specialist explained, “The agricultural extension service
has been encouraging farmers to plant \emph{pure-stand} coffee and
considering this practice the \emph{sine qua non} of modern farming.”\footnote{Phil Raikes, “Coffee Production in West Lake Region, Tanzania,” Institute for Development Research, Copenhagen, Paper A.76.9 (1976), p. 3, quoted in Coulson, “Agricultural Policies in Mainland Tanzania,” p. 80. See also Phil Raikes, “Eating the Carrot and Wielding the Stick,” pp. 105-41.}
If the crop were bananas, the banana trees must also be in pure
stands. Agricultural field officers judged their accomplishments by
whether each crop under their supervision was planted in straight,
properly spaced rows and was not mixed with any other cultigen.\footnote{Boesen, Madsen, and Moody, \emph{Ujamaa}, p. 67.}
Like large-scale mechanized farming, monocropping had a scientific
rationale \emph{in particular contexts}, but extension officers often
promoted monocropping uncritically as an article of faith in the
catechism of modern farming. While empirical evidence was even then
mounting in favor of the ecological soundness and productivity of some
intercropping regimes, the faith continued unabated. What is clear,
however, is that monocropping and row planting vastly facilitate the
work of administrators and agronomists. Both techniques facilitate
inspection and calculations of acreage and yield; they greatly
simplify field trials by minimizing the number of variables at play in
any one field; they streamline the job of extension recommendations
and the supervision of cultivation; and, finally, they simplify
control of the harvest. The simplified and legible field crop offers
to state agricultural officers many of the same advantages that the
“stripped-down” commercial forest offered to scientific foresters and
revenue officers.

\subsection{Bureaucratic Convenience, Bureaucratic Interests}


Authoritarian social engineering is apt to display the full range of
standard bureaucratic pathologies. The transformations it wishes to
effect cannot generally be brought about without applying force or
without treating nature and human subjects as if they were functions
in a few administrative routines. Far from being regrettable
anomalies, these behavioral by-products are inherent in high-modernist
campaigns of this kind. I am purposely ignoring here the more obvious
inhumanities that are inevitable whenever great power is placed in the
hands of largely unaccountable state authorities who are under
pressure from above to produce results despite popular
resistance. Instead, I stress two key elements of the bureaucratic
response typified by the ujamaa village campaign: first, the civil
servants’ inclination to reinterpret the campaign so that it called
for results that they could more easily deliver, and second, their
disposition to reinterpret the campaign in line with what was in their
corporate interests.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-32.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 31. Plan for a ujamaa village: Makazi Mapya, Omulunazi, Rushwa, Tanzania}
\end{figure}


The first tendency was most readily apparent in the displacement of
goals toward strictly quantitative criteria of performance. What might
be called a “substantive ujamaa village,” whose residents had freely
consented to move, had agreed on how to manage a communal plot, and
were productive farmers managing their own local affairs (Nyerere’s
initial vision), was replaced by a “notional ujamaa village,” an
integer that could be added to an avalanche of statistics. Thus party
cadres and civil servants, in showing how much they had accomplished,
emphasized the numbers of people moved, new villages created, house
lots and communal fields surveyed, wells drilled, areas cleared and
plowed, tons of fertilizer delivered, and TANU branches set up. No
matter if a given ujamaa village was not much more than a few
truckloads of angry peasants and their belongings, unceremoniously
dumped at a site marked off with a few surveyors’ stakes; it still
counted as one ujamaa village to the officials’ credit. In addition, a
pettifogging aesthetics might prevail over substance. The desire to
have all the houses in a planned village perfectly aligned, which was
presumably linked to easy surveying and the desire to please the
inspecting officials, might require that a house be dismantled in
order to move it a scant fifty feet to the surveyor’s line.\footnote{James De Vries and Louise P. Fortmann, “Large-scale Villagization: Operation Sogeza in Iringa Region,” in Coulson, \emph{African Socialism in Practice}, p. 135.}


The “productivity of the political apparatus” was judged by numerical
results that permitted aggregation and, perhaps more important,
comparisons.\footnote{The apt phrase is from Bernstein, “Notes on State and the Peasantry,” p. 59.} And when officials realized that their futures
depended on producing impressive figures quickly, a process of
competitive emulation was unleashed. One official described the
atmosphere that caused him to abandon an initial strategy of selective
implementation and to plunge ahead.



\begin{quote}


This [strategy] was found to be unworkable, for two main
reasons. First, there was a competitive attitude (particularly between
regions) with all its political overtones. Here was a moment for
self-aggrandizement by proving ability to mobilize a rural population
wholesale. Reports were coming in from Mara Region that they were
about to complete their operation when we had not started at all. Top
party officials were heralding and positively reinforcing the
achievements of resettlement in Geita District. Who, in such
circumstances, would have wished to lag behind? Political leaders
therefore called for quick measures to complete the resettlement
exercise in a short time. Such a rushed exercise caused problems, of
course, in the form of poorly planned villages.\footnote{Mwapachu, “Operation Planned Villages,” p. 117 (emphasis added).}



\end{quote}


Nyerere, necessarily perceiving the campaign largely through sets of
statistics and self-congratulatory official reports, exacerbated the
competitive atmosphere. His glowing report to TANU was a delirium of
numbers, targets, and percentages.\footnote{Neither in Nyerere’s speeches at this time nor in official reports in the press were such numbers often linked to indices of rural transformation such as mortality rates, income, consumption, etc. See Jannik Boesen, “Tanzania: From Ujamaa to Villagization,” in Mwansasu and Pratt, \emph{Towards Socialism in Tanzania}, p. 128.}



\begin{quote}


Consider, for example, the question of villagization. In my report to
the 1973 TANU Conference I was able to say that 2,028,164 people were
living in villages. Two years later, in June 1975, I reported to the
next TANU Conference that approximately 9,100,000 people were living
in village communities. Now there are about 13,065,000 people living
together in 7,684 villages. This is a tremendous achievement. It is an
achievement of TANU and Government leaders in cooperation with the
people of Tanzania. It means that something like 70\% of our people
have moved their homes in the space of about three years.\footnote{Quoted in Coulson, \emph{African Socialism in Practice}, p. 65. The relentless emphasis on quantitative achievements was echoed in the newspapers: so many people moved to new villages, so many new villages formed, so many acres of crops sown, such and such a percentage of a district rehoused, so many plots of land allocated, etc. See, for example, typical articles in \emph{Daily News} [Dar es Salaam]: “14,133 Move into Villages in Chjunya,” February 19, 1974; “Two Months After Op eration Arusha: 13,928 Families Move into Ujamaa Villages,” October 21, 1974; “Iringa: Settling the People into Planned Villages,” April 15, 1975. \protect\endgraf Nyerere did not, as had Stalin, make a “Dizzy with Success” speech and call a temporary halt in villagization. On the other hand, Tanzanian villagization was not nearly as brutal. Nyerere continued on in this speech to explain again how this concentration of population would permit the delivery of social services “necessary to a life of dignity.”}



\end{quote}


The second, and surely most ominous, deflection of the ujamaa campaign
brought off by state authorities was to see that its implementation
systematically served to underwrite their status and power. As Andrew
Coulson has perceptively noted, in the actual process of creating new
villages, the administrators and party officials (themselves
competitors) effectively evaded all those policies that would have
diminished their privileges and power while exaggerating those that
reinforced their corporate sway. Thus such ideas as allowing small
ujamaa villages like Ruvuma to operate free of government interference
(before 1968), pupils’ involvement in decision making in schools
(1969), workers’ participation in management (1969-70), and the power
to elect village councils and leadership (1973-75) were all honored in
the breach.\footnote{Coulson, \emph{Tanzania}, pp. 320-31.} High-modernist social engineering is ideal soil for
authoritarian pretensions, and Tanzanian officialdom made the most of
this chance to consolidate its position.\footnote{For a powerfully argued parallel case, see James Ferguson, \emph{The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Ferguson concludes that “the ‘development’ apparatus in Lesotho is not a machine for eliminating poverty that is incidentally involved with the state bureaucracy; it is a machine for reinforcing and expanding the exercise of bureaucratic state power, which incidentally takes ‘poverty’ as its point of entry” (pp. 255-56). In Tanzania, there were still more important ways in which the official classes gained power, including the displacement of the Asian trading minority as buyers of rural produce and in retailing, as well as the nationalization of trade and industry in general. It is indicative that the size of the government’s budget and the number of state employees increased at rates well above the rate of economic growth until the mid-1970s, when a fiscal crisis prevented any further expansion.}

\subsection{The Idea of a “National Plantation”}


Villagization was meant to radically concentrate Tanzania’s peasantry
in order to regiment it politically and economically. If it worked, it
would transform the dispersed, autonomous, and illegible populations
that had thus far eluded most of the state policies they found
onerous.  The planners pictured, instead, a population settled in
government designed villages under tight administrative control,
planting communal fields in which pure-stand crops were grown
according to state specifications. If we allow for the continued
existence of substantial private plots and the (related) weakness of
labor control, the whole scheme came perilously close to looking like
a vast, albeit noncontiguous, state plantation. What a neutral
observer might have taken as a new form of servitude, however
benevolent, was largely unquestioned by the elites, for the policy
sailed under the banner of “development.”


It seems incredible, in retrospect, that any state could proceed with
so much hubris and so little information and planning to the
dislocation of so many million lives. It seems, again in retrospect, a
wild and irrational scheme which was bound to fail both the
expectations of its planners and the material and social needs of its
hapless victims.


The inhumanities of compulsory villagization were magnified by the
deeply ingrained authoritarian habits of the bureaucracy and by the
pell-mell rush of the campaign. To concentrate on such administrative
and political shortcomings, however, is to miss the point. Even if the
campaign had been granted more time, more technical skill, and a
better “bedside manner,” the party-state could not possibly have
assembled and digested the information necessary to make a
fundamentally schematic plan succeed. The existing economic activity
and physical movement of the Tanzanian rural population were the
consequences of a mind-bogglingly complex, delicate, and pliable set
of adaptations to their diverse social and material environment.\footnote{In a stingy landscape, to stay put is suicide and to move is the condition of survival. See, for an extended and poetic case along these lines, Bruce Chatwin, \emph{The Songlines} (London: Cape, 1987).}
As in the customary land-tenure arrangements examined in chapter 1,
these adaptations defy administrative codification because of their
endless local variability, their elaboration, and their plasticity in
the face of new conditions.  If land tenure defies codification, then,
it stands to reason that the connections structuring the entire
material and social life of each particular group of peasants would
remain largely opaque to both specialists and administrators.


Under the circumstances, wholesale, by-the-book resettlement made a
havoc of peasant lives. Only a few of the most obvious ecological
failures of villagization will serve to illustrate the pattern of
ignorance. Peasants were forcibly moved from annually flooded lands
that were vital to their cropping regime and shifted to poor soils on
high ground. They were, as we have seen, moved to all-weather roads
where the soil was unfamiliar or unsuitable for the crops
envisaged. Village living placed cultivators far from their fields,
thus thwarting the crop watching and pest control that more dispersed
homesteads made possible.  The concentration of livestock and people
often had the unfortunate consequence of encouraging cholera and
livestock epidemics. For the highly mobile Maasai and other
pastoralists, the scheme of creating ujamaa ranches by herding cattle
to a single location was an unmitigated disaster for range
conservation and pastoral livelihoods.\footnote{M. L. Ole Parkipuny, “Some Crucial Aspects of the Maasai Predicament,” in Coulson, \emph{African Socialism in Practice}, chap. 10, pp. 139-60.}


The failure of ujamaa villages was almost guaranteed by the
highmodernist hubris of planners and specialists who believed that
they alone knew how to organize a more satisfactory, rational, and
productive life for their citizens. It should be noted that they did
have something to contribute to what could have been a more fruitful
development of the Tanzanian countryside. But their insistence that
they had a monopoly on useful knowledge and that they impose this
knowledge set the stage for disaster.


Settling people into supervised villages was emphatically not uniquely
the brainchild of the nationalist elites of independent Tanzania.
Villagization had a long colonial history in Tanzania and elsewhere,
as program after program was devised to concentrate the
population. The same techno-economic vision was shared, until very
late in the game, by the World Bank, United States Agency for
International Development (USAID), and other development agencies
contributing to Tanzanian development.\footnote{See, for example, Raikes, “Eating the Carrot and Wielding the Stick”: “Many policies rest on assumptions about agricultural ‘modernization’ held in common by the Tanzanian Government and its anti-socialist critics, while no small proportion of policy has been carried over (with or without change) from the colonial period” (p. 106). See also the brilliant analysis of the application of the World Bank development paradigm to Lesotho in Ferguson, \emph{The Anti-Politics Machine}, which also discusses World Bank plans for villagization in Lesotho.} However enthusiastic they
were in spearheading their campaign, the political leaders of Tanzania
were more consumers of a high-modernist faith that had originated
elsewhere much earlier than they were producers.


What was perhaps distinctive about the Tanzanian scheme was its speed,
its comprehensiveness, and its intention to deliver such collective
services as schools, clinics, and clean water. Although considerable
force was applied in seeing the scheme through, even then its
consequences were not nearly as brutal or irremediable as those of
Soviet collectivization.\footnote{Ron Aminzade (personal communication, September 22, 1995) claims that Nyerere’s continued popularity, despite the failures of villagization, may be partly due to the ways in which resettlement and other national policies have worked to erode hierarchies of age and gender, thus improving the relative position of younger people and of women.} The Tanzanian state’s relative weakness
and unwillingness to resort to Stalinist methods\footnote{The pace of villagization slowed precipitously in late 1974, when a drought that reduced the harvest by 50 percent followed on the heels of poor harvests from the preceding two years. It is difficult to specify the extent to which villagization and mandated cultivation exacerbated the food-supply shortage. Tanzania was, at any rate, obliged to import unprecedented amounts of foodstuffs at precisely the time when the costs of foreign oil and machinery had skyrocketed. Although the food shortage made many peasants more willing to move in exchange for food rations, they were less willing to hand over the food that they had grown to the state marketing boards. Under the straitened circumstances, large-scale social experimentation was shelved. See Hyden, \emph{Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania}, pp. 129-30, 141, 146, and Deborah Bryceson, “Household, Hoe, and Nation: Development Policies of the Nyerere Era,” in Michael Hodd, ed., \emph{Tanzania After Nyerere} (London: Pinter, 1988), pp. 36-48.} as well as the
Tanzanian peasants’ tactical advantages, including flight, unofficial
production and trade, smuggling, and foot-dragging, combined to make
the practice of villagization far less destructive than the
theory.\footnote{Much of the surplus-producing population of Tanzania has the decided tac tical advantage of living near the country’s borders, making smuggling in both directions a ready option.}

\section{The “Ideal” State Village: Ethiopian Variation}


The pattern of compulsory villagization in Ethiopia uncannily
resembles that of Russia in its coerciveness and Tanzania in its
ostensible rationale. Beyond the obvious shared socialist terrain and
official visits by Ethiopian officials to Tanzania to observe its
program in action,\footnote{Here again, for the best source on the copying of administrative structures, development plans, and economic organization among Marxist regimes, see Colburn, \emph{The Vogue of Revolution}, especially chaps. 4 and 5, pp. 49-77.} there seems to be a deeper affinity at work
between the assertion of state authority in the countryside, on one
hand, and the results in terms of process and actual physical plans,
on the other. The continuity of Nyerere’s plans with those of the
colonizers is obvious in the Tanzanian case. In Ethiopia, which was
never colonized, resettlement can be seen as a century-old project of
the imperial dynasty to subjugate non-Amharic-speaking peoples and,
more generally, to bring fractious provinces under central control.


Although the Marxist revolutionary elite that seized power in early
1974 resorted to forced settlement at an early stage, its leader,
Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam and the Dergue—the shadowy
ruling body of the revolutionary regime—did not call for full-scale
villagization until 1985. The policy anticipated the eventual
resettlement of all 33 million rural Ethiopians. Echoing Nyerere,
Mengistu declared, “The scattered and haphazard habitation and
livelihood of Ethiopian peasants cannot build socialism\dots{} Insofar as
efforts are dispersed and livelihood is individual, the results are
only hand-to-mouth existence amounting to fruitless struggle and
drudgery, which cannot build a prosperous society.”\footnote{Quoted in Girma Kebbede, \emph{The State and Development in Ethiopia} (Englewood, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992), p. 23.} The other
explanations for village settlement were no different from those given
in Tanzania: concentration would bring services to scattered
populations, permit state-designed social production (producer
cooperatives), and allow mechanization and political education.\footnote{See the remarkably detailed and insightful report by Cultural Survival: Jason W. Clay, Sandra Steingraber, and Peter Niggli, \emph{The Spoils of Fanzine: Ethiopian Famine Policy and Peasant Agriculture}, Cultural Survival Report 25 (Cambridge, Mass.: Cultural Survival 1988), especially chap. 5, “Villagization in Ethiopia,” pp. 106-35. As an empire, the Ethiopian state had a long tradition of military settlements and colonization which continued under Mengistu in the forced migration of populations from the north into the lands of the Oromo in the south.}


Socialism and its precondition, villagization, were virtually
Mengistu’s way of saying “modern.” In his justification for massive
resettlement, he decried Ethiopia’s reputation as “a symbol of
backwardness and a valley of ignorance.” He called on Ethiopians to
“rally together to free farming from the ugly forces of nature.”
Finally, he condemned pastoralism per se, praising villagization as a
way “to rehabilitate our nomad society.”\footnote{Ibid., pp. 271, 273.}


The pace of resettlement, however, was far more brutal in Ethiopia,
inadvertently helping to lay the groundwork for the subsequent
rebellions that brought down the regime. By March 1986, a scant year
into the operation, the regime claimed that 4.6 million peasants had
been settled in 4,500 villages.\footnote{John M. Cohen and Nils-Ivar Isaksson, “Villagization in Ethiopia’s Arsi Region,” \emph{Journal of Modern African Studies} 25, no. 3 (1987): 435-64. These figures are a bit fishy. As each village was planned for a notional one thousand inhabitants, it looks as if they multiplied the number of villages by the mandated population, adding perhaps a few additional inhabitants to account for officials. Cohen and Isaksson were more inclined to take the regime at its word than were Clay and his colleagues at Cultural Survival.} Only three months were allotted
between the first “agitation and propaganda” (read, “command”) and the
move itself—often over huge distances. All accounts suggest that many
of the new settlements received almost nothing in the way of services
and had more of the aspect of a penal colony than of a functioning
village.


Forced villagization in the Arsi region was apparently planned
directly from the center in Addis Ababa, with little or no local
participation.  There was a strict template which local surveyors and
administrators were ordered to follow. The plan was carefully
replicated in each location, inasmuch as this was not a regime
inclined to tolerate local improvisation. “But the local recruits
learned their jobs well, for the villages and their 1,000 [square]
meter compounds, carefully marked by pegs and sod cuts, have followed
the geometric grid pattern required by the guidelines. In fact, some
villages have been too rigidly laid out; for example, one farmer had
to move his large, well-constructed \emph{tukul} [traditional thatched
house] some 20 feet so that it would be ‘in line’ with all the other
buildings in its row.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 449.}


The close alignment between theory and practice can be seen by
comparing the layout of a government plan for an ideal village with an
aerial photograph of a new village (figures 32 and 33). Notice the
central location of all key government functions. A standardizing,
round-number, bureaucratic mentality is obvious from the fact that
each village was expected to have one thousand inhabitants and each
compound one thousand square meters.\footnote{A similar geometrical meticulousness was followed in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Walls of earth were thrown up to make long, straight canals, eliminating irregular paddies and creating hectare squares of riceland. Concentration of population, forced labor, the prohibition of foraging or departure, the control of food rations, and executions were carried to an extreme rarely seen in Ethiopia. See Ben Kiernan, \emph{The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), chap. 5.} If every village had the
same population and the same land allotment, a single model could
simply be applied everywhere; no local knowledge would be
required. The identical disposition of land in each settlement would
make it that much easier for the authorities to send out general
directives, to monitor crop production, and to control the harvest
through the new Agricultural Marketing Corporation (AMC).  The generic
plan was particularly convenient for the hard-pressed surveyors,
precisely because it bore no relation whatever to local ecological,
economic, or social patterns. In order to facilitate the uniform
design of the cookie-cutter villages, the planning officials were
directed to choose flat, cleared sites and to insist on straight roads
and similar, numbered houses.\footnote{Clay, Steingraber, and Niggli, \emph{The Spoils of Famine}, p. 121. Like the Soviet Union, Ethiopia had a separate category of state farms that were run on the basis of hired labor and were, at least initially, very highly mechanized. They were expected to produce a supply of major grains and export crops that would be under direct control of the government. “In the late 1970s, as a result of the slow voluntary move toward collectivization, the government began to identify for future state farms, flat, fertile areas for mechanized agriculture. The clearing of residents off such areas so that they could be used to produce directly for the state appears to be a primary reason for the villagization in Bale” (ibid., p. 149).}


The objects of this exercise in geometry were under no illusions about
its purpose. When they were finally free to talk, refugees in Somalia
told their interviewers that the new settlement pattern was devised to
control dissidence and rebellion, to prevent people from leaving, to
“make it easier to watch the people,” to control the crops, to
register possessions and livestock, and (in Wollega) to “allow them to
take our boys to war more easily.”\footnote{Ibid., pp. 190-92, 204.}


In “model producer cooperatives,” standardized housing was provided:
square, tin-roofed houses (\emph{chika bets}). Elsewhere, traditional
housing (\emph{tukls}) were disassembled and reconstructed in the rigidly
stipulated order. As in Russia, all the private shops, tea houses, and
small trading establishments were abolished, leaving only such state
spaces as the village’s mass organization and peasant association
offices, literacy shed, health clinic, or state cooperative shop as
public gathering places. In contrast to the Tanzanian experience, the
Ethiopian campaign had a much stronger military component, as peasants
were moved great distances with a view to military pacification and
political emasculation.\footnote{The roots of this program can be traced to a 1973 World Bank report “that recommended the relocation of peasants from northern areas suffering from high population pressure, soil erosion, and deforestation,” although it was termed a policy response to famine in 1984-85 (Cohen and Isaksson, “Villagization in Ethiopia’s Arsi Region,” p. 443). Something of the logic of social control behind these schemes can be found in the fine paper by Donald Donham, “Conversion and Revolution in Maale, Ethiopia,” Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, New Haven, December 1, 1995.} Needless to say, the draconian conditions
of Ethiopian villagization meant that it was even more destructive of
peasant livelihoods and of the environment than its Tanzanian
counterpart.\footnote{See, especially, Kebbede, \emph{The State and Development}, pp. 5-102, and Clay, Steingraber, and Niggli, \emph{The Spoils of Famine}, passim.}


A full appreciation of the toll of forced resettlement in Ethiopia
extends far beyond the standard reports of starvation, executions,
deforestation, and failed crops. The new settlements nearly always
failed their inhabitants as human communities and as units of food
production. The very fact of massive resettlement nullified a precious
legacy of local agricultural and pastoral knowledge and, with it, some
thirty to forty thousand functioning communities, most of them in
regions that had regularly produced food surpluses.


A typical cultivator in Tigray, a location singled out for harsh
measures, planted an average of fifteen crops a season (such cereal
crops as teff, barley, wheat, sorghum, corn, millet; such root crops
as sweet potatoes, potatoes, onions; some legumes, including
horsebeans, lentils, and chickpeas; and a number of vegetable crops,
including peppers, okra, and many others).\footnote{Clay, Steingraber, and Niggli, \emph{The Spoils of Famine}, p. 23.} It goes without saying
that the farmer was familiar with each of several varieties of any
crop, when to plant it, how deeply to sow it, how to prepare the soil,
and how to tend and harvest it. This knowledge was \emph{place specific} in
the sense that the successful growing of any variety required local
knowledge about rainfall and soils, down to and including the
peculiarities of each plot the farmer cultivated.\footnote{As one farmer told Clay, “There are six kinds of sorghum I plant: two red kinds, two white kinds that are intermediate and ripen very fast. There are also types we eat while the fruit is still green. There are five kinds of teff and three kinds of corn: red, orange, and white. Each is planted according to its season, and each has its own time to plant” (ibid., p. 23).} It was also
place specific in the sense that much of this knowledge was stored in
the collective memory of the locality: an oral archive of techniques,
seed varieties, and ecological information.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-33.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 32. A government plan for a standard socialist village, Arsi region, Ethiopia. The layout shows 1, a mass organization office; 2, a kindergarten; 3, a health clinic; 4, a state cooperative shop; 5, peasant association office; 6, reserve plots; 7, a primary school; 8, a sports field; 9, a seed-multiplication center; 10, a handicrafts center; and 11, an animal-breeding station. Detail 12 depicts an enlargement of compound sites, and detail 13 is an enlargement of two sites, showing the neighborhood latrine at 14.}
\end{figure}


Once the farmer was moved, often to a vastly different ecological
setting, his local knowledge was all but useless. As Jason Clay
emphasizes, “Thus, when a farmer from the highlands is transported to
settlement camps in areas like Gambella, he is instantly transformed
from an agricultural expert to an unskilled, ignorant laborer,
completely dependent for his survival on the central government.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 55.}
Resettlement was far more than a change in scenery. It took people
from a setting in which they had the skills and resources to produce
many of their own basic needs and hence the means of a reasonably
selfsufficient independence. It then transferred them to a setting
where these skills were of little or no avail. Only in such
circumstances was it possible for camp officials to reduce migrants to
mendicants whose obedience and labor could be exacted for subsistence
rations.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-34.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 33. Aerial view of a resettlement site in southwestern Ethiopia, 1986}
\end{figure}


Although the drought that coincided with forced migration in Ethiopia
was real enough, much of the famine to which international aid
agencies responded was a product of the massive resettlement.\footnote{Food aid was, in turn, used to round up people for resettlement and, when resettled, to hold them there. A standard technique of the Dergue was to announce a time and place for food distribution and then ship off the crowd that assembled.} The
destruction of social ties was almost as productive of famine as were
the crop failures induced by poor planning and ignorance of the new
agricultural environment. Communal ties, relations with kin and
affines, networks of reciprocity and cooperation, local charity and
dependence had been the principal means by which villagers had managed
to survive periods of food shortage in the past. Stripped of these
social resources by indiscriminate deportations, often separated from
their immediate family and forbidden to leave, the settlers in the
camps were far more vulnerable to starvation than they had been in
their home regions.


The immanent logic, never achieved, of the Dergue’s rural policy is
telling. If implemented successfully, rural Ethiopians would have been
permanently settled along the main roads in large, legible villages,
where uniform, numbered houses would have been set in a grid centered
on the headquarters of the peasant association (that is, the party),
where the chairman, his deputies, and the militia maintained their
posts.  Designated crops would have been grown collectively, with
machinery, on flat fields laid out uniformly by state surveyors and
then harvested for delivery to state agencies for distribution and
sale abroad. Labor would have been closely supervised by experts and
cadres. Intended to modernize Ethiopian agriculture and, not
incidentally, to strengthen the control of the Dergue, the policy was
literally fatal to hundreds of thousands of cultivators and, finally,
to the Dergue itself.

\section{Conclusion}



\begin{quote}


In quiet and untroubled times, it seems to every administrator that it
is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is
kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every
administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While
the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail
bark, holding it with a boat hook to the ship of the people and
himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he
is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to
heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The
ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook
no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator,
instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an
insignificant, useless, feeble man.



\end{quote}


— Leo Tolstoy, \emph{War and Peace}


The conflict between the officials and specialists actively planning
the future on one hand and the peasantry on the other has been billed
by the first group as a struggle between progress and obscurantism,
rationality and superstition, science and religion. Yet it is apparent
from the high-modernist schemes we have examined that the “rational”
plans they imposed were often spectacular failures. As units of
production, as human communities, or as a means of delivering
services, the planned villages failed the people they were intended,
sometimes sincerely, to serve. In the long run they even failed their
originators as units of growing appropriation or as a way of securing
the loyalty of the rural population, although they may have still
served effectively, in the short run at least, as a way of detaching a
population from its customary social network and thus thwarting
collective protest.

\subsection{High Modernism and the Optics of Power}


If the plans for villagization were so rational and scientific, why
did they bring about such general ruin? The answer, I believe, is that
such plans were not scientific or rational in any meaningful sense of
those terms. What these planners carried in their mind’s eye was a
certain aesthetic, what one might call a visual codification of modern
rural production and community life. Like a religious faith, this
visual codification was almost impervious to criticism or
disconfirming evidence. The belief in large farms, monocropping,
“proper” villages, tractor-plowed fields, and collective or communal
farming was an aesthetic conviction undergirded by a conviction that
this was the way in which the world was headed—a teleology.\footnote{An extreme version of this visual codification can be seen in Ceausmescu’s Romania, where hundreds of villages were destroyed in order to make room for nonfunctioning towns with “modern apartment flats” (easier to control) and where the countryside was divided up into zones of strict agricultural specialization as if it were a single enterprise with its own division of labor. The regime termed the entire exercise “systematization.” Perhaps the best treatment is to be found in Katherine Verdery, \emph{What Was Socialism and What Comes Next} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), especially chap. 6, pp. 133-67.} For
all but a handful of specialists, these were not empirical hypotheses
derived from particular contexts in the temperate West that would have
to be carefully examined in practice. In a given historical and social
context—say, wheat growing by farmers breaking new ground on the
plains of Kansas—many elements of this faith might have made
sense.\footnote{But even here, see Donald Worster, \emph{The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s} (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).} As a faith, however, it was generalized and applied
uncritically in widely divergent settings with disastrous results.


If the proverbial man from Mars were to stumble on the facts here, he
could be forgiven if he were confused about exactly who was the
empiricist and who was the true believer. Tanzanian peasants had, for
example, been readjusting their settlement patterns and farming
practices in accordance with climate changes, new crops, and new
markets with notable success in the two decades before
villagization. They seemed to have an eminently empirical, albeit
cautious, outlook on their own practices. By contrast, specialists and
politicians seemed to be in the unshakable grip of a quasi-religious
enthusiasm made even more potent in being backed by the state.


This was not just any faith. It had a direct relation to the status
and interests of its bearers. Because the bearers of this visual
codification saw themselves as self-conscious modernizers of their
societies, their vision required a sharp and morally loaded contrast
between what looked modern (tidy, rectilinear, uniform, concentrated,
simplified, mechanized) and what looked primitive (irregular,
dispersed, complicated, unmechanized). As the technical and political
elite with a monopoly on modern education, they used this visual
aesthetic of progress to define their historic mission and to enhance
their status.


Their modernist faith was self-serving in other respects as well. The
very idea of a national plan, which would be devised at the capital and
would then reorder the periphery after its own image into quasi-military
units obeying a single command, was profoundly centralizing. Each unit
at the periphery was tied not so much to its neighboring settlement as
to the command center in the capital; the lines of communication rather
resembled the converging lines used to organize perspective in early
Renaissance paintings. “The convention of perspective \dots{} centers
everything in the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from a
lighthouse—only instead of travelling outward, appearances travel in.
The conventions called those appearances reality. Perspective makes the
single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on the
eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged
for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for
God.”\footnote{John Berger, \emph{Ways of Seeing} (London, 1992), p. 16, quoted in Martin Jay, \emph{Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). For a useful collection on the issue of modernity and vision, see also David Michael Levin, ed., \emph{Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision} (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).}


The image of coordination and authority aspired to here recalls that
of mass exercises—thousands of bodies moving in perfect unison
according to a meticulously rehearsed script. When such coordination
is achieved, the spectacle may have several effects. The demonstration
of mass coordination, its designers hope, will awe spectators and
participants with its display of powerful cohesion. The awe is
enhanced by the fact that, as in the Taylorist factory, only someone
outside and above the display can fully appreciate it as a totality;
the individual participants at ground level are small molecules within
an organism whose brain is elsewhere. The image of a nation that might
operate along these lines is enormously flattering to elites at the
apex—and, of course, demeaning to a population whose role they thus
reduce to that of ciphers. Beyond impressing observers, such displays
may, in the short run at least, constitute a reassuring self-hypnosis
which serves to reinforce the moral purpose and self-confidence of the
elites.\footnote{For a more elaborate argument along these lines, see James C. Scott, \emph{Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 45-69.}


The modernist visual aesthetic that animated planned villages has a
curiously static quality to it. It is rather like a completed picture
that cannot be improved upon.\footnote{Zygmunt Bauman, in \emph{Modernity and the Holocaust} (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), makes the same point with regard to the “gardening metaphor,” which he sees as characteristic of modernist thought in general and Nazi racial policies in particular.} Its design is the result of
scientific and technical laws, and the implicit assumption is that,
once built, the task then becomes one of maintaining its form. The
planners aim to have each new village look like the last. Like a Roman
military commander entering a new camp, the official arriving from Dar
es Salaam would know exactly where everything could be found, from the
TANU headquarters to the peasant association and the health
clinic. Every field and every house would also, in principle, be
nearly identical and located according to an overall scheme. To the
degree that this vision had been realized in practice, it would have
made absolutely no connections to the particularities of place and
time. It would be a view from nowhere.  Instead of the unrepeatable
variety of settlements closely adjusted to local ecology and
subsistence routines and instead of the constantly changing local
response to shifts in demography, climate, and markets, the state
would have created thin, generic villages that were uniform in
everything from political structure and social stratification to
cropping techniques. The number of variables at play would be
minimized.  In their perfect legibility and sameness, these villages
would be ideal, substitutable bricks in an edifice of state
planning. Whether they would \emph{function} was another matter.

\subsection{The Failure of Grids}



\begin{quote}


Ideas cannot digest reality.



\end{quote}


— Jean-Paul Sartre


It is far easier for would-be reformers to change the formal structure
of an institution than to change its practices. Redesigning the lines
and boxes in an organizational chart is simpler than changing how that
organization in fact operates. Changing the rules and regulations is
simpler than eliciting behavior that conforms to them.\footnote{This point is made exceptionally well, both empirically and analytically, in Sally Falk Moore, \emph{Social Facts and Fabrications}, especially chap. 6.}
Redesigning the physical layout of a village is simpler than
transforming its social and productive life. For obvious reasons,
political elites—particularly authoritarian high-modernist
elites—typically begin with changes in the formal structure and
rules. Such legal and statutory changes are the most accessible and
the easiest to rearrange.


Anyone who has worked in a formal organization—even a small one
strictly governed by detailed rules—knows that handbooks and written
guidelines fail utterly in explaining how the institution goes
successfully about its work. Accounting for its smooth operation are
nearly endless and shifting sets of implicit understandings, tacit
coordinations, and practical mutualities that could never be
successfully captured in a written code. This ubiquitous social fact
is useful to employees and labor unions. The premise behind what are
tellingly called work-to-rule strikes is a case in point. When
Parisian taxi drivers want to press a point on the municipal
authorities about regulations or fees, they sometimes launch a
work-to-rule strike. It consists merely in following meticulously all
the regulations in the \emph{Code routier} and thereby bringing traffic
throughout central Paris to a grinding halt. The drivers thus take
tactical advantage of the fact that the circulation of traffic is
possible \emph{only} because drivers have mastered a set of practices that
have evolved outside, and often in contravention, of the formal rules.


Any attempt to completely plan a village, a city, or, for that matter,
a language is certain to run afoul of the same social reality. A
village, city, or language is the jointly created, partly unintended
product of many, many hands. To the degree that authorities insist on
replacing this ineffably complex web of activity with formal rules and
regulations, they are certain to disrupt the web in ways that they
cannot possibly foresee.\footnote{See, in this connection, the classic article arguing that our modest degree of knowledge about the likely consequences of any major policy initiative makes a strategy of “crab-wise” adjustments, which can be undone without great damage, the more prudent course: Charles E. Lindblom, “The Science of Muddling Through,” \emph{Public Administration Review} 19 (Spring 1959): 79-88. A follow-up article published twenty years later, “Still Muddling, Not Yet Through,” may be found in Lindblom, \emph{Democracy and the Market System} (Oslo: Norwegian University Presses, 1979), pp. 237-59.} This point is most frequently made by
such proponents of laissez-faire as Friedrich Hayek, who are fond of
pointing out that a command economy, however sophisticated and
legible, cannot begin to replace the myriad, rapid, mutual adjustments
of functioning markets and the price system.\footnote{Proponents of this view forget or ignore, I think, the fact that in order to do its work, the market requires its own vast simplifications in treating land (nature) and labor (people) as factors of production (commodities). This, in turn, can and has been profoundly destructive of human communities and of nature. In a sense, the simplification of the scientific forest compounds the simplification of scientific measurement and the simplification made possible by the commercial market for wood. Karl Polanyi’s classic, \emph{The Great Transformation} (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), is still perhaps the best case against pure market logic.} In this context,
however, the point applies in important ways to the even more complex
patterns of social interaction with the material environment that we
call a city or a village. Cities with a long history may be called
“deep” or “thick” cities in the sense that they are the historical
product of a vast number of people from all stations (including
officialdom) who are long gone. It is possible, of course, to build a
new city or a new village, but it will be a “thin” or “shallow” city,
and its residents will have to begin (perhaps from known repertoires)
to make it work in spite of the rules. In cases like Brasília or
Tanzania’s planned villages, one can understand why state planners may
prefer a freshly cleared site and a “shocked” population moved
abruptly to the new setting in which the planners’ influence is
maximized. The alternative is to reform in situ an existing,
functioning community that has more social resources for resisting and
refashioning the transformation planned for it.


The thinness of artificially designed communities can be compared to
the thinness of artificially designed languages.\footnote{I am aware that the binary distinction between “artificial” and “natural” is ultimately untenable when it comes to things like languages and communities. By “artificial,” I mean languages and communities that are planned centrally and at a single stroke, as it were, as opposed to communities that grow by accretion.} Communities
planned at a single stroke—Brasília or the planned village in Tanzania
or Ethiopia—are to older, unplanned communities as Esperanto is to,
say, English or Burmese. One can in fact design a new language that in
many respects is more logical, simpler, more universal, and less irregular
and that would technically lend itself to more clarity and
precision.  This was, of course, precisely the objective of
Esperanto’s inventor, Lazar Zamenhof, who also imagined that
Esperanto, which was also known as international language, would
eliminate the parochial nationalisms of Europe.\footnote{See J. C. O’Connor, \emph{Esperanto, the Universal Language: The Student’s Complete Text Book} (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1907); and Pierre Janton, \emph{Esperanto Language, Literature, and Community}, trans. Humphrey Tonkin et al. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973). By “universal,” of course, Esperanto’s proponents meant, in fact, “European.”} Yet it is also
perfectly obvious why Esperanto, which lacked a powerful state to
enforce its adoption, failed to replace the existing vernaculars or
dialects of Europe. (As social linguists are fond of saying, “A
national language is a dialect with an army.”) It was an exceptionally
thin language, without any of the resonances, connotations, ready
metaphors, literature, oral history, idioms, and traditions of
practical use that any socially embedded language already
had. Esperanto has survived as a kind of utopian curiosity, a very
thin dialect spoken by a handful of intelligentsia who have kept its
promise alive.

\subsection{The Miniaturization of Perfection and Control}


The pretense of authoritarian high-modernist schemes to discipline
virtually everything within their ambit is bound to encounter
intractable resistance. Social inertia, entrenched privileges,
international prices, wars, environmental change, to mention only a
few factors, ensure that the results of high-modernist planning will
look substantially different from what was originally imagined. Such
is even the case where, as in Stalinist collectivization, the state
devotes great resources to enforcing a high degree of formal
compliance with its directives. Those who have their hearts set on
realizing such plans cannot fail to be frustrated by stubborn social
realities and material facts.


One response to this frustration is a retreat to the realm of
appearances and miniatures—to model cities and Potemkin villages, as
it were.\footnote{See, in this context, Susan Stewart, \emph{On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir} (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).} It is easier to build Brasília than to fundamentally
transform Brazil and Brazilians. The effect of this retreat is to
create a small, relatively self-contained, utopian space where
high-modernist aspirations might more nearly be realized. The limiting
case, where control is maximized but impact on the external world is
minimized, is in the museum or the theme park.\footnote{For a remarkable account of a Soviet theme park, Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy, which was erected in 1939, see Jamey Gambrell, \emph{Once upon an Empire: The Soviet Paradise} (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming). For two accounts of an Indonesian analog (\emph{Taman-Mini}, or “mini-park”) built according to the inspiration of Mrs. Soeharto, the wife of Indonesia’s president since 1965, after she visited Disneyland, see John Pemberton, “Recollections from ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ (Somewhere Beyond the Postmodern),” \emph{Public Culture} 6 (1994): 241-62; and Timothy C. Lindsey, “Concrete Ideology: Taste, Tradition, and the Javanese Past in New Order Public Space,” in Virginia Matheson Hooker, ed., \emph{Culture and Society in New Order Indonesia} (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 166-82.}


This miniaturization of perfection, I think, has a logic all its own,
in spite of its implicit abandonment of large-scale
transformations. Model villages, model cities, military colonies, show
projects, and demonstration farms offer politicians, administrators,
and specialists an opportunity to create a sharply defined
experimental terrain in which the number of rogue variables and
unknowns are minimized. If, of course, such experiments make it
successfully from the pilot stage to general application, then they
are a perfectly rational form of policy planning.  There are
advantages to miniaturization. The constriction of focus makes
possible a far higher degree of social control and discipline. By
concentrating the material and personnel resources of the state at a
single point, miniaturization can approximate the architecture,
layout, mechanization, social services, and cropping patterns that its
vision calls for. Small islands of order and modernity, as Potemkin
well understood, are politically useful to officials who want to
please their superiors with an example of what they can accomplish. If
their superiors are sufficiently closeted and misinformed, they may
mistake, as Catherine the Great apparently did with Potemkin’s
convincing scenery, the exemplary instance for the larger
reality.\footnote{In another example of the exemplum being mistaken for reality, during the disastrous Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, Mao Tse-tung’s subordinates set up elaborate, deceptive tableaux of healthy peasants and bumper crops along the route that his train would follow.} The effect is to banish at one place and one time, in a
kind of high-modernist version of Versailles and Le Petit Trianon, the
larger loss of control.


The visual aesthetic of miniaturization seems significant as
well. Just as the architectural drawing, the model, and the map are
ways of dealing with a larger reality that is not easily grasped or
manageable in its entirety, the miniaturization of high-modernist
development offers a visually complete example of what the future
looks like.


Miniaturization of one kind or another is ubiquitous. It is tempting
to wonder whether the human tendency to miniaturization—to create
“toys” of larger objects and realities that cannot so easily be
manipulated—does not also have a bureaucratic equivalent. Yi-fu Tuan
has brilliantly examined how we miniaturize, and thereby domesticate,
the larger phenomena that are outside our control, often with benign
intentions.  Under this elastic rubric, he includes bonsai, bonseki,
and gardens (a miniaturization of the plant world) along with dolls
and dollhouses, toy locomotives, toy soldiers and weapons of war, and
“living toys” in the form of specially bred fish and dogs.\footnote{Yi-fu Tuan, \emph{Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).} While
Tuan concentrates on more or less playful domestication, something of
the same desire for control and mastery can also, it would seem,
operate on the larger scale of bureaucracies. Just as \emph{substantive}
goals, the achievement of which are hard to measure, may be supplanted
by thin, notional statistics—the number of villages formed, the number
of acres plowed—so may they also be supplanted by microenvironments of
modernist order.


Capital cities, as the seat of the state and of its rulers, as the
symbolic center of (new) nations, and as the places where often powerful
foreigners come, are most likely to receive close attention as veritable
theme parks of high-modernist development. Even in their contemporary
secular guises, national capitals retain something of the older
tradition of being sacred centers for a national cult. The symbolic
power of high-modernist capitals depends not, as it once did, on how
well they represent a sacred past but rather on how fully they symbolize
the utopian aspirations that rulers hold for their nations. As ever, to
be sure, the display is meant to exude power as well as the authority of
the past or of the future.


Colonial capitals were fashioned with these functions in mind. The
imperial capital of New Delhi, designed by Edwin Lutyens, was a
stunning example of a capital intended to overawe its subjects (and
perhaps its own officials) with its scale and its grandeur, with its
processional axes for parades demonstrating military power and its
triumphal arches.  \emph{New} Delhi was naturally intended as a negation of
what then became \emph{Old} Delhi. One central purpose of the new capital
was captured nicely by the private secretary to George V in a note
about the future residence of the British viceroy. It must, he wrote,
be “conspicuous and commanding,” not dominated by the structures of
past empires or by the features of the natural landscape. “We must now
let [the Indian] see for the first time the power of Western science,
art, and civilization.”\footnote{Lawrence Vale, \emph{Architecture, Power, and National Identity} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 90.} Standing at its center for a ceremonial
occasion, one might forget for a moment that this tiny gem of imperial
architecture was all but lost in a vast sea of Indian realities which
either contradicted it or paid it no heed.


A great many nations, some of them former colonies, have built
entirely new capitals rather than compromise with an urban past that
their leaders were determined to transcend; one thinks of Brazil,
Pakistan, Turkey, Belize, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Malawi, and
Tanzania.\footnote{One political advantage of a new capital is precisely that it does not belong to any existing community. Founding a new capital avoids certain delicate, if not explosive, choices that would otherwise have to be made. By the same logic, English became the national language of India because it was the only widely spoken language that did not belong exclusively to any particular traditional community. It \emph{did} belong, however, to India’s English-speaking intelligentsia, which was enormously privileged when its “dialect” became the national language. The United States and Australia, with no urban past to transcend, created planned capitals that represented a vision of progress and order and that were, not incidentally, in stark contrast to indigenous settlement practices.} Most were built following the plans of Western or
Westerntrained architects, even when they attempted to incorporate
references to vernacular building traditions. As Lawrence Vale points
out, many new capitals seem intended as completed and self-contained
objects. No subtraction, addition, or modification is
contemplated—only admiration.  And in their strategic use of hills and
elevation, of complexes set behind walls or water barriers, of finely
graded structural hierarchy reflecting function and status, they also
convey an impression of hegemony and domination which was unlikely to
prevail beyond the city limits.\footnote{Vale, \emph{Architecture, Power, and National Identity}, p. 293.}


Nyerere planned a new capital, Dodoma, that was to be somewhat
different. The ideological commitments of the regime were to be
expressed in an architecture that was purposely \emph{not}
monumental. Several interconnected settlements would undulate with the
landscape, and the modest scale of the buildings would eliminate the
need for elevators and air conditioning. Dodoma was very definitely,
however, intended to be a utopian space that both represented the
future and explicitly negated Dar es Salaam. The master plan for
Dodoma condemned Dar as a “dominant focus of development\dots{} the
antithesis of what Tanzania is aiming for, and is growing at a pace,
which if not checked, will damage the city as a humanist habitat and
Tanzania as an egalitarian socialist-state.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 149.} While planning
villages for everyone else whether they liked it or not, the rulers
also designed for themselves a new symbolic center incorporating, not
by accident, I think, a hilltop refuge amidst manicured, orderly
surroundings.


If the intractable difficulties of transforming existing cities can lead
to the temptation to erect a model capital city, so can the difficulties
of transforming existing villages prompt a retreat into miniaturization.
One major variant of this tendency was the creation of carefully
controlled production environments by frustrated colonial extension
officers. Coulson notes the logic involved: “If a farmer could not be
forced, or persuaded, the only alternatives were to ignore them
altogether and go for mechanized agriculture controlled by outsiders (as
in the Groundnuts Scheme, or on settler farms controlled by Europeans),
or to take them right away from the traditional surroundings, to
settlement schemes where in return for receiving land they might perhaps
agree to follow the instructions of the agricultural staff.”\footnote{Coulson, “Agricultural Policies in Mainland Tanzania,” p. 86.}


Still another variant was the attempt to distill out of the general
population a cadre of progressive farmers who would then be mobilized
to practice modern agriculture. Such policies were followed in
elaborate detail in Mozambique and were important in colonial Tanzania
as well.\footnote{For a fine description of the Mozambique case, see chap. 7 of Isaacman, \emph{Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty}.} When the state confronted a “brick wall of peasant
conservatism,” notes a 1956 document from the Tanganyika Department of
Agriculture, it became necessary “to withdraw the effort from some
portions so as to concentrate on small selected points, a procedure
which has come to be known as the ‘focal-point approach.’”\footnote{Quoted in Coulson, “Agricultural Policies in Mainland Tanzania,” p. 78. The document goes on to stress how important it is to separate the good, industrious cultivators from the bad, lazy ones. One wonders whether the Latin American revolutionary strategy of \emph{focos}, or creating small insurrectionary enclaves (and elaborated by Regis DeBray in the 1960s), shares an intellectual lineage with “focal-point” strategies in development work.} In
their desire to isolate the small sector of the agricultural
population that they thought would respond to scientific agriculture,
the extension agents frequently overlooked other realities that bore
directly on their substantive mission—realities that were under their
nose but not under their aegis.  Pauline Peters thus describes an
effort in Malawi to depopulate a rural area of all but those whom the
agricultural authorities had designated “master farmers.” Extension
agents were attempting to create a microlandscape of “neatly-bounded,
mixed-farming lot[s] based on rotation of single-stand crops which
would replace the scattered, multi-cropped farming they considered
backward. In the meantime, they entirely ignored an autonomous and
general rush to plant tobacco—the very transformation they were trying
to bring about by force.”\footnote{Pauline Peters, “Transforming Land Rights: State Policy and Local Practice in Malawi,” paper presented at the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, New Haven, February 19, 1993.}


The planned city, the planned village, and the planned language (not
to mention the command economy) are, we have emphasized, likely to be
thin cities, villages, and languages. They are thin in the sense that
they cannot reasonably plan for anything more than a few schematic
aspects of the inexhaustibly complex activities that characterize
“thick” cities and villages. One all-but-guaranteed consequence of
such thin planning is that the planned institution generates an
unofficial reality—a “dark twin”—that arises to perform many of the
various needs that the planned institution fails to fulfill. Brasília,
as Holston showed, engendered an “unplanned Brasília” of construction
workers, migrants, and those whose housing and activities were
necessary but were not foreseen or were precluded by the plan. Nearly
every new, exemplary capital city has, as the inevitable accompaniment
of its official structures, given rise to another, far more
“disorderly” and complex city \emph{that makes the official city work}—that
is virtually a condition of its existence. That is, the dark twin is
not just an anomaly, an “outlaw reality”; it represents the activity
and life without which the official city would cease to function. The
outlaw city bears the same relation to the official city as the
Parisian taxi drivers’ actual practices bear to the \emph{Code routier}.


On a more speculative note, I imagine that the greater the pretense of
and insistence on an officially decreed micro-order, the greater the
volume of nonconforming practices necessary to sustain that
fiction. 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.\footnote{Birgit Müller, unpublished paper, 1990.} When this
economy is ruthlessly suppressed, the cost has often been economic
ruin and starvation (the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution in China; the autarkic, moneyless economy of Pol Pot’s
Cambodia). Efforts to force a country’s inhabitants to maintain
permanent, fixed residences tend to produce large, illegal,
undocumented populations in urban areas where they have been forbidden
to go.\footnote{Kate Xiao Zhou, \emph{How the Fanners Changed China: Power of the People} (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).} The insistence on a rigid visual aesthetic at the core of
the capital city tends to produce settlements and slums teeming with
squatters who, as often as not, sweep the floors, cook the meals, and
tend the children of the elites who work in the decorous, planned
center.\footnote{The large gap that thus develops between an inevitably thin authoritarian high-modernist social fiction and the informal, “deviant” practices that cannot be openly avowed but that are its necessary complement is diagnostically characteristic. Although we shall return to this theme, here it is relevant to recall that the hypocrisy, cynicism, and comedy generated by the gulf between the official pieties of a mendacious public sphere and the practices necessary to the reproduction of daily life often become the raw material for such a society’s finest literature, poetry, and song.}

\chapter{Chapter 8. Taming Nature: An Agriculture of Legibility and Simplicity}



\begin{verse}
Yes, enumerate the carriage parts— \\{}
Still not a carriage.

When you begin making decisions and cutting it up \\{}
~~rules and names appear \\{}
And once names appear, you should know when to stop.
\end{verse}


— \emph{Tao-to-ching}


The necessarily simple abstractions of large bureaucratic
institutions, as we have seen, can never adequately represent the
actual complexity of natural or social processes. The categories that
they employ are too coarse, too static, and too stylized to do justice
to the world that they purport to describe.


For reasons that will become apparent, state-sponsored highmodernist
agriculture has recourse to abstractions of the same order. The simple
“production and profit” model of agricultural extension and
agricultural research has failed in important ways to represent the
complex, supple, negotiated objectives of real farmers and their
communities. That model has also failed to represent the space in
which farmers plant crops—its microclimates, its moisture and water
movement, its microrelief, and its local biotic history. Unable to
effectively represent the profusion and complexity of real farms and
real fields, high-modernist agriculture has often succeeded in
radically simplifying those farms and fields so they can be more
directly apprehended, controlled, and managed. I emphasize the
\emph{radical} simplification of agricultural high modernism because
agriculture is, even in its most rudimentary, neolithic forms,
inevitably a process of simplifying the floral profusion of
nature.\footnote{For persuasive evidence that even the most apparently pristine forests are in part the product of human agency practiced over centuries, see, for example, Darryl Posey, “Indigenous Management of Tropical Forest Eco-Systems: The Case of the Kayapo Indians of the Brazilian Amazon,” \emph{Agroforestry Systems} 3 (1985): 139-58; Susanna Hecht, Anthony Anderson, and Peter May, “The Subsidy from Nature: Shifting Cultivation, Successional Palm Forests, and Rural Development,” \emph{Human Organization} 47, no. 1 (1988): 25-35; J. B. Alcorn, “Huastec Noncrop Resource Management: Implications for Prehistoric Rain Forest Management,” Human Ecology 9, no. 4 (1981): 395-417; and Christine Padoch, “The Woodlands of Tae: Traditional Forest Management in Kalimantan,” in William Bentley and Marcia Gowen, eds., \emph{Forest Resources and Wood Based Biomass Energy as Rural Development Assets} (New Delhi: Oxford and IBH, 1995).} How else are we to understand the process by which man
has encouraged certain species of flora that he found useful and
discouraged others that he found a nuisance?


The logic behind the radical simplification of the field is almost
precisely identical to the logic behind the radical simplification of
the forest. In fact, a simplified agriculture, which was developed
earlier, served as the model for scientific forestry. The guiding idea
was the maximization of the crop yield or profit.\footnote{For marketed crops in a fully commercialized system, profit maximization would rarely be precisely the same as crop-volume maximization. Where labor was scarce, cultivators would be more concerned about maximizing the crop return per unit of labor, whereas if land was scarce, the return per acre would be the focus.} The forests
were reconceptualized as “timber farms” in which a single species of
tree was planted in straight rows and harvested like a crop when it
was “mature.” The preconditions of such simplifications were the
existence of a commodity market and competitive pressure, on states as
well as on entrepreneurs, to maximize profits or revenue. In the
monocropped field and single-species forest alike, the innumerable
other members of the biotic community were ignored unless they had
some direct bearing on the health and yield of the species to be
harvested. Such narrowing of attention to a single outcome—invariably
the one of most commercial or fiscal interest—confers an analytical
power that allows foresters and agronomists to track carefully the
influence of other factors on this single dependent variable. Within
its ambit, there is no denying the extraordinary power of this
approach to increase yields. As we shall see, however, this potent but
narrow perspective is troubled both by certain inevitable blind spots
and by phenomena that lie outside its restricted field of vision. To
continue the metaphor, this narrowness in turn means that production
agronomy is occasionally blindsided by factors outside its analytical
focus and is forced, by the resulting crisis, to take a broader
perspective.


The question we shall address in this chapter is why a model of
modern, scientific agriculture that has apparently been successful in
the temperate, industrializing West has so often foundered in the
Third World. In spite of these indifferent results, the model has been
pressed by colonial modernizers, independent states, and international
agencies.  In Africa, where the results have been particularly
sobering, an agronomist with great experience has claimed that “one of
the crucial lessons of the past fifty years or so of ecological
research focused on African agriculture is that the ‘dramatic
modernization’ option has a track record so poor that a return to
slower and more incremental approaches must now be given serious and
sustained attention.”\footnote{Paul Richards, \emph{Indigenous Agricultural Revolution: Ecology and Food Production in West Africa} (London: Unwin Hyman, 1985), p. 160; in this chapter I rely heavily on this brilliant book. Richards is committed to scientific agricultural research but insists that it examine, without prejudice, the existing practices of African farmers and that it reflect the actual problems and goals of local cultivators.}


We will not be much concerned in this discussion with the particular
reasons that made this scheme or that cropping plan fail. To be sure,
the familiar bureaucratic pathologies as well as openly predatory
practices have often greatly compounded these failures. My claim,
however, is that the origin of these failures can be traced to a
deeper level; these were, in other words, systemic failures and would
have occurred under the best assumptions about administrative
efficiency and probity.


At least four elements seem to be at work in these systemic failures.
The first two are linked to the historical origin and institutional
nexus of high-modernist agriculture. First, given their discipline’s
origin in the temperate, industrializing West, the bearers of
modernism in agricultural planning inherited a series of unexamined
assumptions about cropping and field preparation that turned out to
work badly in other contexts. Second, given the presumptions about
expertise embodied in modernist agricultural planning, the actual
schemes were continually bent to serve the power and status of
officials and of the state organs they controlled.\footnote{The specifically structural and institutional interests that lead to agricultural policies favoring state power, urban consumption, and elite economic interests have been spelled out persuasively by Robert Bates in \emph{Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies} (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981). My analysis deals with the deeper sources of policy error lying outside Bates’s political-economy field of vision.}


The third element, however, operates at a deeper level: it is the
systematic, cyclopean shortsightedness of high-modernist agriculture
that courts certain forms of failure. Its rigorous attention to
productionist goals casts into relative obscurity all the outcomes
lying outside the immediate relationship between farm inputs and
yields. This means that both long-term outcomes (soil structure, water
quality, land-tenure relations) and third-party effects, or what
welfare economists call “externalities,” receive little attention
until they begin to affect production.


Finally, the very strength of scientific agricultural
experimentation—its simplifying assumptions and its ability to isolate
the impact of a single variable on total production—is incapable of
dealing adequately with certain forms of complexity. It tends to
ignore, or discount, agricultural practices that are not assimilable
to its techniques.


Lest there be any misunderstanding about my purpose here, I want to
emphasize that this is not a general offensive against modern
agronomic science, let alone an attack on the culture of scientific
research.  Modern agronomic science, with its sophisticated plant
breeding, plant pathology, analysis of plant nutrition, soil analysis,
and technical virtuosity, is responsible for creating a fund of
technical knowledge that is by now being used in some form by even the
most traditional cultivators. My purpose, rather, is to show how the
\emph{imperial pretensions} of agronomic science—its inability to recognize
or incorporate knowledge created outside its paradigm—sharply limited
its utility to many cultivators. Whereas farmers, as we shall see,
seem pragmatically alert to knowledge coming from \emph{any} quarter should
it serve their purposes, modern agricultural planners are far less
receptive to other ways of knowing.

\section{Varieties of Agricultural Simplification}

\subsection{Early Agriculture}


Cultivation is simplification. Even the most cursory forms of
agriculture typically produce a floral landscape that is less diverse
than an unmanaged landscape. The crops that mankind has cultivated
have, when fully domesticated, become dependent for their survival
upon the management of cultivators—such activities as making a
clearing, burning brush, breaking the soil, weeding, pruning,
manuring. Strictly speaking, a crop in the field is not an artificial
landscape, inasmuch as all fauna, not excluding human beings, modify
their environment in the course of food gathering. What is certain,
however, is that most of \emph{Homo sapiens}’s cultivars have been so
adapted to their altered landscape that they have become “‘biological
monsters’” which could not survive in the wild.\footnote{Jack R. Harlan, \emph{Crops and Man}, 2nd ed. (Madison, Wis.: American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, 1992), p. 5.}


Millennia of variation and conscious human selection have favored
cultivars that are systematically different from their wild and weedy
cousins.\footnote{For the major grains—all in the family of grasses—this has led to a kind of symbiotic mimicry. Each major grain has in the same family one or more lookalike “obligate weeds,” which thrive under precisely the same field conditions as the cultivar but which shatter their hardy seeds early and thus reseed themselves in the cultivated field.} Our convenience has led us to prefer plants that have
large seeds and are easy to germinate, have more blossoms and hence
more fruit, and whose fruits are more easily threshed or
shelled. Cultivated maize thus has a few large ears with large kernels
whereas wild or semidomesticated maizes have very small cobs with
small kernels. The difference is most starkly captured by the contrast
between the huge, seed-laden commercial sunflower and its diminutive
woodland relative.


Beyond the question of the harvest itself, of course, cultivators have
also selected for scores of other properties: texture, flavor, color,
storage quality, aesthetic value, grinding and cooking qualities, and
so on. The breadth of human purposes has led not to a single, ideal
cultivar of each species but rather to a great many varieties, each
distinctive in some important way. Thus we have the varieties of
barley grown for porridge, for bread, for beer, and for feeding
livestock; and thus “sweet sorghum for chewing, white-seeded types for
bread, small, dark, redseeded types for beer, and strong-stemmed,
fibrous types for houseconstruction and basketry.”\footnote{Harlan, \emph{Crops and Man}, p. 127 (emphasis in original).}


The greatest selection pressure, however, came from the dominant
anxiety of cultivators: that they not starve. This most basic of
existential concerns also led to a great variety of cultivars, termed
the “landraces” of the various crops. Landraces are genetically
variable populations that respond differently to different soil
conditions, levels of moisture, temperature, sunlight, diseases and
pests, microclimates, and so forth. Over time, traditional
cultivators, operating as experienced applied botanists, have
developed literally thousands of landraces of a single species. A
working knowledge of many, if not all, of these landraces provided
cultivators with enormous flexibility in the face of environmental
factors that they could not control.\footnote{In a Malay village where I carried out fieldwork for two years, each of the older cultivators knew of roughly eighty varieties of rice by name and by its properties.}


For our purposes, the long development of so many landraces is
significant in at least two respects. First, while early farmers were
transforming and simplifying their natural environment, they also had
a surpassing interest in fostering a certain kind of diversity. A
combination of their wide interests and their concern about the food
supply impelled them to select and protect many landraces. The genetic
variability of the crops they grew provided some built-in insurance
against drought, flooding, plant diseases, pests, and the seasonal
vagaries of climate.\footnote{In fact, the clearing or field is itself a powerful selector for resistance. Even if the cultivator were to randomly choose the seed stock for the next season or, for that matter, leave the crop standing in the field to reseed itself, the resistance of next year’s crop will increase, in a phenomenon called field resistance. Whichever landraces (including random crosses and mutants) do best \emph{over time} against pests, adverse weather, and so on will contribute, willy-nilly, more of their seed to the subsequent season’s crop. See Harlan, \emph{Crops and Alan}, pp. 117-33.} A pathogen might affect one landrace but not
another; some landraces would do well in a drought, others in wet
conditions; some would do well in clayey soil, others in sandy soil.
Placing a large number of prudent bets, finely tuned to microlocal
conditions, the cultivator maximized the dependability of a tolerable
harvest.


The variety of landraces is significant in another sense. \emph{All} modern
crops of any economic significance are the product of landraces. Until
about 1930 all scientific crop breeding was essentially a process of
selection from among the existing landraces.\footnote{“Probably, the total genetic change achieved by farmers over the millennia was far greater than that achieved by the last hundred or two years of more systematic, science-based efforts” (Norman Simmonds, \emph{Principles of Crop Improvement} [New York: Longman, 1979], cited by Jack Ralph Kloppenberg, Jr., \emph{First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492-2000} [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], p. 185). As will be apparent, I am much indebted to Kloppenberg’s fine analysis throughout much of this chapter.} Landraces and their
wild progenitors and “escapes” represent the “germ plasm” or
seed-stock capital upon which modern agriculture is based. In other
words, as James Boyce has put it, modern varieties and traditional
agriculture are complements, not substitutes.\footnote{James Boyce, “Biodiversity and Traditional Agriculture: Toward a New Policy Agenda-a Pre-Proposal” (unpublished paper, January 1996). See also Boyce, “The Environmental Impact of North-South Trade: A Political Economy Approach,” Working Paper 1996-3, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1996. Actually, the relation between modern varieties and traditional agriculture is one of dependence rather than complementarity. Traditional agriculture does not require modern agriculture as a condition of its existence, whereas modern agriculture would appear to depend on the genetic capital of the landraces. On this basis, Boyce argues for in situ preservation (as opposed to storage in seed banks) and development of landraces by protecting traditional cultivators in these centers.}

\subsection{Twentieth-Century Agriculture}


Modern, industrial, scientific farming, which is characterized by
monocropping, mechanization, hybrids, the use of fertilizers and
pesticides, and capital intensiveness, has brought about a level of
standardization into agriculture that is without historical precedent.
Far beyond mere monocropping on the model of scientific forestry
explored earlier, this simplification has entailed a genetic narrowing
fraught with consequences that we are only beginning to comprehend.


One of the basic sources of increasing uniformity in crops arises from
the intense commercial pressures to maximize profits in a competitive
mass market. Thus the effort to increase planting densities in order
to stretch the productivity of land encouraged the adoption of
varieties that would tolerate crowding. Greater planting densities
have, in turn, intensified the use of commercial fertilizers and
therefore the selection of subspecies known for high fertilizer
(especially nitrogen) uptake and response. At the same time, the
growth of great supermarket chains, with their standardized routines
of shipping, packaging, and display, has inexorably led to an emphasis
on uniformity of size, shape, color, and “eye appeal.”\footnote{Eye appeal has depended on aesthetic values that have often diverged markedly from matters of yields, taste, and even profitability. In the American tradition of awarding prizes to fruits, vegetables, and livestock entered in competition at agricultural fairs, first prize has generally gone to the ideal ear of corn or the ideal pig despite the fact that they might be economically inferior in terms of profitability. Of course, if a buyer was willing to pay a sufficient “aesthetic premium” for the ideal pig, then aesthetics and profit might coincide. See Kloppenberg, \emph{First the Seed}, p. 96.} The result
of these pressures was to concentrate on the small number of cultivars
that met these criteria while abandoning others.


The production of uniformity in the field is best grasped, however,
through the logic of mechanization. As factor prices in the West have,
since at least 1950, favored the substitution of farm machinery for
hired labor, the farmer has sought cultivars that were compatible with
mechanization. That is, he selected crops whose architecture did not
interfere with tractors or sprayers, which ripened uniformly, and
which could be picked in a “once-over” pass of the machine.


Given the techniques of hybridization being developed at roughly the
same time, it was but a short step to creating new crop varieties bred
explicitly for mechanization. “Genetic variability,” as Jack Ralph
Kloppenberg notes, “is the enemy of mechanization.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 117. The following two observations are also based on the same passage.} In the case
of corn, hybridization—the progeny of two inbred lines—produces a
field of the genetically identical individuals that are ideal for
mechanization.  Varieties developed with machinery in mind were
available as early as 1920, when Henry Wallace joined forces with a
manufacturer of harvesting equipment to cultivate his new,
stiff-stalked variety with a strong shank connecting the ear to the
stalk. An entire field of plant breeding, termed “phytoengineering,”
was thus born in order to adapt the natural world to machine
processing. “Machines are not made to harvest crops,” noted two
proponents of phytoengineering. “In reality, crops must be designed to
be harvested by machine.”\footnote{R. E. Webb and W. M. Bruce, “Redesigning the Tomato for Mechanized Production,” in \emph{Science for Better Living: Yearbook of Agriculture, 1968} (Washington: United States Department of Agriculture, 1968), p. 104, cited in ibid., p. 126. Kloppenberg continues, “Hybrids were particularly attractive to the vegetable industry, and spinach, carrots, cucumbers, and the brassicas (cabbage, cauliflower, etc.) have been hybridized and redesigned to permit non-selective, once-over, machine harvesting” (ibid.). It is worth noting that, quite apart from the harvest, the mechanical cultivating, sorting, and packing of some crops had earlier influenced crop selection and breeding.} Having been adapted to the cultivated
field, the crop was now adapted to mechanization. The
“machine-friendly” crop was bred to incorporate a series of
characteristics that made it easier to harvest it mechanically. Among
the most important of these characteristics were resilience, a
concentrated fruit set, uniformity of plant size and architecture,
uniformity of fruit shape and size, dwarfing (in the case of tree
crops especially), and fruits that easily break away from the
plant.\footnote{Ibid., p. 127.}


The development of the “supermarket tomato” by G. C. (Jack) Hanna at
the University of California at Davis in the late 1940s and 1950s is
an early and diagnostic case.\footnote{Jim Hightower et al., \emph{Hard Tomatoes}, Hard Times, Final Report of the Task Force on the Land Grant College Complex of the Agribusiness Accountability Project (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1978).} Spurred by the wartime shortage of
field labor, researchers set about inventing a mechanical harvester
\emph{and} breeding the tomato that would accommodate it. The tomato plants
eventually bred for the job were hybrids of low stature and uniform
maturity that produced similarly sized fruits with thick walls, firm
flesh, and no cracks; the fruits were picked green in order to avoid
being bruised by the grasp of the machinery and were artificially
ripened by ethylene gas during transport. The results were the small,
uniform winter tomatoes, sold four to a package, which dominated
supermarket shelves for several decades. Taste and nutritional quality
were secondary to machine compatibility. Or to put it more charitably,
the breeders did what they could to develop the best tomato within the
very sharp constraints of mechanization.


The imperatives of maximizing profits and hence, in this case, of
mechanizing the harvest worked powerfully to transform and simplify
both the field and the crop. Relatively inflexible, nonselective
machines work best in flat fields with identical plants growing
uniform fruits of perfectly even maturity. Agronomic science was
deployed to approximate this ideal: large, finely graded fields;
uniform irrigation and nutrients to regulate growth; liberal use of
herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides to maintain uniform health;
and, above all, plant breeding to create the ideal cultivar.

\subsection{The Unintended Consequences of Simplification}


Reviewing the history of major crop epidemics, beginning with the
Irish potato famine in 1850, a committee of the United States National
Research Council concluded: “These encounters show clearly that crop
mono-culture and genetic uniformity invite epidemics. All that is
needed is the arrival on the scene of a parasite that can take
advantage of the vulnerability. If the crop is uniformly vulnerable,
so much the better for the parasite. In this way virus diseases have
devastated sugar beets with ‘yellows,’ peaches with yellows, potatoes
with leaf roll and X and Y viruses, cocoa with swollen shoot, clover
with sudden death, sugarcane with mosaic, and rice with hoja
blanca.”\footnote{Committee on Genetic Vulnerability of Major Crops, Agricultural Board, Division of Biology and Agriculture, United States National Research Council, \emph{Genetic Vulnerability of Major Crops} (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1972), p. 21.} After a corn leaf blight had devastated much of the 1970
corn crop, the committee had been convened in order to consider the
genetic vulnerability of all major crops. One of the pioneer breeders
of hybrid corn, Donald Jones, had foreseen the problems that the loss
of genetic diversity might bring: “Genetically uniform pure line
varieties are very productive and highly desirable when environmental
conditions are favorable and the varieties are well-protected from
pests of all kinds. When these external factors are not favorable, the
result can be disastrous \dots{} due to some new virulent parasite.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 12.}


The logic of epidemiology in crops is relatively straightforward in
principle. All plants have some resistance to pathogens; otherwise
they and the pathogen (if it preyed upon only that plant) would
disappear. At the same time, all plants are genetically vulnerable to
certain pathogens. If a field is populated exclusively by genetically
identical individuals, such as single-cross hybrids or clones, then
each plant is vulnerable in exactly the same way to the same pathogen,
be it a virus, fungus, bacterium, or nematode.\footnote{Another effect of genetic uniformity is to make the entire population of plants also vulnerable to the same environmental stresses.} Such a field is an
ideal genetic habitat for the proliferation of precisely those strains
or mutants of pathogens that thrive and feed on this particular
cultivar. The uniform habitat, especially one in which plants are
crowded, exerts a natural selection pressure, as it were, that favors
such pathogens. Given the right seasonal conditions for the pathogen
to multiply (temperature, humidity, wind, and so on), the classic
conditions for the geometric progression of an epidemic are in
place.\footnote{The first scientist to work out the mathematical model of plant epidemics was van der Plank. See Committee on \emph{Genetic Vulnerability of Major Crops, Genetic Vulnerability of Major Crops}, pp. 28-32.}


In contrast, diversity is the enemy of epidemics. In a field with many
species of plants, only a few individuals are likely to be susceptible
to a given pathogen, and they are likely to be widely scattered. The
mathematical logic of the epidemic is broken.\footnote{The same logic, of course, holds true for human diseases. Other things being equal, scattered populations are healthier than concentrated populations. Urban populations in Western Europe did not successfully reproduce themselves until at least the nineteenth century; they depended on being demographically replenished from the comparatively healthy population in the countryside. For the epidemiological reasons behind the association of diversity and dispersion with health and the association of bio-uniformity and concentration with high mortality, see Alfred Crosby, \emph{Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900} (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Mark Ridley, “The Microbes’ Opportunity,” \emph{Times Literary Supplement}, January 13, 1995, pp. 6-7. The logic of dispersion during epidemics was recognized long before anyone understood the causes or vectors of major epidemic diseases. See, for example, Daniel Defoe, \emph{A Journal of the Plague Year} (1722; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).} A monocropped
field, as the National Research Council report noted, increases
vulnerability appreciably inasmuch as all members of the same plant
species share much of their genetic inheritance. But where a field is
populated by many genetically diverse landraces of a given species,
the risk is vastly reduced. Any agricultural practice that increases
diversity over time and space, such as crop rotation or mixed cropping
on a farm or in a region, acts as a barrier to the spread of
epidemics.


The modern regime of pesticide use, which has arisen over the past
fifty years, must be seen as an \emph{integral} feature of this genetic
vulnerability, not as an unrelated scientific breakthrough. It is
precisely because hybrids are so uniform and hence disease prone that
quasiheroic measures have to be taken to control the environment in
which they are grown. Such hybrids are analogous to a human patient
with a compromised immune system who must be kept in a sterile field
lest an opportunistic infection take hold. The sterile field, in this
case, has been established by the blanket use of pesticides.\footnote{Well, not quite. As we have learned, the profligate use of antibiotics on humans and pesticides on crops runs up against the problem that the pathogens, which are the target of the attack, often adapt and mutate, through selection pressures, faster than the human and plant defenses do. For this reason, new generations of pesticides must be created to keep one jump ahead of the pathogens, and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera, once thought extinct, have returned in more virulent strains. See, in this context, Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams, \emph{Evolution and Healing: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine} (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995).}


Corn, as the most widely planted crop in the United States (85 million
acres in 1986)\footnote{David Pimentel and Lois Levitan, “Pesticides: Amounts Applied and Amounts Reaching Pests,” \emph{BioScience} 36, no. 2 (February 1986): 87.} and the first one to be hybridized, has provided
nearly ideal conditions for insect, disease, and weed
buildup. Pesticide use is correspondingly high. Corn accounts for
one-third of the total market for herbicides and one-quarter of the
market for insecticides.\footnote{Kloppenberg, \emph{First the Seed}, pp. 118-19. Worldwide, cotton and highyielding varieties of rice absorb the largest share of pesticides.} One of the long-term effects, which is
readily predictable according to the theory of natural selection, has
been the emergence of resistant strains among insects, fungi, and
weeds, necessitating either larger doses or a new set of chemical
agents. Some pathogens, again predictably, have developed what is
termed “cross-resistance” to a whole class of pesticides.\footnote{Once again, there are striking parallels in human epidemics with the development of resistant strains of viral and bacterial diseases and resistant vectors of disease. See John Wargo’s discussion of malaria and its carrier, the Anopheles mosquito, in \emph{Our Children’s Toxic Legacy: How Science and Law Fail to Protect Us from Pesticides} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 15-42.} As more
generations of the pathogen are exposed to the pesticide, the
likelihood that resistant strains will emerge is correspondingly
greater. Above and beyond the troubling consequences of pesticide use
for the organic matter in the soil, groundwater quality, human health,
and the ecosystem, pesticides have exacerbated some existing crop
diseases while creating new ones.\footnote{“The extensive use of herbicides has not been without its costs. Of forty-five iatrogenically (i.e., caused by our use of pesticides) induced diseases of crop plants, thirty were found to be caused by herbicides” (Kloppenberg, \emph{First the Seed}, p. 247). The literature also abounds with cases of insecticides and other agents having indirect but equally devastating consequences. In 1995, for example, the massive application of malathion to control the boll weevil in Texas also killed many beneficial insects, thereby touching off an explosion of army worms who ate most of the beet crop. See “Where Cotton’s King, Trouble Reigns,” \emph{New York Times}, October 9, 1995, p. A10, and Sam Howe Verhovek, “In Texas, an Attempt to Swat an Old Pest Stirs a Revolt,” \emph{New York Times}, January 24, 1996, p. A10.}


Just prior to the corn leaf blight in the South in 1970, 71 percent of
all acreage in corn was planted to only six hybrids. The specialists
investigating the blight stressed the pressures of mechanization and
product uniformity that led to a radically narrower genetic crop base.
“\emph{Uniformity},” the report asserted, “is the key word.”\footnote{Committee on Genetic Vulnerability of Major Crops, \emph{Genetic Vulnerability of Major Crops}, p. 6.} Most of
the hybrids had been developed by the male-sterile method using “Texas
cytoplasm.” It was this uniformity that was attacked by the fungus
\emph{Helminthosporium maydis}; those hybrids created without Texas
cytoplasm suffered only trivial damage. The pathogen was not new; in
its report, the National Research Council committee imagined that it
was probably in existence when Squanto showed the Pilgrims how to
plant corn. While H. \emph{maydis} may have from time to time produced more
virulent strains, “American corn was \emph{too variable} to give the new
strain a very good foothold.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 7 (emphasis added).} What was new was the vulnerability
of the host.


The report went on to document the fact that “most major crops are
impressively uniform genetically and impressively vulnerable [to
epidemics].”\footnote{Ibid., p. 1. To take a minor crop, of the peas planted commercially in 1969, 96 percent were in only two varieties. A small dress rehearsal for the corn blight of 1970 could have been witnessed in the case of oats. A “miracle oat,” Victoria, was bred to resist all forms of crown rust fungus. It was planted throughout the country in 1940 and, in 1946, succumbed to a devastating epidemic. Because oats by that time were not as widely planted as earlier in the century, the disaster was not much reported.} Exotic germ plasm from a rare Mexican landrace
proved to be the solution to breeding new hybrids that were less
susceptible to the blight. In this and many other cases, it was only
the genetic diversity created by a long history of landrace
development by nonspecialists that provided a way out.\footnote{For an impressive listing of such instances, see Kloppenberg, \emph{First the Seed}, p. 168.} Like the
formal order of the planned section of Brasília or collectivized
agriculture, modern, simplified, and standardized agriculture depends
for its existence on a “dark twin” of informal practices and
experience on which it is, ultimately, parasitic.

\section{The Catechism of High-Modernist Agriculture}


The model and promise of American agricultural modernism was absolutely
hegemonic in the three decades from 1945 to 1975. It was the prevailing
“export model.” Hundreds of irrigation and dam projects modeled roughly
on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) were begun; many large and
highly capitalized agricultural schemes were inaugurated with great
fanfare; and thousands of advisers were dispatched. There was a
continuity in personnel as well as in ideas. Economists, engineers,
agronomists, and planners who had served in the TVA, the U.S. Department
of Agriculture, or the Department of the Treasury moved to the United
Nations, the Food and Agriculture Organization, or USAID, bringing their
experience and ideas with them. A combination of American political,
economic, and military hegemony, the promise of loans and assistance,
concerns about world population and food supply, and the great
productivity of American agriculture made for a degree of
self-confidence in the American model that is hard to overestimate.


A few skeptics like Rachel Carson were beginning to question the
model, but they were greatly outnumbered by a chorus of visionaries
who saw an unlimited and brilliant future ahead. Typical of the
optimism was an article by James B. Billard entitled “More Food for
Our Multiplying Millions: The Revolution in American Agriculture,”
which appeared in a 1970 issue of \emph{National Geographic}.\footnote{James B. Billard, “More Food for Multiplying Millions: The Revolution in American Agriculture,” with photographs by James R. Blair and a painting of the farm of the future by Davis Meltzer, \emph{National Geographic} 137, no. 2 (February 1970): 147-85. This article is the subject of a scathing critique by Wendell Berry in \emph{The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture} (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), chap. 5. It is remarkable how little of the article, as an “informed” fantasy, holds up from the vantage point of 1997. The revolution in biotechnology and recombinant DNA transfer, surely the most important change in agriculture, is hardly a speck on its horizon, nor are the problems of genetic vulnerability and pesticide use.} Its
vision of the farm of the future, reproduced here in figure 34, was
not an idle fantasy; it was, we are told, drawn “with the guidance of
U.S. Department of Agriculture specialists.” Billard’s text is one
long paean to mechanization, scientific marvels, and huge scale. For
all the technical wizardry, he envisions a process of simplification
of the landscape and centralization of command. Fields will be larger,
with fewer trees, hedges, and roads; plots may be “several miles long
and a hundred yards wide”; “weather control” will prevent hailstorms
and tornadoes; atomic energy will “level hills” and make irrigation
water from seawater; satellites, sensors, and airplanes will spot
plant epidemics while the farmer sits in his control tower.


At the operational level, the credo of American agriculture for export
incorporated the same fundamental convictions. Both the exporters and
the vast majority of their eager clients were committed to the
following truths: the superior technical efficiency of large-scale
farms, the importance of mechanization to save labor and break
technical bottlenecks, the superiority of monocropping and hybrids
over polycropping and landraces, and the advantages of high-input
agriculture, including commercial fertilizers and pesticides. Above
all, they believed in large, integrated, planned projects rather than
piecemeal improvements, partly because the large, capital-intensive
schemes could be planned as nearly pure technical exercises, rather
like the design of the Soviet collective farm that was invented in a
Chicago hotel room. The greater the industrial content of a scheme and
the more its environment could be made uniform (through controlled
irrigation and nutrients, the use of tractors and combines, the
development of flat fields), the less was left to chance.\footnote{See Albert O. Hirschman, \emph{Development Projects Observed} (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1967).} Local
soils, local landscape, local labor, local implements, and local
weather appeared to be almost irrelevant to the prepackaged
projects. At the same time, schemes conceived along these lines
emphasized the technical expertise of the planners, the possibility of
central control, and, not least, a “module” that could be redeployed
to almost any locale. For local elites anxious to have a modern show
project over which they could preside, the advantages were also
obvious.


The lamentable fate of the vast majority of these projects, whether
private or public, is by now a matter of record.\footnote{For a fine analysis of five such schemes (four of them private and one public, namely, the Tanganyika groundnuts scheme of 1947), see Nancy L. Johnson and Vernon W. Ruttan, “Why Are Farms So Small?” \emph{World Development} 22, no. 5 (1994): 691-706.} They failed in
most cases despite lavish credit subsidies and strong administrative
backing.  While each failure had its own peculiarities, the level of
abstraction at which most projects were conceived was fatal. Imported
faith and abstraction prevailed, as we shall see, over close attention
to the local context.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-35.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 34. Illustration of the farm of the future, painted by Davis Meltzer “with the guidance of U.S. Department of Agriculture specialists,” from a 1970 issue of \emph{National Geographic}. The caption details the farm of the early twenty-first century: “Grainfields stretch like fairways and cattle pens resemble high-rise apartments.\dots{} Attached to a modernistic farmhouse, a bubble-topped control tower hums with a computer, weather reports, and a farm-price ticker tape. A remote-conrolled tiller-combine glides across the 10-mile-long wheat field on tracks that keep the heavy machine from compacting the soil. Threshed grain, funneled into a pneumatic tube beside the field, flows into storage elevators rising close to a distant city. The same machine that cuts the grain prepares the land for another crop. A similar device waters neighboring strips of soybeans as a jet-powered helicopter sprays insecticides.\forcelinebreak “Across a service road, conical mills blend feed for beef cattle, fattening in multilevel pens that conserve ground space. Tubes carry the feed to be mechanically distributed. A central elevator transports the cattle up and down, while a tubular side drain flushes wastes to be broken down for fertilizer. Beside the farther pen, a processing plant packs beef into cylinders for shipment to market by helicopter and monorail. Illuminated plastic domes provide controlled environments for growing high-value crops such as strawberries, tomatoes, and celery. Near a distant lake and recreation area, a pumping station supplies water for the vast operation.”}
\end{figure}

\section{Modernist Faith Versus Local Practices}


We can explore the contrast between imported faith and local context
by juxtaposing several tenets of the catechism of high-modernist
agriculture with the local practices that appeared to violate
them. And as we shall see, contrary to contemporary expectations,
these practices turned out to be scientifically sound and in some
cases superior to the program of farming being urged or imposed by the
agricultural reformers.

\subsection{Monoculture and Polyculture}


Nothing better illustrates the myopic credo of high-modernist
agriculture, originating in temperate zones and brought to the
tropics, than its nearly unshakable faith in the superiority of
monoculture over the practice of polyculture found in much of the
Third World.


To take West African indigenous farming systems as an example,
colonial agricultural specialists encountered what seemed to them to
be an astonishingly diverse regime of polycropping, with as many as
four crops (not to mention subspecies) in the same field
simultaneously.\footnote{Richards, \emph{Indigenous Agricultural Revolution}, pp. 63-116. In this discussion I shall use the terms “polycropping” and “mixed cropping” interchangeably. Intercropping is a form of polycropping in which a second cultigen in planted between rows of the first. Relay cropping refers to a sequence of crops that overlap in the field and is thus also a form of polyculture.} A fairly representative instance of what met
their eyes is depicted in figure 35.  The visual effect, to Western
eyes, was one of sloppiness and disorder.  Given their visual
codification of modern agricultural practice, most specialists knew,
without further empirical investigation, that the apparent disorder of
the crops was a symptom of backward techniques; it failed the visual
test of scientific agriculture. Campaigns to replace polyculture with
pure-stand planting were pushed with equal fervor by colonial
officials and, after independence, by their local successors.


We have gradually come to understand a quite specific logic of
\emph{place}—in particular, tropical soils, climate, and ecology—that helps
to explain the functions of polyculture. The diversity of species
naturally occurring in a tropical setting is, other things being
equal, consistently greater than the diversity of species in a
temperate setting. An acre of tropical forest will have far more
species of plants, although fewer individuals of each species, than
will an acre of temperate woodland. Thus unmanaged nature in temperate
climates \emph{looks} more orderly because it is less diverse, and this
may play a role in the visual culture of Westerners.\footnote{The more stringent the climate, the less the biodiversity. As one approaches the tundra, the number of species of trees, mammals, and insects diminishes. The same, of course, applies to the climatic zones created by successively higher elevations in mountainous terrains.} In favoring
polyculture, the tropical cultivator also imitates nature in his
techniques of cultivation. Polyculture, like the tropical forest
itself, plays an important role in protecting thin soils from the
erosive effects of wind, rain, and sunlight. Furthermore, the
seasonality of tropical agriculture is governed more by the timing of
rains than by temperature.  For this reason, a variety of polycropping
strategies allows farmers to hedge their bets about the rains, holding
the soil with drought-resistant crops and interspersing among them
crops that can take best advantage of the rains. Finally, the creation
of a uniform, controlled farming environment is intrinsically more
difficult in a tropical setting than in a temperate one, and, where
population densities are low, the labor requirements of extensive
terracing or irrigation are uneconomic in the strict neoclassical
sense of the word.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-36.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 35. Construction of stick bunds across incipient gullies in a Sierra Leone rice field}
\end{figure}


Here one may recall Jane Jacobs’s important distinction between visual
orderliness on one hand and functional working order on the other. The
city desk of a newspaper, a rabbit’s intestines, or the interior of an
aircraft engine may certainly look messy, but each one reflects,
sometimes brilliantly, an order related to the function it
performs. In such instances the apparent surface disarray obscures a
more profound logic. Polyculture was a floral variant of such
order. Only a very few colonial specialists managed to peer behind the
visual confusion to its logic. One of them was Howard Jones, a
mycologist in Nigeria, who wrote in 1936:



\begin{quote}


[To the European] the whole scheme seems \dots{} laughable and ridiculous,
and in the end he would probably conclude that it is merely foolish to
crowd different plants together in this childish way so that they may
choke one another. Yet if one looks at it more closely there seems a
reason for everything. The plants are not growing at random, but have
been planted at proper distances on hillocks of soil arranged in such
a way that when rain falls it does not waterlog the plants, nor does
it pour off the surface and wash away the fine soil\dots{} The soil is
always occupied and is neither dried up by the sun nor leached out by
the rain, as it would be if it were left bare\dots{} This is but one of
many examples that might be given that should warn us to be very
cautious and thorough before we pass judgement upon native
agriculture. The whole method of farming and outlook of the farmer are
so entirely new to us that we are strongly tempted to call it foolish
from an instinctive conservatism.\footnote{Quoted in Paul Richards, “Ecological Change and the Politics of African Land Use,” \emph{African Studies Review} 26, no. 2 (June 1983): 40. Richards also quotes Dudley Stamp, who at about the same time wrote enthusiastically about the wider applicability of African techniques for combating soil erosion: “A recent tour of Nigeria has convinced the writer that the native farmer has already evolved a scheme of farming which cannot be bettered in principle even if it can be improved in detail and that, as practised in some areas, this scheme affords almost complete protection against soil erosion and loss of fertility. It may be that the African has thus a contribution to make towards the solution of the great soil erosion problems in other regions” (p. 23).}



\end{quote}


Elsewhere in the tropical world, a few astute observers were
uncovering a different agricultural logic. A striking example of
visual order versus working order was provided by Edgar Anderson, on
the basis of his botanical work in rural Guatemala. He realized that
what appeared to be overgrown, “riotous” dump heaps that no Westerner
would have taken for gardens exhibited, on closer inspection, an
exceptionally efficient and well-thought-out order. Anderson sketched
one of these gardens (figures 36 and 37), and his description of the
logic he discerned in it is worth quoting at length.



\begin{quote}


Though at first sight there seems little order, as soon as we started
mapping the garden, we realized that it was planted in fairly definite
crosswise rows. There were fruit trees, native and European in great
variety: annonas, cherimoyas, avocados, peaches, quinces, plums, a
fig, and a few coffeebushes. There were giant cacti grown for their
fruit.  There was a large plant of rosemary, a plant of rue, some
poinsettias, and a fine semiclimbing tea rose. There was a whole row
of the native domesticated hawthorn, whose fruits like yellow,
doll-size apples, make a delicious conserve. There were two varieties
of corn, one well past bearing and now serving as a trellis for
climbing string beans which were just coming into season, the other, a
much taller sort, which was tasseling out. There were specimens of a
little banana with smooth wide leaves which are the local substitute
for wrapping paper, and are also used instead of cornhusks in cooking
the native variant of hot tamales.  Over it all clambered the
luxuriant vines of the various cucurbits.  Chayote, when finally
mature, has a large nutritious root weighing several pounds. At one
point there was a depression the size of a small bathtub where a
chayote root had recently been excavated; this served as a dump heap
and compost for the waste from the house. At one end of the garden was
a small beehive made from boxes and tin cans. In terms of our American
and European equivalents, the garden was a vegetable garden, an
orchard, a medicinal garden, a dump heap, a compost heap, and a
beeyard.  There was no problem of erosion though it was at the top of
a steep slope; the soil surface was practically all covered and
apparently would be during most of the year. Humidity would be kept
during the dry season and plants of the same sort were so isolated
from one another by intervening vegetation that pests and diseases
could not readily spread from plant to plant. The fertility was being
conserved; in addition to the waste from the house, mature plants
were being buried in between the rows when their usefulness was over.



\end{quote}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-37.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 36. Edgar Anderson’s drawing of an orchard garden in Santa Lucia, Guatemala}
\end{figure}


It is frequently said by Europeans and European Americans that time
means nothing to an Indian. This garden seemed to me to be a good
example of how the Indian, when we look more than superficially into
his activities, is budgeting his time more efficiently than we do. The
garden was in continuous production but was taking only a little
effort at any one time: a few weeds pulled when one came down to pick
the squashes, corn and bean plants dug in between the rows when the
last of the climbing beans were picked, and a new crop of something
else planted above them a few weeks later.\footnote{Edgar Anderson, \emph{Plants, Man, and Life} (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952), pp. 140-41. It goes without saying that the gardens Anderson is describing are so diverse in part because the villagers in question wish to grow many of the foods needed for subsistence rather than paying for them in the market. The point, however, is the plan behind the visual disorder.}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=0.85\textheight,width=\textwidth]{j-c-james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state-38.jpg}
\caption[]{\noindent 37. In his drawing of an orchard garden in Santa Lucia, Anderson used glyphs that identify not only the plants but also their general categories. Circular glyphs indicate fruit trees of European origin (plum, peach); rounded, irregular glyphs indicate fruit trees of American origin (manzanilla). Dotted lines stand for climbing vegetables, small circles for subshrubs, large stars for succulents, and wedge-shaped figures for plants in the banana family. The narrow mass seen at the right side of figure 36 represents a hedge of chichicaste, a shrub used by the Mayas.}
\end{figure}


Like the micrologic of the Guatemalan garden, the logic of West
African polycropping systems, long dismissed as being primitive, has
finally been recognized. In fact, they came under investigation partly
as a reaction against the many monocropping schemes that
miscarried. The advantages were often evident even at the level of
narrow productivist outcomes; and once other goals such as
sustainability, conservation, and food security were considered, their
advantages seemed especially striking.


Various forms of polyculture are the norm in 80 percent of West
Africa’s farmland.\footnote{Richards, \emph{Indigenous Agricultural Revolution}, p. 63.} Given what we now know, this should occasion
little surprise. Intercropping systems are best adapted to soils of
low fertility, which characterize much of West Africa. Their use
produces greater gains in yield on such soils than on soils of high
fertility.\footnote{Ibid., p. 70.} One reason seems to be that optimal planting densities
are greater in intercropping than in monocropping, and the resulting
crowding appears, for reasons that are poorly understood but may have
to do with root fungi interactions, to improve the performance of each
cultivar.  Crowding at the later stage of cropping also helps to
suppress weeds, which are otherwise a major constraint in tropical
farming. Since the mixture of cultivars usually combines grains and
legumes (maize and sorghum, for example, with cowpeas and groundnuts),
each crop has complementary nutritional needs and rooting systems that
extract nutrients from different levels in the soil.\footnote{Most traditional cropping systems, whether polyculture or crop rotation, combine a grain and a legume in this fashion.} In the case
of relay cropping, it appears that the residues of the first crop
gathered benefit the remaining crop. The diversity of cultivars on the
same field also has a beneficial effect on the health of the crops and
hence on yields. Mixed crops and the scattering of particular
cultivars limit the habitat of various pests, diseases, and weeds that
otherwise might build up to devastating proportions, as they do on
monocropped plots.\footnote{Richards, \emph{Indigenous Agricultural Revolution}, pp. 66-70.} In fact, two specialists who were very much
out of step with the agronomic establishment of the 1930s and 1940s
went so far as to suggest that “the systematic study of mixed cropping
and other native practices might lead to comparatively minor
modifications in Yoruba and other forms of agriculture, which might in
the aggregate do more to increase crop production and soil fertility
than revolutionary changes to green manuring or mixed farming.”\footnote{H. C. Sampson and E. M. Crowther, “Crop Production and Soil Fertility Problems,” \emph{West Africa Commission}, 1938-1939: Technical Reports, part 1 (London: Leverhulme Trust, 1943), p. 34, cited in ibid., p. 30. Mixed \emph{cropping} (polyculture) must not be confused with mixed \emph{farming}, which indicates a farm producing a variety of crops (each typically on its own plot) and livestock on the European smallholder model.}


The multistoried effect of polyculture has some distinct advantages
for yields and soil conservation. “Upper-story” crops shade
“lowerstory” crops, which are selected for their ability to thrive in
the cooler soil temperature and increased humidity at ground
level. Rainfall reaches the ground not directly but as a fine spray
that is absorbed with less damage to soil structure and less
erosion. The taller crops often serve as a useful windbreak for the
lower crops. Finally, in mixed or relay cropping, a crop is in the
field at all times, holding the soil together and reducing the
leaching effects that sun, wind, and rain exert, particularly on
fragile land. Even if polyculture is not to be preferred on the
grounds of immediate yield, there is much to recommend it in terms of
sustainability and thus long-term production.


Our discussion of mixed cropping has thus far dealt only with the
narrow issues of yield and soil conservation. It has overlooked the
cultivators themselves and the various other ends that they seek by
using such techniques. The most significant advantage of
intercropping, Paul Richards claims, is its great flexibility, “the
scope [it] offers for a range of combinations to match individual
needs and preferences, local conditions, and changing circumstances
within each season and from season to season.”\footnote{Richards, “Ecological Change and the Politics of African Land Use,” p. 27.} Farmers may
polycrop in order to avoid labor bottlenecks at planting and at
harvest.\footnote{This is just one example of how the choice of technique is influenced by the factor endowments of the farmer—a large consideration, but by no means the only one.} Growing many different crops is also an obvious way to
spread risks and improve food security. Cultivators can reduce the
danger of going hungry if they sow, instead of only one or two
cultivars, crops of long and short maturity, crops that are drought
resistant and those that do well under wetter conditions, crops with
different patterns of resistance to pests and diseases, crops that can
be stored in the ground with little loss (such as cassava), and crops
that mature in the “hungry time” before other crops are gathered.\footnote{Strictly speaking, many of these advantages could also be obtained by planting many tiny parcels to single cultivars. What would be lost are the specific advantages of polycropping mentioned earlier.}
Finally, and perhaps most important, each of these crops is
embedded in a distinctive set of social relations. Different members
of the household are likely to have different rights and
responsibilities with respect to each crop. The planting regimen, in
other words, is a reflection of social relations, ritual needs, and
culinary tastes; it is not just a production strategy that a
profit-maximizing entrepreneur took straight out of the pages of a
text in neoclassical economics.


The high-modernist aesthetic and ideology of most colonial agronomists
and their Western-trained successors foreclosed a dispassionate
examination of local cultivation practices, which were regarded as
deplorable customs for which modern, scientific farming was the
corrective. A critique of such hegemonic ideas comes, if it comes at
all, not from within, but typically from the margins, where the
intellectual point of departure and operating assumptions, as was the
case with Jacobs, are substantially different. Thus the case for the
rationality of mixed cropping has largely come from rogue figures
outside the establishment.


Perhaps the most striking of these figures was Albert Howard (later
Sir Albert), an agricultural researcher who worked under local
patronage for more than three decades in India. He was known chiefly
for the Indore process, a scientific procedure of making humus from
organic wastes, and unlike most Western agronomists, he was an avid
observer of forest ecology and indigenous practices. Concerned above
all with soil fertility and sustainable agriculture, Howard observed
that the natural diversity of the forest and local polycropping
practices were both successful means of maintaining or increasing soil
health and fertility.  Soil fertility was a matter of not simply
chemical composition but also structural properties: the soil’s tilth
(or crumb structure), its degree of aeration, its moisture-holding
power, and the “fungus bridge” (the mycorrhizal association) necessary
to humus creation.\footnote{“Mycorrhizal association” refers to the symbiotic relation between the mycelium of certain fungi and the roots of a seed plant.} Some but not all elements in this complex soil
interaction could be precisely measured, while others could be
recognized by a practiced observer but not readily measured. Howard
undertook elaborate experiments in humus production, soil structure,
and plant response and was able to show field-trial yield results
superior to those achieved by standard Western practices. His main
concern, however, was not with how many bushels of wheat or maize
could be gotten from an acre as with the health and quality of the
crops and soil over the long haul.


The case for polyculture has worked its way back to the West, although
it remains one voiced by only a tiny minority. Rachel Carson, in her
revolutionary book \emph{Silent Spring}, published in 1962, traced the
destructive use of massive doses of pesticides and herbicides to
monocropping itself. The problem with insects, she explained, resulted
from the “devotion of immense acreage to a single crop. Such a system
set the stage for explosive increases in specific insect populations.
Single crop farming does not take advantage of the principles by which
nature works, it is agriculture as an engineer might conceive it to
be.  Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man
has displayed passion for simplifying it\dots{} One important check is a
limit on the amount of suitable habitat for each species.”\footnote{Rachel Carson, \emph{Silent Spring} (1962; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 10.} Just
as Howard believed that monoculture had contributed to the loss of
soil fertility and its corrective, the growing use of chemical
fertilizers (260 pounds per acre in the United States in 1970), so
Carson argued that monoculture spawned the exploding population of
pests and its corrective, the massive application of insecticides—a
cure that turned out to be worse than the disease.


For these and other reasons, there are at least faint indications that
some forms of polycropping might be suitable for Western farmers as
well as Africans.\footnote{Organic farmers have occasionally opted for mixed cropping as a way of avoiding the heavy use of fertilizers and insecticides. The most common obstacle to certain (not all) forms of polyculture is that they are too labor intensive in a context where labor is the scarce factor of production. It is hard to know how much of this labor intensiveness is the result of the fact that virtually all machine implements have been designed with monoculture exclusively in mind. One pioneer, Wes Jackson, has demonstrated that, over a three-year period and in production terms alone, polyculture can outperform monoculture. The fact that the gains to polyculture are greater in the second and third years suggests that the interaction effects between the two crops are responsible for the performance (Jackson, “Becoming Native to This Place,” paper presented at the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, New Haven, November 18, 1994). Jackson, like Howard, is primarily concerned with developing a form of agriculture that will preserve or enhance its soil capital. Such preservation is less urgent in stable bottomland but vital in ecological zones with fragile soils (e.g., hillsides and uplands). The polycropping of perennials seems particularly suitable to achieving this end.} This is not the place to attempt to demonstrate
the superiority of polyculture over monoculture, nor am I qualified to
do so. There is no single, context-free answer to this issue, for
answers would depend on any number of variables, including the goals
sought, the crops sown, and the microsettings in which they were
planted. What I have tried to demonstrate, however, is that
polyculture, even on the narrow production-oriented grounds favored by
Western agronomy, merited empirical examination as one among many
agricultural strategies. That it was instead dismissed summarily by
all but a handful of rogue agronomists is a tribute to the power both
of imperialist ideology and of the visual aesthetic of agricultural
high modernism.


The case of polyculture also raises an issue relevant to both
agricultural practice and social structure, an issue that we will
ponder at greater length in the remainder of this book: \emph{the
resilience and durability of diversity}. Whatever its other virtues or
demerits, polyculture is a more stable, more easily sustainable form
of agriculture than monocropping. It is more likely to produce what
economists call Hicksian income: income that does not undermine factor
endowments, which will permit that income flow to continue
indefinitely into the future. Polyculture is, at the same time, more
supple and adaptable. That is, it is more easily able to absorb stress
and damage without being devastated. Elegant research has recently
shown that, at least up to a point, the more cultivars that a given
plot has, the more productive and resilient it is.\footnote{Comparative experimental studies of prairie ecologies have confirmed Darwin’s original premise that more diverse ecosystems are more productive and resilient. Ecologists at the University of Minnesota compared 147 one-hundred-square-foot plots sown with different numbers of randomly chosen grass species. “The more species a plot had, the greater its biomass of plants and the more nitrogen it had taken up in its increased growth”; “the fewer the species, the sparser the growth and the greater the amount of nitrogen leaching out of upper soil layers.” After a drought, the plots with the larger number of species returned more rapidly to full productivity than did the plots with fewer species. Productivity increased dramatically with each species added up to ten species, and each species added thereafter offered much less to overall productivity. In the long run, it has been theorized, additional species might prove vital in protecting the ecosystem against extremes of weather or pest infestations. See Carol Kaesuk Yoon, “Ecosystem’s Productivity Rises with Diversity of Its Species,” \emph{New York Times}, March 5, 1996, p. C4.} Polyculture,
as we have seen, is more resistant to the insults of weather and
pests, not to mention more generous in the improvements it effects in
the soil. Even if monoculture could be shown to always give superior
yields in the short run, polyculture might still be considered to have
decisive long-term advantages.\footnote{These advantages might include, on the cost side, lower expenditures for such inputs as fertilizers and pesticides.} The evidence from forestry has
some application to agriculture as well: monocropped forests like
those in Germany and Japan have led to ecological problems so severe
that restoration ecology has been called to the rescue in order to
reestablish something approaching the earlier diversity (in insects,
flora, and fauna) necessary to the health of the forest.\footnote{Those who investigate the order that lies behind seemingly turbulent natural systems (clouds, water flows, air turbulence, epidemics, etc.) have come to contrast what they call fractal systems with linear systems. The key difference of relevance to us is the flexibility and sturdiness of fractal processes, which can survive perturbations and function over a wide range of frequencies—a quality com mon to many biological processes. In contrast, linear processes, once they are knocked off the rails, continue to veer off on the new tangent, never to return to the original equilibrium range. Polyculture, in just this sense, has a greater tolerance of disturbances.}


Here it is worth noting the strong parallel between the case for
diversity in cultivation and forestry and the case that Jacobs made
for diversity in urban neighborhoods. The more complex the
neighborhood, she reasoned, the better it will resist short-term
shocks in business conditions and market prices. Diversity, by the
same token, provides many potential growth points which can benefit
from new opportunities. A highly specialized neighborhood, by
contrast, is like a gambler placing all his bets on one turn of the
roulette wheel. If he wins, he wins big; if he loses, he may lose
everything. For Jacobs, of course, a key point about the diversity of
a neighborhood is the \emph{human} ecology it fosters.  The variety of
locally available goods and services and the complex human networks
that it makes possible, the foot traffic that promotes safety, the
visual interest that an animated and convenient neighborhood
provides—all interact to make such a location’s advantages
cumulative.\footnote{Up to a point. Jacobs shows how a neighborhood’s success can have effects on property values that will undermine some uses and will eventually transform the place. There is no equilibrium in Jacobs’s view, only a cycle that begins repeatedly in different parts of a city.} The diversity and complexity that cause systems of
flora to become more durable and resilient work, at another level
apparently, to cause human communities to become more nimble and
satisfactory.

\subsection{Permanent Fields Versus Shifting Cultivation}


Most West African farmers practiced some form of shifting
cultivation.\footnote{Shifting cultivation is also common throughout much of Southeast Asia and Latin America.} Variously called slash-and-burn cultivation,
swiddening, and rotational bush fallow, shifting cultivation involves
the temporary cultivation of a field cleared by cutting and burning
most of the vegetation. After being worked for a few years, the field
is abandoned for a new plot.  Eventually, when new growth has restored
the original field to something like its original fertility, it is
cultivated again. Polycropping and minimum tillage were often combined
with shifting cultivation.


Like polycropping, shifting cultivation, as we shall see, turns out to
be a rational, efficient, and sustainable technique under the soil,
climate, and social conditions where it is generally practiced.
Polycropping and shifting cultivation are almost invariably
associated.  Harold Conklin’s early, detailed, and still unsurpassed
account of shifting cultivation in the Philippines noted that, for a
newly cleared plot, the \emph{average} number of cultivars in a single
season was between forty and sixty.\footnote{Harold C. Conklin, \emph{Hanunoo Agriculture: A Report on an Integral System of Shifting Cultivation in the Philippines} (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1957), p. 85. One cannot come away from Conklin’s meticulous account without a sense of awe at the breadth of knowledge and skills of these cultivators.} At the same time, shifting
cultivation is an exceptionally complex and hence quite illegible form
of agriculture from the perspective of a sovereign state and its
extension agents. The fields themselves are “fugitive,” going in and
out of cultivation at irregular intervals—hardly promising material
for a cadastral map. The cultivators themselves, of course, are often
fugitive as well, moving periodically to be near their new
clearings. Registering or monitoring such populations, let alone
turning them into easily assessable taxpayers, is a Sisyphean
task.\footnote{And that, of course, was part of the reason why such populations often remained in, or fled to, non-state spaces.} The project of the state and the agricultural authorities,
as we saw in the Tanzanian case, was to replace this illegible and
potentially seditious space with permanent settlements and permanent
(preferably monocropped) fields.


Shifting cultivation also gave offense to agricultural modernizers of
whatever race, because it violated in almost every respect their
understanding of what modern agriculture \emph{had} to look like. “Early
attitudes to shifting cultivation were almost entirely negative,”
Richards notes. “It was a bad system: exploitative, untidy, and
misguided.”\footnote{Richards, \emph{Indigenous Agricultural Revolution}, p. 50. Richards continues: “The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, summed up the attitude of the day when noting that in Sierra Leone, for example, ‘the natural forest has been ruthlessly destroyed to find virgin soil for the cultivation of “hill” or “land” rice’” (pp. 50-51).} The finely adapted logic of shifting cultivation
depended on disturbing the landscape and ecology as little as possible
and mimicking, where it could, many of the symbiotic associations of
local plants. This meant that such fields looked far more like
unimproved nature than the neatly manicured, rectilinear fields that
most agricultural officers were used to. The ecological caution of
shifting cultivation, in other words, was the reason behind the
appearances that so offended development officials.


Rotational bush fallow had a good many other advantages that were
rarely appreciated. It upheld the physical properties of upland and
hill soils which, once destroyed, were difficult to restore. The
rotation itself, where land was abundant, ensured the long-run
stability of the practice.  Shifting cultivators rarely removed large
trees or stumps—a custom that limited erosion and helped the soil
structure but that struck agricultural officials as sloppy and
unsightly. With some exceptions, swidden plots were cultivated by hoe
or dibble stick rather than plowed.  To Westernized agronomists, it
appeared that the farmers were merely “scratching the surface” of
their soils out of a deplorable ignorance or sloth. Where they
encountered farming systems involving deep plowing and monocropping,
they believed they had encountered a more advanced and industrious
population.\footnote{Ibid., p. 42.} The burning of the brush accumulated in clearing a
new swidden was also condemned as wasteful. After a time, however,
both shallow cultivation and burning were found to be highly
beneficial; the former preserved the soil, especially in areas of high
rainfall, while the latter reduced pest populations and provided
valuable nutrients to the crop. Experiments showed, in fact, that
burning the brush \emph{in} the field (rather than hauling it off)
contributed to better yields, as did a carefully timed burn.\footnote{See ibid., chap. 2. Richards concludes: “From the point of view of fertilization, modern soil science confirms the validity of the forest farmer’s emphasis on ash and the savannah farmer’s emphasis on ‘manure’ and ‘compost’” (p. 61). For an excellent analysis of the techniques of burning in Honduras, see Kees Jansen, “The Art of Burning and the Politics of Indigenous Agricultural Knowledge.” paper presented at a congress entitled “Agrarian Questions: The Politics of Farming Anno 1995,” May 22-24, 1995, Wageningen, The Netherlands.}


To someone trained to a Western perspective, the total effect of such
cultivation practices had “backwardness” written all over it—heaps of
brush waiting to be burned on unplowed, half-cleared fields littered
with stumps and planted with several interspersed crops, none of them
sown in straight rows. And yet, as the hard evidence accumulated, it
was clear that appearances were deceiving, even in productionist
terms. As Richards concludes, “The proper test for any practice was
whether it worked in the environment concerned, not whether it looked
‘advanced’ or ‘backward.’ Testing requires carefully controlled
input-output trials.  If ‘shallow’ cultivation on ‘partially cleared’
land gives better returns relative to the inputs expended than rival
systems, and these results can be sustained over time, then the
technique is a good one, irrespective of whether it was invented
yesterday or a thousand years ago.”\footnote{Richards, \emph{Indigenous Agricultural Revolution}, p. 43. In this context Richards is accepting the premise that the only test is market efficiency, providing that it is sustainable.} Lost in the early blanket
condemnations of shifting cultivation was the realization that the
practice was deployed in a highly discriminating way by African
cultivators. Most farmers combined permanent bottomland cultivation of
some kind with swidden cultivation of the more fragile hillsides,
uplands, or forests. Rather than not knowing any better, as was often
assumed, most shifting cultivators were familiar with a range of
cropping techniques among which they selected with care.

\subsection{Fertilizer Versus Fertility}



\begin{quote}


The best fertilizer on any farm is the footsteps of the owner.



\end{quote}


— Confucius


Commercial fertilizers have often been touted as magical inoculations
for improving poor soils and raising yields; extension agents have
routinely referred to fertilizers and pesticides as medicine for the
soil. The actual results have often been disappointing. Two major
reasons for the disappointment are directly relevant to our larger
argument.


First, recommendations for fertilizer applications are inevitably
gross simplifications. Their applicability to any \emph{particular} field
is questionable, since a map of soil classes is likely to overlook an
enormous degree of microvariation between and within fields. The
conditions under which fertilizers are applied, the “dosage,” the soil
structure, the crops for which they are intended, and the weather
immediately prior and subsequent to their application can all greatly
influence their uptake and effect. As Richards observes, the
unavoidable variation by farm and field “requires a more open-ended
approach, with, in all probability, farmers doing much of the
necessary experimentation for themselves.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 61.}


Second, fertilizer formulas suffer from an analytical narrowness. The
formulas themselves derive from the work of a remarkable German
scientist, Justus Freiherr von Liebig, who, in a classic manuscript
published in 1840, identified the main chemical nutrients present in
the soil and to whom we still owe the current standard fertilizer
recipe (N, P, K). It was a brilliant scientific advance, with
far-reaching and usually beneficial results. Where it tended to get
into trouble, however, was when it posed as “imperial” knowledge-when
it was touted as the way in which all soil deficiencies could be
remedied.\footnote{Liebig did believe that his formula could cure all soil problems.} As Howard and others have painstakingly shown, there
are a range of intervening variables—including the physical structure
of the soil, aeration, tilth, humus, and the fungus bridge—that
greatly influence plant nutrition and soil fertility.\footnote{Among the many experiments that Howard conducted were elaborate trials of “green manuring” (the plowing under of a nitrogen-fixing, leguminous crop prior to the planting of a grain crop), which showed that its effect depended greatly on these other variables as well as the right timing and the amount of moisture in the soil in order to promote the chemical reactions (first aerobic and then anaerobic) necessary for the production of more humus. See Sir Albert Howard, \emph{An Agricultural Testament} (London: Oxford University Press, 1940).} Chemical
fertilizers can in fact so thoroughly oxidize beneficial organic
matter as to destroy its crumb structure and contribute to a
progressive alkalization and a loss of fertility.\footnote{Alkalization occurs as well with the salts left behind in the course of intensive irrigation. Growers in those areas of the Imperial Valley in California suffering from alkalization have had to install drainage tiles at shorter and shorter intervals over the years in order to prevent the buildup from reaching ruinous proportions.}


The details are less important than the larger point: an effective
soil science must not stop at chemical nutrients; it must encompass
elements of physics, bacteriology, entomology, and geology, and that
is at a minimum. Ideally, then, a practical approach to fertilizers
requires, simultaneously, a general, interdisciplinary knowledge,
which a single specialist is unlikely to have, \emph{and} attention to the
particularity of a given field, which only the farmer is likely to
have. A procedure that blends a purely chemical nutrient perspective
with soil classification grids and that leaves the particular field
far behind is a recipe for ineffectiveness or even disaster.

\subsection{A History of “Unauthorized” Innovation}


For most colonial officials and their successors, high-modernist
commitments led them to form inaccurate assumptions about indigenous
agriculture and blinded them to its dynamism. Far from being timeless,
static, and rigid, indigenous agricultural practices were constantly
being revised and adapted. Some of this plasticity was part of a broad
repertoire of techniques that could be adjusted, for example, to
different patterns of rainfall, soils, pitches of land, market
opportunities, and labor supplies. Most African cultivators were
typically utilizing more than one cultivation technique during a
season and knew many more that might come in handy. When entirely
novel cultivars from the New World became available, they were adopted
with alacrity where appropriate. Thus maize, cassava, potatoes,
chiles, and a variety of New World pulses and gourds were incorporated
into many African planting regimens.\footnote{Rice, an Old World plant, had come much earlier and been adapted. Although a perennial, rice is planted as if it were an annual.}


The history of “on-farm” experimentation, selection, and adaptation
was, of course, a very old story indeed, both in Africa and elsewhere.
Ethnobotany and paleobotany have been able to trace in some historical
detail how hybrids and variants of, for example, the main Old World
grains or New World maize were selected and propagated for a host of
different uses and growing conditions. The same observation holds true
for those plants that are vegetatively propagated—that is, propagated
by cuttings rather than by seeds.\footnote{Just how deep this history is, is reflected in the fact that modern man has added no important domesticated species of plant or animal in the last four thousand years. This story can be followed in Carl O. Sauer, \emph{Agricultural Origins and Dispersals} (New York: American Geographical Society, 1952). Sauer relies heavily on an important work by the pioneer Russian scientist in this area, N. I. Vavilov: \emph{The Origin, Variation, Immunity, and Breeding of Cultivated Plants}, trans. K. Starr Chester, vol. 13, nos. 1-6, of Chronica botanica (1949-50). Potatoes are a good example of a plant that must be vegetatively propagated by cuttings.}


On a strictly dispassionate view, more specialists would have
concluded that there were many grounds for considering every African
farm as something of a small-scale experimental station. It stands to
reason that any community of cultivators who must wrest their living
from a stingy and variable environment will rarely overlook the
opportunity to improve their security and food supply. The limits to
local knowledge must also be emphasized. Indigenous cultivators knew
their own environment and its possibilities remarkably well. But they
of course lacked the knowledge that such tools of modern science as
the microscope, aerial photography, and scientific plant breeding
could provide. They often lacked, as did many cultivators elsewhere,
the technology or the access to technology that make, say, large-scale
irrigation schemes and highly mechanized agriculture possible. Like
peasants in the Mediterranean Basin, China, and India, they were
capable of damaging their ecosystem, even if low population densities
had thus far spared them from making this mistake.\footnote{There are exceptions, one of which seems to be the ecologically devastated northern part of Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is worth adding that neither does the record of the industrialized world in soil erosion, pollution or exhaustion of groundwater, and global warming represent an edifying example of foresight.} But if most
agricultural specialists had appreciated how much the indigenous
farmer \emph{did} know, had appreciated her practical, experimental temper
and willingness to adopt new crops and techniques when they met local
needs, such specialists would have concluded, with Robert Chambers,
that “indigenous agricultural knowledge, despite being ignored or
overridden by consultant experts, is the single largest knowledge
resource not yet mobilized in the development enterprise.”\footnote{Robert Chambers, \emph{Rural Development: Putting the Last First} (London: Longman, 1983), quoted in Richards, \emph{Indigenous Agricultural Revolution}, p. 40. There is a case to be made for Howard’s claim that “agricultural revolutions” are always acts of autonomous farmers rather than states. From the agricultural revolution in Britain that laid the groundwork for industrialization to the broad adoption of such new crops as cocoa, tobacco, and maize in Africa, Howard’s generalization rings true. It does not hold true, however, for large-scale irrigation projects or for the more recent, research-driven breeding of high-yielding varieties of wheat, rice, and maize. These state-sponsored innovations typically have powerful implications for centralization.}

\section{The Institutional Affinities of High-Modernist Agriculture}


The willful disdain for local competence shown by most agricultural
specialists was not, I believe, simply a case of prejudice (of the
educated, urban, and Westernized elite toward the peasantry) or of the
aesthetic commitments implicit in high modernism. Rather, official
attitudes were also a matter of institutional privilege. To the degree
that the cultivators’ practices were presumed reasonable until proven
otherwise, to the degree that specialists might learn as much from the
farmer as vice versa, and to the degree that specialists had to
negotiate with farmers as political equals, would the basic premise
behind the officials’ institutional status and power be
undermined. The unspoken logic behind most of the state projects of
agricultural modernization was one of consolidating the power of
central institutions and diminishing the autonomy of cultivators and
their communities vis-à-vis those institutions. Every new material
practice altered in some way the existing distribution of power,
wealth, and status; and the agricultural specialists’ claims to be
neutral technicians with no institutional stake in the outcome can
hardly be accepted at face value.\footnote{James Ferguson, \emph{The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Ferguson shows brilliantly how the institutional power of international and national development agencies depends vitally on their representing their activities as neutral interventions by scientific specialists.}


The centralizing effects of Soviet collectivization and ujamaa
villages were perfectly obvious. So are those of large irrigation
projects, where authorities decide when to release the water, how to
distribute it, and what water fees to charge, or of agricultural
plantations, where the workforce is supervised as if it were in a
factory setting.\footnote{It might be objected that, in the case of large irrigation works, a centralized logic is mandatory for the apportionment of water rights between upstream and downstream users. The fact is that quite large irrigation systems have been successfully organized for hundreds of years without centralized political authorities exercising coercive powers. For a remarkable study showing how such a system worked and how it was nearly destroyed by the “simplifications” imposed by hydrological experts and agronomists from the Asian Development Bank, see J. Steven Lansing, \emph{Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Also useful is Elinor Ostrom, \emph{Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).} For colonialized farmers, the effect of such
centralization and expertise was a radical de-skilling of the
cultivators themselves. Even in the context of family farms and a
liberal economy, this was in fact the utopian prospect held up by
Liberty Hyde Bailey, a plant breeder, apostle of agricultural science,
and the chairman of the Country Life Commission under Theodore
Roosevelt. Bailey declared, “There will be established in the open
country plant doctors, plant breeders, soil experts, health experts,
pruning and spraying experts, forest experts, recreation experts,
market experts, \dots{} [and] housekeeping experts, \dots{} [all of whom are]
needed for the purpose of giving special advice and direction.”\footnote{Quoted in Stephen A. Marglin, “Farmers, Seedsmen, and Scientists: Systems of Agriculture and Systems of Knowledge” (unpublished paper, May 1991, revised March 1992). Marglin’s account is an astute analysis of the ecological and institutional consequences of scientific agriculture. His analysis of knowledge systems has strong parallels with my own analysis of mētis in chapter 8. We each independently discovered the value of using concepts of knowledge from Greek philosophy to distinguish practical knowledge from deductive knowledge. I have found his discussion helpful and clarifying. Marglin’s analysis of American agricultural practice is usefully read along with Deborah Fitzgerald, \emph{Yeomen No More: The Industrialization of American Agriculture} (forthcoming).}
Bailey’s future was one organized almost entirely by a managerial
elite: “Yet we are not to think of society as founded wholly on small
separate tracts, of ‘family farms,’ occupied by persons who live
merely in contentment; this would mean that all landsmen would be
essentially laborers. We need to hold on the land many persons who
possess large powers of organization, who are managers, who can handle
affairs in a bold way: it would be fatal to the best social and
spiritual results if such persons could find no adequate opportunities
on the land and were forced into other occupations.”\footnote{Marglin, “Farmers, Seedsmen, and Scientists,” p. 7.}


In spite of these hopeful pronouncements and intentions, if one
examines carefully many of the agricultural innovations of the
twentieth century—innovations that seemed purely technical and hence
neutral—one cannot but conclude that many of them created commercial
and political monopolies that inevitably diminished the autonomy of
the farmer. The revolution in hybrid seeds, particularly corn, had
this effect.\footnote{The term “hybrid” has changed in meaning. Originally, it referred to any cross; now it refers only to crosses between two inbred “pure” lines.} Since hybrids are either sterile or do not breed
“true,” the seed company that has bred the parents of the hybrid-cross
has valuable property in hybrid seed, which it can sell every year,
unlike the openpollinated varieties which the farmer can select
himself.\footnote{Marglin notes the close collaboration between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the large seed companies, which helped the latter achieve dominance in maize hybrids. The same dominance is less likely for wheat and rice, which are self-pollinating. Improved yields for these crops are achieved with new varieties which are genetically stable. Marglin, “Farmers, Seedsmen, and Scientists,” p. 17.}


A similar but not identical centralizing logic applied to the
highyielding varieties (HYVs) of wheat, rice, and maize developed over
the past thirty years. Their enormous impact on yields (an impact that
varied widely by crop and growing conditions) depended on combining a
massive response to nitrogen application with short, tough stalks that
prevented lodging. Realizing their potential yield required abundant
water (usually via irrigation), large applications of commercial
fertilizer, and the periodic application of pesticides. Mechanization
of field preparation and harvesting was also promoted. As with
hybrids, the lack of biological diversity in the fields meant that
each generation of HYVVS was likely to succumb to infestations of
fungus, rust, or insects, necessitating the purchase of new seeds
\emph{and} new pesticides (as the insects built up resistance). The
resulting biological arms race, which plant breeders and chemists
believe that they can continue to win, is one that puts the cultivator
increasingly in the hands of public and private specialists. As with
the truly democratic aspects of Nyerere’s policies, those elements of
research and policy that might threaten the position of a managerial
elite tended either not to be explored at all or, if explored, to be
“selected against” in policy implementation.

\section{The Simplifying Assumptions of Agricultural Science}



\begin{quote}


This attempt at total control is an invitation to disorder. And the
rule seems to be that the more rigid and exclusive is the specialist’s
boundary, and the stricter the control within it, the more disorder
rages around it. One can take a greenhouse and grow summer vegetables
in the wintertime, but in doing so one creates a vulnerability to the
weather and to the possibility of failure where none existed
before. The control by which a tomato plant lives through January is
much more problematic than the natural order by which an oak tree or a
titmouse lives through January.



\end{quote}


— Wendell Berry, \emph{The Unsettling of America}


Most of the elements of state development programs have not been
merely the whims of powerful elites. Even villagization in Tanzania
had long been the subject of apparently sound agroeconomic
analysis. Schemes for the introduction of such new crops as cotton,
tobacco, groundnuts, and rice as well as plans for mechanization,
irrigation, and fertilizer regimens had been preceded by lengthy
technical studies and field trials. Why, then, have such a large
number of these schemes failed to deliver anything like the results
foreseen for them? A closely related question, which we will address
in the next chapter, is why so many successful changes in agricultural
practices and production have been pioneered, not by the state, but by
the autonomous initiative of cultivators themselves.

\subsection{The Isolation of Experimental Variables}


The record shows, it seems to me, that a substantial part of the
problem lies in the systematic and necessary limitations of scientific
work \emph{whenever} the ultimate purpose of that work is practical
adoption by a diverse set of practitioners working in a large variety
of conditions.  That is, some of the problems lie deeper than the
institutional temptations to central control, the pathologies of
administration, or the penchant for aesthetically satisfying but
uneconomic show projects.  Even under the best of circumstances, the
laboratory results and the data from the experimental plots of
research stations are a long country mile from the human and natural
environments where they must ultimately find a home.


The normal procedure in scientific agricultural research has
historically been to focus almost exclusively on crop-by-crop
experiments designed to test the impact of variations in inputs on
yields. More recently, other variables have come under scrutiny. Thus
experiments might test yields under different soil and moisture
conditions or determine which hybrids resisted lodging or ripened in a
way that facilitated machine harvesting. Ecologically conscious
research has often proceeded in the same fashion: by isolating one by
one the variables that might contribute, say, to biological resistance
of a certain variety of fruit to a particular pest.


The isolation of a very few variables—ideally just two, while
controlling all others—is a key tenet of experimental science.\footnote{Since such control is only approximated in most real experiments, every experiment is followed by a great deal of discussion about the “extraneous variables,” or variables other than those singled out by the experimental design, which might have produced the findings. The findings in such cases are ambiguous until a subsequent experiment controls the rogue variables.} As
a procedure, it is both valuable and necessary to scientific
work. Only by radically simplifying the experimental situation is it
possible to guarantee unambiguous, verifiable, impersonal, and
universal results.\footnote{Marglin, “Farmers, Seedsmen, and Scientists,” p. 5.} As a pioneer in chaos theory has put it:
“There is a fundamental presumption in physics that the way you
understand the world is that you keep isolating its ingredients until
you understand the stuff you think is truly fundamental. Then you
presume that the other things you don’t understand are details. The
assumption is that there are a small number of principles that you can
discern by looking at things in their pure state—this is the truly
analytic notion—and somehow you put these together in some more
complicated ways when you want to solve more \emph{dirty} problems. \emph{If you
can}.”\footnote{Mitchell Feigenbaum, quoted in James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin, 1988), p. 185.} In agricultural research, controlling for all possible
variables except those under experimental scrutiny required
normalizing assumptions about such things as weather, soils, and
landscapes, not to mention normalizing assumptions, often implicit,
about farm size, labor availability, and the desires of cultivators.
“Test-tube research,” of course, most closely approximated the ideal
of controls.\footnote{Experimental laboratory science is necessarily carried out using a standardized and purified nature (e.g., purified reagents from catalogues) and man-made instruments of observation. The reliable manipulation of such objects makes for successful experiments and a certain level of self-vindication in laboratory practice. See Theodore M. Porter, \emph{Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), chap. 1. See also Ian Hacking, “The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences,” in Andrew Pickering, ed., \emph{Science as Practice and Culture} (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 29-64.} Even the experimental plot on a research station,
however, was itself a radical simplification. It maximized the degree
of control “within a small and highly simplified enclosure” and
ignored the rest, leaving it “totally out of control.”\footnote{Berry, \emph{The Unsettling of America}, pp. 70-71. There is no reason, in principle, why the dependent variable of greatest interest cannot be, say, nutritional value, the timing of tillering, taste, or hardiness. But the research is more manageable when the variable of interest is less subjective and more easily quantifiable.}


It is easy to see how monoculture and attention to quantitative yields
would fit most comfortably within this paradigm. Monoculture
eliminates all other cultivars that might complicate the design, while
concern with quantitative yields avoids the thorny measurement
problems that would arise if a particular quality or taste were the
objective. The science of forestry is easiest when one is interested
only in the commercial wood from a single species of tree. The science
of agriculture is easiest when it is a question of the most efficient
way of getting as many bushels as possible of one hybrid of maize from
a “normalized” acre.


A progressive loss of experimental control occurs when one moves from
the laboratory to the research plot on an experimental station and
then to field trials on actual farms. Richards notes the unease such a
move aroused among researchers in West Africa, who were anxious about
making their research more practical yet concerned about any relaxing
of experimental conditions. After discussing how the farms selected
for trials ought to be relatively homogeneous so that they would
respond in uniform ways to the experimental results, the researchers
went on to lament the experimental control that they lost by
leaving the research station. “It may be difficult,” they wrote, “to
plant at all locations within a few days and almost impossible to find
farm plots of uniform soil.” They continued, “Other types of
\emph{interference}, such as pest attacks or bad weather, may affect some
treatments and not others.”\footnote{D. S. Ngambeki and G. F. Wilson, “Moving Research to Farmers’ Fields,” International Institute of Tropical Agriculture Research Briefs, 4:4, 1, 7-8, quoted in Richards, \emph{Indigenous Agricultural Revolution}, p. 143.} This is, Richards explains, a
“salutary reminder of one of the reasons why ‘formal’ scientific
research procedures on experimental stations, with the stress on
controlling all variables except the one or two under direct
investigation, ‘miss the point’ as far as many small-holders are
concerned. The main concern of farmers is how to cope with these
complex interactions and unscheduled events. From the scientist’s
point of view (particularly in relation to the need to secure
clear-cut results for publication), on-farm experimentation poses a
tough challenge.”\footnote{Richards, \emph{Indigenous Agricultural Revolution}, p. 143.}


To the extent that science is obliged to deal simultaneously with the
complex interactions of many variables, it begins to lose the very
characteristics that distinguish it as modern science. Nor does the
accumulation of many narrow experimental studies add up to the same
thing as a single study of such complexity. This is not, I must
repeat, a case against the experimental techniques of modern
scientific research. Any extensive, on-farm research study that did
not reduce the complexity of interactions might be able to show, as
farmers can, that a set of practices produced “good results”: say,
high yields. But it would not be able to isolate the key factors
responsible for this result. The case that I am making instead
recognizes the power and utility of scientific work, within its
domain, \emph{and} recognizes its limitations in dealing with the kinds of
problems for which its techniques are ill suited.

\subsection{Blind Spots}


Returning once again to the case of polyculture, we can see why
agronomists might have scientific as well as aesthetic and
institutional grounds for opposing polycropping. Complex forms of
intercropping introduce \emph{too many variables} into simultaneous play to
offer much chance of unambiguous experimental proof of causal
relations. We know that certain polycultural techniques, particularly
those combining nitrogen-fixing legumes with grains, are quite
productive, but we know little about the precise interactions that
bring about these results.\footnote{Sauer, \emph{Agricultural Origins and Dispersals}, pp. 62-83.} And we find problems in teasing out
causation even when we confine our attention to the single dependent
variable of quantitative yields.\footnote{In addition to the difficulties in finding the “active” cause among many possibilities, such a study of polycropping would have to find and justify a formula for comparing different combinations of yields. Assuming the same costs, which is superior: a yield of two hundred bushels of lima beans and three hundred bushels of corn, or a yield of three hundred bushels of lima beans and two hundred bushels of corn? Does one arrive at a common denominator by using market prices (which would mean the answer would vary week by week and year by year), caloric content, overall nutritive value, or some other measure? The difficulties rapidly pile up.} If we relax this restriction of
focus and begin to consider a wider range of dependent variables
(outcomes), such as soil fertility, interactions with livestock
(fodder, manuring), compatibility with family labor supply, and so on,
the difficulties of comparison rapidly become intractable to
scientific method.


The nature of the scientific problem here is strongly analogous to
that of complexity in physical systems. The elegantly simple formulas
of Newton’s laws of mechanics make it relatively easy to calculate the
orbits of two heavenly bodies once we know their respective masses and
the distance between them. Add one more body, however, and the
calculation of orbits resulting from the interaction becomes far more
complex. When there are ten bodies interacting (this is the
\emph{simplified} version of our solar system),\footnote{That is, this is a version of the solar system that discounts all the various moons, asteroids, nearby stars, and so on.} no orbits ever exactly
repeat themselves, and there is no way to predict the long-term state
of the system. As each new variable is introduced, the number of
ramifying interactions to be taken into account grows geometrically.


It does not stretch the facts too far, I think, to claim that
scientific agricultural research has an elective affinity with
agricultural techniques that lie within reach of its powerful
methods. Maximizing the yields of pure-stand crops is one technique
where its power can be used to best advantage. Insofar as its
institutional power has permitted, agricultural agencies, like
scientific foresters, have tended to simplify their environments in
ways that make them more amenable to their system of knowledge. The
forms of agriculture that conformed to their modernist aesthetic and
their politico-administrative interests also happened to fit securely
within the perimeter of their professional scientific vocation.\footnote{Writing in 1977, Wendell Berry rhetorically asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture: “Where are the control plots which test the various systems of soil management? Where are the performance figures for present-day small farms using draft animals, small scale technologies, and alternative energy sources? Where are the plots kept free of agricultural chemicals? If these exist, then they are the best-kept secrets of our time. But if they do not exist, whence comes the scientific authority of scientific agriculture? Without appropriate controls, one has no proof; one does not, in any respectable sense, have an experiment” (\emph{The Unsettling of America}, p. 206). Since that time, such comparisons have been made, with many of the results reported in a USDA study on organic farming entitled \emph{Report and Recommendations on Organic Farming}, prepared by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Team on Organic Farming (Washington: USDA, 1980). The parallels with the West African story are striking. In each case certain practices were deemed not to be worth investigating, partly because they and their practitioners were presumed to be backward and inefficient. Only when the anomalies and long-run consequences of mainstream doctrines became apparent were such practices examined carefully.}


What of the “disorder” outside the realm of the experimental design?
Extra-experimental interactions can in fact prove beneficial when they
strengthen the desired effect.\footnote{Aspirin, for example, which has long been used to alleviate headaches, has turned out to have a number of other beneficial effects that were discovered only recently.} There is no a priori reason for
anticipating what their effects might be; what is significant is that
they lie wholly outside the experimental model.


Occasionally, however, these effects have been both important and
potentially threatening. A striking example from the years between
1947 and 1960 was the massive, worldwide use of pesticides, the most
infamous of which was DDT. DDT was sprayed to kill mosquito
populations and thereby reduce the many diseases that the pests
carry. The experimental model was largely confined to determining the
dosage concentrations and application conditions required for
eradicating mosquito populations.  Within its field of vision, the
model was successful; DDT did kill mosquitos and dramatically reduced
the incidence of endemic malaria and other diseases.\footnote{With hindsight, one could still argue that, in terms of a cost-benefit analysis, the reduction in disease was so valuable that it outweighed any harm caused to the environment. But that is not the point. The point is that the costs in this case were outside the experimental model and could not have been assessed in any event.} It also had,
as we slowly became aware, devastating ecological effects, as
residues were absorbed by organisms all along the food chain, of which
humans are of course also a part. The consequences of the use of DDT
and other pesticides on soil, water, fish, insects, birds, and fauna
were so intricate that we have not yet gotten to the bottom of them.

\subsection{Weak Peripheral Vision}


Part of the problem was that the side effects were constantly
ramifying.  A first-order effect—say, the decline or disappearance of
a local insect population—led to changes in flowering plants, which
changed the habitat for other plants and for rodents, and so
on. Another part of the problem was that the effects of pesticides on
other species were examined only under experimental conditions. Yet
the application of DDT was under \emph{field} conditions, and as Carson
pointed out, scientists had no idea what the interactive effects of
pesticides were when they were mixed with water and soil and acted
upon by sunlight.


That awareness of these interaction effects came from \emph{outside} the
scientific paradigm itself is both interesting and, I think,
diagnostic.  It began, in particular, when people gradually came to
realize that the songbird population had suffered a radical
decline. Public alarm at what was \emph{not} happening anymore outside
their kitchen windows led, eventually (through scientific research),
to a tracing of how DDT concentrations in the organs of birds led to
fragile eggshells and reproductive failure.  This finding in turn
stimulated a host of related inquiries into the effects of pesticides
and ultimately to legislation banning the use of DDT. In this case, as
in others, the power of the scientific paradigm was achieved partly by
its exclusion of extra-experimental variables that have often circled
back, as it were, to take their revenge.


The logic of agroeconomic analysis of farming efficiency and profits
also wins its power by a comparable restriction of the field of focus.
Its tools are used to best advantage in examining the microeconomics
of the farm as a firm. On the basis of its necessary simplifying
assumptions about factor costs, inputs, weather, labor use, and
prices, it can show how profitable or unprofitable it might be to use
a particular piece of machinery, to buy irrigation equipment, or to
raise one crop rather than another. Studies of this kind and also of
marketing have tended to demonstrate the economies of scale achievable
by large, highly capitalized, and highly mechanized
operations. Outside this narrow perspective are hundreds of
considerations that are necessarily bracketed, in a manner similar to
that used in experimental science. But here, in agroeconomic analysis,
the human agents adopting this view have the political capacity, in
the short run at least, to make certain that they are not held
economically responsible for the larger “extra-firm” consequences of
their logic. The pattern in agriculture in the United States was
clearly outlined by a rogue economist testifying to Congress in 1972.



\begin{quote}


Only in the past decade has serious attention been given to the fact
that the large agricultural firm is \dots{} able to achieve benefits by
externalizing certain costs. The disadvantages of large scale
operation fall largely outside the decision-making framework of the
large farm firm. Problems of waste disposal, pollution control, added
burdens on public service, deterioration of rural social structures,
impairment of the tax base, and the political consequences of a
concentration of economic power have typically not been considered as
costs of large scale, by the firm. They are unquestionably costs to
the larger community.


In theory, large scale operation should enable the firm to bring a
wide range of both costs and benefits within its internal
decision-making framework. In practice the economic and political
power that accompanies large scale provides constant temptation to the
large firm to take the benefits and pass on the costs.\footnote{Philip M. Raup, University of Minnesota, testifying before the U.S. Senate Small Business Committee (March 1, 1972), quoted in Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, p. 171.}



\end{quote}


In other words, although the business analysts of theagricultural
firms have weak peripheral vision, the political clout that such firms
possess both individually and collectively can help them avoid being
blindsided.

\subsection{Shortsightedness}


Nearly all studies purporting to evaluate decisions of interest to
farmers are experiments that last one or at most a few seasons.
Implicitly, the logic behind a research design of this kind is that
the long-run effects will not contradict the short-run findings. The
question of the time horizon of research is directly relevant even to
those for whom the maximization of yields is the holy grail. Unless
they are exclusively interested in immediate yields, no matter what
the consequences, their attention must be directed to the issue of
sustainability or to Hicksian income. Perhaps the most significant
practical division is thus not between those who would design
agricultural policy with cultural and social goals in mind (such as
the preservation of the family farm, the landscape, or diversity) and
those who want to maximize production and profit, but rather between
productionists with a short view and productionists with a long view.
After all, concern about soil erosion and water supply was motivated
less often by regard for the environment than by regard for the
sustainability of current production.


The relatively short-run orientation of crop studies and farm
economics works to exclude even those long-run results of interest to
the productionists. Many of the claims for polyculture, for example,
assert its superiority over the long haul as a system of production. A
polycropping trial of twenty or more years, as Stephen Marglin has
suggested, might well reach conclusions that are quite different from
those derived from a trial that lasts a season or two.\footnote{Marglin, “Farmers, Seedsmen, and Scientists,” pp. 33-38.} It is not
at all implausible that the process of open pollination and selection
by farmers, as opposed to hybridization, might have developed
cultivars roughly equal in yield to the best hybrids and superior to
them in many other respects, including profitability.\footnote{See, for example, Kloppenberg, \emph{First the Seed}, chap. 5. Harlan, \emph{Crops and Man}, p. 129, reports that a selection of barley left in the field as seed stock over a trial of sixty years produced 95 percent of the yield that plant breeders would have been able to achieve and were almost certainly hardier and more disease resistant strains of barley.} The paper
profits of scientific, monocropped forests, we now realize, were
achieved at considerable cost to the long-term health and productivity
of the forest. One would have supposed that since most farms are
family enterprises, there would have been more studies of cropping and
firm economics that took as their analytical unit of time the entire
family cycle of one generation.\footnote{The classic study of the family development cycle is A. V. Chayanov, \emph{The Theory of Peasant Economy}, introduction by Teodor Shanin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). One of the policy arguments for the stable family farm as an institution is that it is more likely than a capitalist firm to have an intergenerational interest in maintaining or improving the quality of the land and environment. The same logic has traditionally been deployed to argue that many forms of sharecropping and tenancy lead to destructive practices.}


Nothing in the logic of the scientific method itself seems to require
that a short-run perspective prevail; rather, such a perspective seems
to be a response to institutional and perhaps commercial pressures. On
the other hand, the need to isolate a few variables while assuming
everything else constant and the bracketing of interaction effects
that lie outside the experimental model are very definitely inscribed
in scientific method. They are a condition of the formidable clarity
it achieves within its field of vision. Taken together, the parts of
the landscape occluded by actual scientific practice—the blind spots,
the periphery, and the long view—also constitute a formidable portion
of the real world.

\section{The Simplifying Practice of Scientific Agriculture}

\subsection{Some Yields Are More Equal Than Others}


Modern agricultural research commonly proceeds as if yields, per unit
of scarce inputs, were the central concern of the farmer. The
assumption is enormously convenient; like the commercial wood of
scientific forestry, the generic, homologous, uniform commodities thus
derived create the possibility both of quantitative comparisons
between the yield of different cultivation techniques and of aggregate
statistics. The familiar tabulations of acres planted, yields per
acre, and total production from year to year are usually the decisive
measure of success in a development program.


But the premise that all rice, all corn, and all millet are “equal,”
however useful, is simply not a plausible assumption about any crop
unless it is \emph{purely} a commodity for sale in the market.\footnote{Even if all such grains were equal in the marketplace, each variety would still have unique labor requirements, growing characteristics, and resistances that would make an important difference to the growers.} Each
subspecies of grain has distinctive properties, not just in how it
grows but in its qualities as a grain once harvested. In some
cultures, certain varieties of rice are grown for use in certain
distinctive dishes; other varieties of rice may be used only for
specific ritual purposes or in the settlement of local debts. Some of
the complex considerations that go into distinguishing one rice from
another in terms of their cooking properties alone can be appreciated
from Richards’s observations about how the considerations are weighed
in Sierra Leone.



\begin{quote}


A phrase like “it cooks badly” is often a catch-all for a range of
properties connected with storage, preparation and consumption, going
well beyond subjective questions of “taste.” Is the variety concerned
well-adapted to local food processing techniques? Is it readily peeled,
milled, and pounded? How much water and fuel does it require in
cooking?  How long does it keep, prior to cooking and once cooked?
Mende women claim that improved swamp rices are much less palatable
than the harder “upland” rices when served up a second time. With the
right kind of rice, it is possible to cut down the number of times it
is necessary to cook during busy periods on the farm. Since cooking
sometimes takes up to 3-4 hours per day (including the time taken to
husk rice, prepare a fire and collect water) this is a factor of no
small importance when labour is short.\footnote{Richards, \emph{Indigenous Agricultural Revolution}, p. 124.}



\end{quote}


So far, we have considered only the husked grain. What if we broaden
our view to take in the rest of the plant? At once we see that there
is a great deal more to be harvested from a plant than its seed
grains. Thus a Central American peasant may not be interested only in
the number and size of the corn kernels she harvested. She may also be
interested in using the cobs for fodder and scrub brushes; the husk
and leaves for wrappers, thatch, and fodder; and the stalks as
trellises for climbing beans, as fodder, and as temporary fencing. The
fact that Central American farmers know of many more maize varieties
than do their counterparts in the Corn Belt of the United States is
partly related to the uses to which different varieties are put. Maize
may also be sold in the market for any of these purposes and thus
prized for qualities other than its kernels. The same story could, of
course, be told about virtually any widely grown cultivar. Its various
parts from various stages of growth may come in handy as twine,
vegetable dyes, medicinal poultices, greens to eat raw or to cook,
packaging material, bedding, or items for ritual or decorative
purposes.


Even from a commercial point of view, then, the plant is not simply
its grain. Nor are all grains of all subspecies and hybrids of maize
and rice equal. The yield of seeds by weight or volume may therefore
be only one of many ends—and perhaps not the most important one—for a
cultivator. But once scientific agriculture or plant breeding begins
to introduce this enormous range of value and uses into its own
calculations, it is once again in the Newtonian dilemma of the ten
heavenly bodies. And even if it were able to represent some of this
complexity in its models, these usages are subject to change without
notice.

\subsection{Experimental Plots Versus Actual Fields}


All environments, as we noted earlier, are intractably local. There is
always what we might call the translation problem in converting the
generic, standardized High Church Latin which emanates from labs and
experimental stations into the vernacular of the local parish.
Standardized solutions to field preparation, planting schedules, and
fertilizer requirements always have to be adjusted when they are
applied to, say, a stony, low-lying, north-facing field which has just
grown two crops of oats. Agricultural scientists at research stations
and extension agents are very much aware of this translation problem,
as are specialists in any applied science. The question is always how
to discover and convey findings so that they will be helpful to
farmers. As long as the findings or solutions are not simply imposed,
the farmer must decide if they meet his needs.


Like cadastral maps, the experimental plots of agricultural research
stations cannot begin to represent the diversity and variability of
farmers’ fields. The researchers must operate on the basis of
standard, normal-range assumptions about soil, field preparation,
weeding, rainfall, temperature, and so on, whereas each farmer’s field
is a unique concatenation of circumstances, actions, and events, some
of which are knowable in advance (soil composition) and some of which
are out of anyone’s hands (the weather). The \emph{interactions} among
these and other variables are at least as important as the status of
each; thus the effects of an early monsoon on rocky soil that has just
been weeded are different from those of an early monsoon on
waterlogged land that has not been weeded.


The averages and normalizations of experimental work obscure the fact
that an average weather year or a standard soil is a statistical
fiction. As Wendell Berry puts it:



\begin{quote}


The industrial version of agriculture has it that farming brings the
farmer annually, over and over again, to the same series of problems,
to each one of which there is always the same generalized solution,
and therefore, that industry’s solution can be simply and safely
substituted for his solution. But that is false. On a good farm,
because of weather and other so-called variables, neither the annual
series of problems nor any of the problems individually is ever quite
the same two years running. The good farmer (like the artist, the
quarterback, the statesman) must be master of many possible solutions,
one of which he must choose under pressure and apply with skill in the
right place at the right time.\footnote{Wendell Berry, “Whose Head Is the Farmer Using? Whose Head Is Using the Farmer?” in Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, and Bruce Coleman, eds., \emph{Meeting the Expectations of the Land: Essays in Sustainable Agriculture and Stewardship} (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), quoted in Marglin, “Farmers, Seedsmen, and Scientists,” p. 32.}



\end{quote}


Soil, although it is not as capriciously variable day by day as the
weather, is often exceptionally variable within the same field. The
essential simplifications of agricultural science require, first, that
soil be sorted into a small number of categories based on acidity,
nitrogen levels, and other qualities. For analyzing the soil of a
single field, the practice is to gather bits of soil from several
parts of the field and to combine them in the sample to be analyzed so
that it will represent an average. This procedure implicitly
recognizes the substantial variation in soil quality over a given
field. The recommended fertilizer application may therefore not be
right for \emph{any} part of the field, but compared to applications
derived from other formulas, it will be “less wrong,” on average, for
the field as a whole.  Once again, Berry cautions us against these
generalizations: “Most farms, even most fields, are made up of
different kinds of soil patterns and soil sense. Good farmers have
always known this and have used the land accordingly; they have been
careful students of the natural vegetation, soil depth, and structure,
slope and drainage. They are not appliers of generalizations,
theoretical or methodological or mechanical.”\footnote{Berry, \emph{The Unsettling of America}, p. 87. I do not consider myself to be a good farmer in Berry’s sense of the term, but in a three-acre sheep pasture on my small farm, I can recognize at least six different soil conditions from the patterns of vegetation alone. Four of them seem directly related to drainage, while two of them seem to reflect slope, sunlight, and the continued influence of past use.} When, to the
complexity and variation of the soil conditions, we add the practice
of polyculture, the obstacles to a successful application of a general
formula become virtually insurmountable. The knowledge we do have of
the limits on some plants’ tolerance of temperature and moisture does
not ensure that they will necessarily thrive within these limits. The
typical plant is “awfully finicky about just where and when it will
grow, under exactly what conditions it will germinate,” as Edgar
Anderson explains. “The vastly more intricate business of which plants
they will and will not tolerate as neighbors and under what
conditions, has never been looked into except in a preliminary way for
a few species.”\footnote{Anderson, \emph{Plants, Man, and Life}, p. 146.}


Indigenous farmers are exceptionally alert to microfeatures of terrain
and environment that are important to cultivation. Two examples from
Richards’s analysis of West Africa will serve to illustrate the small
details that are simply too minute to be visible within a
standardizing grid. Among the bewildering variety of small-scale,
local irrigation practices, Richards classifies at least eleven
different kinds, some with subvariations. All depend directly on
locally specific details of topography, soil, flooding, rainfall, and
so on, with the type of irrigation used depending on whether the area
is a seasonally flooded delta, saucer-shaped depression with poor
drainage, or an inland valley swamp. These small “schemes,” which take
advantage of the existing possibilities of the landscape, are a far
cry from vast engineered schemes in which no effort is spared to
modify the landscape in conformity with the engineering plan.


Richards’s second example shows how West African farmers used a rather
simple but ingenious choice in what strain of rice to plant to help
them cope with a local pest. Mende farmers on one area of Sierra Leone
had, against the textbook advice on the varieties of rice to be
preferred, selected a variant of rice with long awns (beard or
bristles) and glumes (bracts). The textbook reasoning was probably
that such varieties were lower yielding or that the awns and glumes
would simply add more chaff that would have to be winnowed after
threshing. The farmers’ reasoning was that the long awns and glumes
discouraged birds from eating the bulk of their rice before it ever
made it to the threshing floor. These details about microirrigation
and the damage caused by birds are vital for local cultivators, but
such details do not and cannot appear on the high-flying mapping of
modern agricultural planning.


Many critics of scientific agriculture have claimed not only that it
has systematically favored large-scale, production-oriented
monoculture but that its research findings are of at best limited use,
since all agriculture is local. Howard argued for a fundamentally
different practice, basing it on two premises. The first was that
experimental plots could not yield helpful results.



\begin{quote}


Small plots and farms are very different things. It is impossible to
manage a small plot as a self-contained unit in the same way as a good
farm is conducted. The essential relation between livestock and the
land is lost; there are no means of maintaining the fertility of the
soil by suitable rotations as is the rule in good farming. The plot
and the farm are obviously out of relation; the plot does not even
represent the field in which it occurs. A collection of field plots
cannot represent the agricultural problem they set out to
investigate\dots{} What possible advantage therefore can be obtained by
the application of higher mathematics to a technique which is so
fundamentally unsound?\footnote{Howard, \emph{An Agricultural Testament}, pp. 185-86.}



\end{quote}


Howard’s second premise is that many of the most important indications
of a farm and a crop’s health are \emph{qualitative:} “Can a mutually
interacting system like the crop and the soil, for example, dependent
on a multitude of factors which are changing from week-to-week and
year-to-year, ever be made to yield quantitative results corresponding
to the precision of mathematics?”\footnote{Ibid., p. 196.} As Howard sees it, the danger
is that the narrow, experimental, and exclusively quantitative
approach will succeed in completely driving out the other forms of
local knowledge and judgment possessed by most cultivators.


But Howard and others, it seems to me, miss the most important
abstraction of experimental work in scientific agriculture. How can we
define how useful this research is until we know the ends to which
cultivators will put it? Useful for what? It is at the level of human
agency where scientific agriculture constructs its greatest
abstraction: the creation of a stock character, the Everyman
cultivator, who is interested only in realizing the greatest yields at
the least cost.

\subsection{Fictional Farmers Versus Real Farmers}


Not only are the weather, the crops, and the soil complex and
variable; the farmer is, too. Season by season and frequently day by
day, millions of cultivators are pursuing an innumerable variety of
complicated goals.  These goals and the shifting mix between them defy
any simple model or description.


Profitable production of one or more major crops, the usual standard
of agricultural research, is obviously one purpose shared by most
cultivators. It is instructive, nevertheless, to observe how deeply
mediated this goal is by other purposes that may indeed usurp it
altogether. The complexities I suggest below merely scratch the
surface.


Each farm family has its unique endowment of land, skills, tools, and
labor, which greatly constrain how it farms. Consider only one aspect
of labor supply: a “labor-rich” farm with many able-bodied young
workers has options in growing labor-intensive crops, in planting
schedules, and in developing artisan sidelines that are not easily
available to “labor-poor” farms. Furthermore, the same family farm
will go through several stages in the course of a family cycle of
development.\footnote{See Chayanov, \emph{The Theory of Peasant Economy}, pp. 53-194.} Farmers who migrate out for wage work during part of
the year may plant crops of early or late maturity or crops requiring
little care in order to accommodate their migratory schedule.


As we saw earlier, a particular crop’s profit may be tied to more than
just its yield in grain and the cost of producing it. The stubble of a
crop may be crucial as fodder for livestock or waterfowl. A crop may be
vital because of what it does to the soil in rotation with other crops
or how it assists another crop with which it is interplanted. A crop may
be less important for its grain that for what it supplies, in raw
material, for artisanal production, whether that material is sold in the
market or used at home. Families who live close to the subsistence line
may choose their crops, not on the basis of their profitability, but on
the basis of how steady their yields are and whether they can be eaten
if their market price plunges.


The complexities thus far introduced could, at least in principle, be
accommodated within a drastically modified, neoclassical notion of
economic maximization, even though it would be too elaborate to model
easily. Once we add such considerations as aesthetics, rituals, taste,
and social and political considerations, this is no longer the case.
There are any number of perfectly rational but noneconomic reasons for
wanting to grow a certain crop in a certain way, whether because one
wishes to maintain cooperative relations with neighbors or because a
particular crop is linked to group identity. Such cultural habits are
perfectly compatible with commercial success, as the experience of the
Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites demonstrates. As long as we are
pointing to the high level of abstraction of “the farm family” for
whom scientific agricultural research does its work, we should note
that, in much of the world, an understanding of the practices in use
on almost any farm will require distinguishing the purposes of the
various members of the family. Each family enterprise is, on closer
inspection, a partnership—albeit typically unequal—with its own
internal politics.


The units of “farmer” and “farm community” are, finally, every bit as
intricate and fluid as the weather, soil, and landscape. Mapping them
is even more problematic than, say, analyzing the soil. The reason, I
think, is that while the farmer’s expertise may occasionally fail him
in assessing his own soil, we will not doubt the farmer’s expertise in
knowing his own mind and interests.\footnote{At least we can be sure that he is the best expert when it comes to his own interests, whether he is entirely sure of them or not.}


Just as the buzzing complexity and plasticity of customary land tenure
practices cannot be satisfactorily represented in the straitjacket of
modern freehold property law, so the complex motives and goals of
cultivators and the land they farm cannot be effectively portrayed by
the standardizations of scientific agriculture. The schematic
representations so important for experimental work can and have
produced important new knowledge, which, suitably adapted, has been
incorporated into most agricultural routines. But such abstractions,
again like those of freehold tenure, are powerful misrepresentations
that usually circle back to influence reality. They operate, at a
minimum, to generate research and findings most applicable to farms
that meet the description of their schematization: large, monocropped,
mechanized, commercial farms producing solely for the market. In
addition, this standardization is typically linked to public policy in
the form of tax incentives, loans, price supports, marketing
subsidies, and, significantly, handicaps imposed on enterprises that
do not fit the schematization, which systematically operate to nudge
reality toward the grid of its observations. The effect is nothing
like the shock therapy of the campaigns for Soviet collectivization or
ujamaa villages, which relied more on sticks than carrots. But over
the long haul such a powerful grid can, and does, change the
landscape.

\section{Two Agricultural Logics Compared}


If the logic of actual farming is one of an inventive, practiced
response to a highly variable environment, the logic of scientific
agriculture is, by contrast, one of adapting the environment as much
as possible to its centralizing and standardizing formulas. Thanks to
the pioneering work of Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, it is possible to
spell out how this logic works for potato cultivation in the
Andes.\footnote{Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, “Potatoes and Knowledge,” in Mark Hobart, ed., \emph{An Anthropological Critique of Development} (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 209-27. I thank Stephen Gudeman for bringing this work to my attention.}


Van der Ploeg calls indigenous potato cultivation in the Andes a
“craft”.\footnote{Compare the term “craft” with the term “mētis,” which is elaborated in chapter 9.} The cultivator begins with an exceptionally diverse
local ecology and aims at both successfully adapting to it and
gradually improving it.  Andean farmers’ skills have allowed them to
achieve results that are quite respectable in terms of narrow
productionist goals and extraordinarily so in terms of reliability of
yields and sustainability.


The typical farmer cultivates anywhere from twelve to fifteen distinct
parcels as well as other plots on a rotating basis.\footnote{One can see why the logic of scientific agriculture would make extension agents the implacable enemies of multiple plots and multiple cultivars. Together they place far too many variables in play for scientific method to model.} Given the
great variety of conditions on each plot (altitude, soil, history of
cultivation, slope, orientation to wind and sun), each field is
unique.  The very idea of a “standard field” in this context is an
empty abstraction. “Some fields contain only one cultivar, others
between two and ten, sometimes interplanted in the same row or with
each in its own row.”\footnote{Van der Ploeg, “Potatoes and Knowledge,” p. 213.} Each cultivar is a well-placed bet in its
niche. The variety of cultivars makes for local experimentation with
new crosses and hybrids, each of which is tested and exchanged among
farmers, and the many landraces of potatoes thus developed have unique
characteristics that become well known. From the appearance of a new
variety to its substantial use in the fields takes at least five or
six years. Each season is the occasion for a new round of prudent
bets, with last season’s results in terms of yield, disease, prices,
and response to changed plot conditions having been carefully
weighed. These farms are market-oriented experiment stations with good
yields, great adaptability, and reliability. Perhaps more important,
they are not just producing crops; they are reproducing farmers and
communities with plant breeding skills, flexible strategies,
ecological knowledge, and considerable self-confidence and autonomy.


Compare this “craft-based” potato production with the inherent logic
of scientific agriculture. The process begins with the definition of
an ideal plant type. “Ideal” is defined mainly, but not only, in terms
of yields. Professional plant breeders then begin synthesizing the
strains that might combine to form a new genotype with the desired
characteristics. Then, and only then, are the plant strains grown in
experimental plots in order to determine the conditions under which
the potential of the new genotype will be realized. The basic
procedure is exactly the reverse of Andean craft production, where the
cultivator begins with the plot, its soil, and its ecology and then
selects or develops varieties that will likely thrive in this
setting. The variety of cultivars in such a community is in large part
a reflection of the variety of both local needs and ecological
conditions. In scientific potato growing, by contrast, the point of
departure is the new cultivar or genotype, in service of which every
effort is made to transform and homogenize field conditions so that
the field meets the genotype’s specific requirements.


The logic of beginning with an ideal genotype and then transforming
nature to accord with its growing conditions has some predictable
consequences. Extension work essentially becomes the attempt to remake
the farmer’s field to suit the genotype. This usually requires the
application of nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides, which must be
purchased and applied at the right moment. It usually also requires a
watering regimen that in many cases only irrigation can possibly
satisfy.\footnote{In a larger sense, irrigation, standard fertilizer applications, greenhouses, cloud seeding, and hybridization and cloning represent the decision to adapt the climate and environment to the crop rather than the crop to the environment. These are what Vernon W. Ruttan has called “land substitutes.” See “Constraints on the Design of Sustainable Systems of Agricultural Production,” \emph{Ecological Economics} 10 (1994): 209-19.} The timing of all operations for this genotype
(planting, cultivating, fertilizer spreading, and so forth) are
spelled out carefully. The logic of the process—a logic not even
remotely realized on the ground—is to transform the farmers into
“standard” farmers growing the required genotype on similar soils and
leveled fields and according to the instructions printed right on the
seed packages, applying the same fertilizers, pesticides, and amounts
of water. It is a logic of homogenization and the virtual elimination
of local knowledge.  To the degree that this homogenization is
successful, the genotype will likely succeed in terms of production
levels in the short run.  Conversely, to the degree that such
homogenization is impossible, the genotype will fail.


Once the job of the agricultural specialist is defined as one of
raising all farmers’ plots to the uniform condition that will realize
the new cultivar’s promise, there is no further need to attend to the
great variety of conditions—some of which are unalterable—on actual
farmers’ fields. Rather than have the facts on the ground muddy a
simple, unitary research issue, it was more convenient to try to
impose a research abstraction on the fields (and lives) of
farmers. Given the intractable ecological variety of the Andes, this
was a nearly fatal step.\footnote{Some agricultural environments lend themselves to abstract treatment more easily than others. Well-watered bottomlands with rich soils not subject to erosion \emph{can} be treated more homogeneously without great immediate harm, whereas fragile, semiarid hillsides subject to sheet and gully erosion need to be treated with great care.} Rarely have agricultural specialists
asked themselves, as did the Russian S. P. Fridolin well before the
revolution, whether they might not be working from the wrong angle:
“He realized that his work was actually harming the peasants. Instead
of learning what local conditions were and \emph{then} making agricultural
practice fit these conditions better, he had been trying to ‘improve’
local practice so that it would conform to abstract standards.”\footnote{Yaney, \emph{The Urge to Mobilize}, p. 445.}
It is little wonder that scientific agriculture tends to favor the
creation of large artificial practices and environments—irrigation
schemes, large and leveled fields, the application of fertilizer by
formula, greenhouses, pesticides—all of which allow a homogenization
and control of nature within which “ideal” experimental conditions for
its genotypes can be maintained.


There is, I think, a larger lesson here. An explicit set of rules will
take you further when the situation is cut-and-dried. The more static
and one-dimensional the stereotype, the less the need for creative
interpretation and adaptation. In the Andes, van der Ploeg implies,
the “rules” attached to the new potato were so restrictive that they
could never be successfully translated to the great variety of local
farming vernaculars. One of the major purposes of state
simplifications, collectivization, assembly lines, plantations, and
planned communities alike is to strip down reality to the bare bones
so that the rules will in fact explain more of the situation and
provide a better guide to behavior. To the extent that this
simplification can be imposed, those who make the rules \emph{can} actually
supply crucial guidance and instruction.  This, at any rate, is what I
take to be the inner logic of social, economic, and productive
de-skilling. If the environment can be simplified down to the point
where the rules do explain a great deal, those who formulate the rules
and techniques have also greatly expanded their power. They have,
correspondingly, diminished the power of those who do not. To the
degree that they do succeed, cultivators with a high degree of
autonomy, skills, experience, self-confidence, and adaptability are
replaced by cultivators following instructions. Such reduction in
diversity, movement, and life, to recall Jacobs’s term, represents a
kind of social “taxidermy.”


The new potato genotype, as van der Ploeg shows, usually fails, if not
immediately, within three or four years. Unlike the ensemble of
indigenous varieties, the new cultivar thrives within a narrower band
of environmental conditions. \emph{Many} things, in other words, must go
right for the new cultivar to produce well, and if \emph{any} of these
things goes wrong (too much hot weather, late delivery of fertilizer,
and so forth), the yields suffer dramatically. Within a few years the
new genotypes “become incapable of generating even low levels of
production.”\footnote{Van der Ploeg, “Potatoes and Knowledge,” p. 222. The author does not specify the precise reasons for the decline. It is possible that the strongly recommended monocropping of the new variety encourages the buildup of pest populations and disease, that it depletes the soil of vital nutrients or damages its structural properties, or that the genotype loses its vigor over two or three generations.}


In practice, however, the vast majority of Andean cultivators are
neither purely traditional cultivators nor mindless followers of the
scientific specialists. They are, instead, crafting unique amalgams of
strategies that reflect their aims, their resources, and their local
conditions. Where the new potatoes seem to fit their purposes, they
may plant some, but they may interplant them with other cultivars and
may substitute dung, or plow in green manure (alfalfa, clover),
rather than apply the standard fertilizer package. They are constantly
inventing and experimenting with different rotations, timing, and
weeding techniques.  But because of the very particularity of these
thousands of “infield experiments” and the specialists’ studied
inattention to them, they are illegible, if not invisible, to
scientific research. Farmers, being polytheists when it comes to
agricultural practice, are quick to seize whatever seems useful from
the epistemic work of formal science. But the researchers, trained as
monotheists, seem all but incapable of absorbing the informal
experimental results of practice.

\section{Conclusion}


The great confidence that high-modernist agriculture has inspired
among its practitioners and partisans should not surprise us. It is
associated with unparalleled agricultural productivity in the West and
with the power and prestige of the scientific and industrial
revolutions. Little wonder, then, that the tenets of high modernism,
as talismans of the true faith, should have been carried throughout
the world uncritically and indeed with the conviction that they
lighted the way to agricultural progress.\footnote{The talisman of vitamins offers something of a parallel. The discovery of their existence and their role in health was an important breakthrough, but they are now taken by masses of people, most of whom may not need them, in one-size-fits-all dosages, rather in the way some of our ancestors felt protected by wearing garlands of garlic around their necks.} I believe that this
uncritical, and hence unscientific, trust in the artifacts and
techniques of what became codified as scientific agriculture was
responsible for its failures. The logical companion to a complete
faith in a quasi-industrial model of high-modernist agriculture was an
often explicit contempt for the practices of actual cultivators and
what might be learned from them.  Whereas a scientific spirit would
have counseled skepticism \emph{and} dispassionate inquiry into these
practices, modern agriculture as a blind faith preached scorn and
summary dismissal.


Actual cultivators in West Africa and elsewhere should more accurately
have been understood as lifelong experimenters conducting infield
seasonal trials, the results of which they incorporated into their
ever-evolving repertoire of practices. Inasmuch as these experimenters
were and are surrounded by hundreds or thousands of other local
experimenters with whom they share research findings and the knowledge
of generations of earlier research as codified in folk wisdom, they
could be said to have instant access to the popular equivalent of an
impressive research library. Now it is also undeniably the case that
they carry out most of their research without the proper experimental
controls and are therefore prone to drawing false inferences from
their findings. They are also limited by what they can observe;
microprocesses only visible in the laboratory necessarily escape
them. Nor is it clear that the ecological logic that seems to work
well on a single farm over the long haul will at the same time produce
sustainable aggregate results for an entire region.


That said, it is also the case, however, that West African cultivators
have at their disposal a lifetime of careful, local observation and
the fine-grained knowledge of the locality that no research scientist
can hope to duplicate for the same terrain. And let us not fail to
note what kind of experimenters these are. Their lives and the lives
of their families depend directly on the outcomes of their field
experiments.  Given these important positional advantages, one would
have imagined that agricultural scientists would have paid attention
to what these farmers did know. It was their failure to do so, Howard
claims, that constitutes the great shortcoming of modern scientific
agriculture: “The approach to the problems of farming must be made
from the field, not from the laboratory. The discovery of the things
that matter is three quarters of the battle. In this the observant
farmer and labourer, who have spent their lives in close contact with
nature, can be of greatest help to the investigator. The views of the
peasantry in all countries are worthy of respect; there is always good
reason for their practices; in matters like the cultivation of mixed
crops they themselves are still the pioneers.”\footnote{Howard, \emph{An Agricultural Testament}, p. 221.} Howard credits
most of his own findings about soil, humus, and root action to a
careful observation of indigenous farming practice. And he is rather
disdainful of agricultural specialists who “do not have to take their
own advice”—that is, who have never had to see their own crop through
from planting to harvest.\footnote{Ibid., p. 160. Richards, \emph{Indigenous Agricultural Revolution}, concurs, writing, “No student should expect to be able to advise farmers on changes in their farming practices until he or she has a firm grasp of the issues from the participant’s point of view. No one expects a pilot to captain a plane on the basis of textbook knowledge alone. Why should a farmer expect to ‘hand over the controls’ to an advisor who, in all probability, has never before piloted a farm ‘for real’?” (p. 157).}


Why, then, the \emph{unscientific} scorn for practical knowledge? There are
at least three reasons for it, as far as I can tell. The first is the
“professional” reason mentioned earlier: the more the cultivator
knows, the less the importance of the specialist and his
institutions. The second is the simple reflex of high modernism:
namely, a contempt for history and past knowledge. As the scientist is
always associated with the modern and the indigenous cultivator with
the past that modernism will banish, the scientist feels that he or
she has little to learn from that quarter. The third reason is that
practical knowledge is represented and codified in a form uncongenial
to scientific agriculture. From a narrow scientific view, \emph{nothing} is
known until and unless it is proven in a tightly controlled
experiment. Knowledge that arrives in any form other than through the
techniques and instruments of formal scientific procedure does not
deserve to be taken seriously. The imperial pretense of scientific
modernism admits knowledge only if it arrives through the aperture
that the experimental method has constructed for its
admission. Traditional practices, codified as they are in practice and
in folk sayings, are seen presumptively as not meriting attention, let
alone verification.


And yet, as we have seen, cultivators have devised and perfected a
host of techniques that do work, producing desirable results in crop
production, pest control, soil preservation, and so forth. By
constantly observing the results of their field experiments and
retaining those methods that succeed, the farmers have discovered and
refined practices that work, without knowing the precise chemical or
physical reasons why they work. In agriculture, as in many other
fields, “practice has long preceded theory.”\footnote{Howard, \emph{An Agricultural Testament}, p. 116.} And indeed some of
these practically successful techniques, which involve a large number
of simultaneously interacting variables, may never be fully understood
by the techniques of science.  We turn, then, to a closer examination
of practical knowledge, a kind of knowledge that high modernism has
ignored to its peril.

\part{Part 4. The Missing Link}

\chapter{Chapter 9. Thin Simplifications and Practical Knowledge: Mētis}



\begin{quote}


No battle—Tarutino, Borodino, or Austerlitz—takes place as those who
planned it anticipated. That is an essential condition.



\end{quote}


— Tolstoy, \emph{War and Peace}


We have repeatedly observed the natural and social failures of thin,
formulaic simplifications imposed through the agency of state
power. The utilitarian commercial and fiscal logic that led to
geometric, monocropped, same-age forests also led to severe ecological
damage.  Where the formula had been applied with the greatest rigor,
it eventually became necessary to attempt to restore much of the
forest’s original diversity and complexity—or rather, to create a
“virtual” forest that would mimic the robustness and durability of the
“prescientific” forest.


The planned “scientific city,” laid out according to a small number of
rational principles, was experienced as a social failure by most of
its inhabitants. Paradoxically, the failure of the designed city was
often averted, as was the case in Brasília, by practical
improvisations and illegal acts that were entirely outside the
plan. Just as the stripped-down logic behind the scientific forest was
an inadequate recipe for a healthy, “successful” forest, so were the
thin urban-planning schemata of Le Corbusier an inadequate recipe for
a satisfactory human community.


Any large social process or event will inevitably be far more complex
than the schemata we can devise, prospectively or retrospectively, to
map it. Lenin had every reason, as a would-be head of the vanguard
party, to emphasize military discipline and hierarchy in the
revolutionary project. After the October Revolution, the Bolshevik
state authorities had every reason, once again, to exaggerate the
central, all-seeing role of the party in bringing the revolution
about. And yet we know—and Lenin and Luxemburg knew—that the
revolution had been a close call, relying more on the improvisations,
missteps, and strokes of luck that Tolstoy described in \emph{War and
Peace} than on the precision of a parade-ground drill.


The thin simplifications of agricultural collectivization and
centrally planned production have met a comparable fate, whether on
the collective farms of the former Soviet Union or in the ujamaa
villages of Nyerere’s Tanzania. Here again, the schemes that did not
collapse altogether managed to survive thanks largely to desperate
measures either not envisaged or else expressly prohibited by the
plan. Thus an informal economy developed in Russian agriculture,
operating on tiny private plots and the “theft” of time,
equipment, and commodities from the state sector and supplying most of
the dairy products, fruit, vegetables, and meat in the Russian
diet.\footnote{See Lev Timofeev, \emph{Soviet Peasants, or The Peasants’ Art of Starving}, trans. Jean Alexander and Victor Zaslavsky, ed. Armando Pitassio and V. Zaslavsky (New York: Telos Press, 1985), for a penetrating discussion of the private-plot economy. An exception to the generalization about meat may have been beef, but supplies of pork, lamb, and chicken were largely provided from private plots or other sources outside of the state marketing channels.} Thus the forcibly resettled Tanzanians successfully
resisted collective production and drifted back to sites more suitable
for grazing and cultivation. At times, the price of an unyielding
imposition of state simplifications on agrarian life and
production—Stalin’s forced collectivization or China’s Great Leap
Forward—was famine. As often as not, however, state officials recoiled
before the abyss and came to tolerate, if not condone, a host of
informal practices that in fact underwrote the survival of the
official scheme.


These rather extreme instances of massive, state-imposed social
engineering illustrate, I think, a larger point about formally
organized social action. In each case, the necessarily thin, schematic
model of social organization and production animating the planning was
inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a successful social
order. By themselves, the simplified rules can never generate a
functioning community, city, or economy. Formal order, to be more
explicit, is always and to some considerable degree parasitic on
informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize,
without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or
maintain.


This homely insight has long been of great tactical value to
generations of trade unionists who have used it as the basis of the
work-to-rule strike. In a work-to-rule action (the French call it
\emph{grève du zèle}), employees begin doing their jobs by meticulously
observing every one of the rules and regulations and performing only
the duties stated in their job descriptions. The result, fully
intended in this case, is that the work grinds to a halt, or at least
to a snail’s pace. The workers achieve the practical effect of a
walkout while remaining on the job and following their instructions to
the letter. Their action also illustrates pointedly how actual work
processes depend more heavily on informal understandings and
improvisations than upon formal work rules.  In the long work-to-rule
action against Caterpillar, the large equipment manufacturer, for
example, workers reverted to following the inefficient procedures
specified by the engineers, knowing they would cost the company
valuable time and quality, rather than continuing the more expeditious
practices they had long ago devised on the job.\footnote{See Louis Uchitelle, “Decatur,” \emph{New York Times}, June 13, 1993, p. C1.} They were relying
on the tested assumption that working strictly by the book is
necessarily less productive than working with initiative.


This perspective on social order is less an analytical insight than a
sociological truism. It does offer, however, a valuable point of
departure for understanding why authoritarian, high-modernist schemes
are potentially so destructive. What they ignore—and often
suppress—are precisely the practical skills that underwrite any
complex activity. My aim in this chapter is to conceptualize these
practical skills, variously called know-how (\emph{savoir faire or arts de
faire}),\footnote{Michel de Certeau, \emph{The Practice of Everyday Life} (Arts de faire: Le pratique du quotidien), trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). See also Jacques Rancière, \emph{The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge}, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).} common sense, experience, a knack, or \emph{mētis}. What are
these skills? How are they created, developed, and maintained? What is
their relation to formal epistemic knowledge? I hope to show that many
forms of high modernism have replaced a valuable collaboration between
these two dialects of knowledge with an “imperial” scientific view,
which dismisses practical know-how as insignificant at best and as
dangerous superstitions at worst. The relation between scientific
knowledge and practical knowledge is, as we shall see, part of a
political struggle for institutional hegemony by experts and their
institutions. Taylorism and scientific agriculture are, on this
reading, not just strategies of production, but also strategies of
control and appropriation.

\section{Mētis: The Contours of Practical Knowledge}


Following the illuminating studies of Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre
Vernant, we can find in the Greek concept of mētis a means of
comparing the forms of knowledge embedded in local experience with the
more general, abstract knowledge deployed by the state and its
technical agencies.\footnote{Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, \emph{Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society}, trans. Janet Lloyd (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978), originally published in French as \emph{Les ruses d’intelligence: La mētis des grecs} (Paris: Flammarion, 1974).} Before elaborating the concept and its use,
we will turn to a brief example in order to illustrate the vernacular
character of local knowledge and ground the discussion that follows.


When the first European settlers in North America were wondering when
and how to plant New World cultivars, such as maize, they turned to
the local knowledge of their Native American neighbors for help. They
were told by Squanto, according to one legend (Chief Massasoit,
according to another), to plant corn when the oak leaves were the size
of a squirrel’s ear.\footnote{The version of the story that I know appears not to specify the species of oak, whether white, red, burr, or other variety, or the species of squirrel, which was presumably the common gray squirrel. For the Native Americans, the context must have served to specify such details as these.} Embedded in this advice, however folkloric
its ring today, is a finely observed knowledge of the succession of
natural events in the New England spring. For Native Americans it was
this \emph{orderly} succession of, say, the skunk cabbage appearing, the
willows be ginning to leaf, the red-wing blackbird returning, and the
first hatch of the mayfly that provided a readily observable calendar
of spring.  While the timing of these events might be earlier or later
in a given year and while the pace of their succession might be more
drawn out or accelerated, the \emph{sequence} of the events was almost never
violated. As a rule of thumb, it was a nearly foolproof formula for
avoiding a frost.  We almost certainly distort Squanto’s advice, as
the colonists perhaps did, by reducing it to a single
observation. Everything we know about indigenous technical knowledge
suggests that it relies on an accumulation of many partly redundant
signals. If other indications did not confirm the oak-leaf formula, a
prudent planter might delay further.


Compare this advice to that based on more universalistic units of
measurement. A typical local edition of \emph{The Farmer’s Almanac} is a
case in point. It may suggest planting corn after the first full moon
in May or after a specified date, such as May 20. In New England, at
any rate, this advice would require considerable adjustment by
latitude and altitude. A date that would serve for southern
Connecticut would not suit Vermont; a date that worked in the valleys
would not be right for the hills (especially the north-facing slopes);
a date that worked near the coast would not work inland. And the
almanac’s date is almost certainly a fail-safe date, since the worst
thing that could happen to an almanac publisher would be to have his
or her advice lead to a crop failure. As a result of this commercial
caution, some valuable growing time may have been lost in the interest
of certainty.\footnote{I am ignoring, in my treatment of the almanac’s advice, the fact that European settlers quickly developed their own comparable rules of thumb, and like farmers everywhere, they were paying close attention to what other cultivators were doing. One usually does not want to be the first to plow and plant, nor does one want to be the last.}


The Native American maxim, by contrast, is vernacular and local, keyed
to common features of the local ecosystem; it inquires about oak
leaves \emph{in this place}, and not oak leaves in general. Despite its
specificity, it travels remarkably well. It can be deployed
successfully anywhere in temperate North America where there are oak
trees and squirrels. The precision provided by the observed sequence
almost certainly gains a few days of growing time while not
appreciably raising the risk of planting before a hard frost.


Practical knowledge like Squanto’s can, of course, be translated into
more universalistic scientific terms. A botanist might observe that
the first growth of oak leaves is made possible by rising ground and
ambient temperatures, which also assure that maize will grow and that
the probability of a killing frost is negligible. The mean soil
temperature at a given depth might do just as well. Along these lines,
the early nineteenth-century mathematician, Adolph Quetelet, turned
his scientific eye to the mundane problem of when the lilacs would
bloom in Brussels.  He concluded, after much rigorous observation,
that the lilacs burst into bloom “when the sum of the squares of the
mean daily temperature since the last frost added up to (4264C)
squared.”\footnote{Quoted in Ian Hacking, \emph{The Taming of Chance} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 62. Note that even in Quetelet’s formula, the calculations must begin with an unpredictable event: the “last frost.” Since the date of the last frost can be known only in retrospect, Quetelet’s formula fails as a useful guide for action.} Knowledge this certainly is! Given the techniques for
making the required observations, it is probably quite accurate. But
it is hardly practical. Quetelet’s playful formula alerts us to a
hallmark of most practical, local knowledge: it is as economical and
accurate as it needs to be, no more and no less, for addressing the
problem at hand.


One hesitates before introducing yet another unfamiliar term, such as
“mētis,” into this discussion. In this case, however, “mētis” seems to
better convey the sorts of practical skills that I have in mind than
do such plausible alternatives as “indigenous technical knowledge,”
“folk wisdom,” “practical skills,” techne, and so on.\footnote{Such terms as “indigenous technical knowledge” and “folk wisdom” seem to me to confine this knowledge to “traditional” or “backward” peoples, whereas I want to emphasize how these skills are implicit in the most modern of activities, whether on the factory floor or in a research laboratory. “Local knowledge” and “practical knowledge” are better, but both terms seem too circumscribed and static to capture the constantly changing, dynamic aspect of mētis. \protect\endgraf The term descends to us from Greek mythology. Mētis, the first bride of Zeus, had tricked Cronos into swallowing an herb that caused him to regurgitate Zeus’s elder brothers, whom Cronos feared would rise against him. Zeus in turn swallowed Mētis, thereby incorporating all her intelligence and wiles, before she could give birth to Athena. Athena was then born from Zeus’s thigh.}


The concept comes to us from the ancient Greeks. Odysseus was
frequently praised for having mētis in abundance and for using it to
outwit his enemies and make his way home. Mētis is typically
translated into English as “cunning” or “cunning intelligence.” While
not wrong, this translation fails to do justice to the range of
knowledge and skills represented by mētis. Broadly understood, mētis
represents a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence
in responding to a constantly changing natural and human
environment. Odysseus’s mētis was in evidence, not only in his
deceiving of Circe, the Cyclops, and Polyphemus and in binding himself
to the mast to avoid the Sirens, but also in holding his men together,
in repairing his ship, and in improvising tactics to get his men out
of one tight spot after another.  The emphasis is both on Odysseus’s
ability to adapt successfully to a constantly shifting situation \emph{and}
on his capacity to understand, and hence outwit, his human and divine
adversaries.


All human activities require a considerable degree of mētis, but some
activities require far more. To begin with skills that require
adapting to a capricious physical environment, the acquired knowledge
of how to sail, fly a kite, fish, shear sheep, drive a car, or ride a
bicycle relies on the capacity for mētis. Each of these skills
requires hand-eye coordination that comes with practice and a capacity
to “read” the waves, the wind, or the road and to make the appropriate
adjustments.  One powerful indication that they all require mētis is
that they are exceptionally difficult to teach apart from engaging in
the activity itself. One might imagine trying to write down explicit
instructions on how to ride a bicycle, but one can scarcely imagine
that such instructions would enable a novice to ride a bicycle on the
first try.  The maxim “Practice makes perfect” was devised for such
activities as this, inasmuch as the continual, nearly imperceptible
adjustments necessary for riding a bicycle are best learned by having
to make them.  Only through an acquired “feel” for balanced motion do
the required adjustments become automatic.\footnote{The difference between the first halting, awkward steps of a toddler and the gait of a child who has been walking for a year is a measure of the complexity and “on-the-job training” necessary to master such an apparently simple skill.} No wonder that most
crafts and trades requiring a touch or feel for implements and
materials have traditionally been taught by long apprenticeships to
master craftsmen.


There is no doubt that some individuals seem to get the hang of a
particular skill and master it more quickly than most other
people. But beyond this ineffable difference (which often spells the
difference between competence and genius), riding a bike, sailing,
fishing, shearing sheep, and so on can be learned through
practice. Since every road, wind, stream, and sheep is different and
continually changing, the best practitioner, like Odysseus, will have
had experience under many different conditions. If your life depended
on your ship coming through rough weather, you would surely prefer a
successful captain with long experience to, say, a brilliant physicist
who had analyzed the natural laws of sailing but who had never
actually sailed a vessel.


Those specialists who deal with emergencies and disasters are also
exemplary of mētis. Firefighters, rescue squads, paramedics,
mine-disaster teams, doctors in hospital emergency rooms, crews that
repair downed electrical lines, teams that extinguish fires in oil
fields, and, as we shall see, farmers and pastoralists in precarious
environments must respond quickly and decisively to limit damage and
save lives. Although there are rules of thumb that can be and are
taught, each fire or accident is unique, and half the battle is
knowing which rules of thumb to apply in which order and when to throw
the book away and improvise.


Red Adair’s team, which has been hired worldwide to cap well-head
fires, was a striking and diagnostic case. Before the Gulf War of
1990, his was the only team with any appreciable “clinical”
experience, and he could set his own price. Each fire presented new
problems and required an inspired mixture of experience and
improvisation. We can imagine, at almost opposite ends of a spectrum,
Adair on one hand and a minor clerk performing highly repetitive steps
on the other. Adair’s job cannot, by definition, be reduced to a
routine. He must begin with the unpredictable—an accident, a fire—and
then devise the techniques and equipment (from an existing repertoire,
to be sure, but one invented largely by him) required to extinguish
that fire and cap that well.\footnote{During the Gulf War, teams with little experience were hired from all over the world to cope with an unprecedented number of fires. A great many new techniques were tried, and much new field experience gained. One team hit on the use of a mounted jet engine (as opposed to dynamite or water) to literally blow out the fire at the wellhead, as if it were a candle on a birthday cake.} The clerk, by contrast, deals with a
predictable, routinized environment that can often be ordered in
advance and down to the smallest detail.  Adair cannot simplify his
environment in order to apply a cookie-cutter solution.


The examples thus far introduced have been mostly concerned with the
relation between people and their physical environment. But mētis
equally applies to human interaction. Think of the complex physical
activities that require constant adjustment to the movement, values,
desires, or gestures of others. Boxing, wrestling, and fencing require
instant, quasi-automatic responses to an opponent’s moves, which can
be learned only through long practice of the activity itself. Here the
element of deception enters as well. The successful boxer will learn
to feint a move in order to provoke a response of which he can then
take advantage. If we move from physical contests to such cooperative
activities as dancing, music, or lovemaking, a similar practiced
responsiveness born of experience is essential. Many sports combine
both the cooperative and the competitive aspects of mētis. A soccer
player must learn not only the moves of his or her teammates but also
which \emph{team} moves and fakes will deceive their opponents. Such
skills, it is important to note, are both generic and particular;
while each player may be more or less skilled at different facets of
the game, each team has its particular combination of skills, its
“chemistry,” and each contest with an opposing team represents a
challenge that is in some ways unique.\footnote{It is in part this aspect of team sports that often makes the outcomes nontransitive. That is, team A may routinely beat team B, and team B may routinely beat team C, but because of the particular \emph{relation} of skills between teams A and C, team C may often beat team A.}


On a much bigger, higher-stakes canvas, war diplomacy and politics
more generally are mētis-laden skills. The successful practitioner, in
each case, tries to shape the behavior of partners and opponents to
his own ends. Unlike the sailor, who can adjust to the wind and the
waves but not influence them directly, the general and the politician
are in constant interaction with their counterparts, each of whom is
trying to outfox the other. Adapting quickly and well to unpredictable
events—both natural events, such as the weather, and human events,
such as the enemy’s move—and making the best out of limited resources
are the kinds of skills that are hard to teach as cut-and-dried
disciplines.


The necessarily implicit, experiential nature of mētis seems
central. A simple experiment in implicit learning conducted by the
philosopher Charles Peirce may help to convey something of the
process. Peirce had people lift two weights and judge which of the two
was heavier. At first, their discrimination was rather crude. But as
they practiced for long periods, they became able to distinguish
accurately quite minute differences in weight. They could not pinpoint
what it was that they sensed or felt, but their actual capacity to
discriminate grew enormously. Peirce took the results as evidence for
a kind of subliminal communication via “faint sensations” between
people. For our purposes, however, it illustrates a rudimentary kind
of knowledge that can be acquired only by practice and that all but
defies being communicated in written or oral form apart from actual
practice.\footnote{Taoism emphasizes precisely this kind of knowledge and skill. Compare Peirce’s observation with that of Chuang Tzu: “Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied. What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now—now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and the spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a joint” (\emph{Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings}, trans. Burton Watson [New York: Columbia University Press, 1964], p. 47).}


Surveying the range of examples that we have touched on, we can
venture some preliminary generalizations about the nature of mētis and
about where it is relevant. Mētis is most applicable to broadly
similar but never precisely identical situations requiring a quick and
practiced adaptation that becomes almost second nature to the
practitioner. The skills of mētis may well involve rules of thumb, but
such rules are largely acquired through practice (often in formal
apprenticeship) and a developed feel or knack for strategy. Mētis
resists simplification into deductive principles which can
successfully be transmitted through book learning, because the
environments in which it is exercised are so complex and nonrepeatable
that formal procedures of rational decision making are impossible to
apply. In a sense, mētis lies in that large space between the realm of
genius, to which no formula can apply, and the realm of codified
knowledge, which can be learned by rote.

\subsection{The Art of the Locality}


Why are the rules of thumb that can be derived from any skilled craft
still woefully inadequate to its practice? Artists or cooks, Michael
Oakeshott has noted, may in fact write about their art and try to boil
it down to technical knowledge, but what they write represents not
much of what they know but rather only that small part of their
knowledge that can be reduced to exposition. Knowing a craft’s
shorthand rules is a very long way from its accomplished performance:
“These rules and principles are mere abridgements of the activity
itself; they do not exist in advance of the activity, they cannot
properly be said to govern it and they cannot provide the impetus of
the activity. A complete mastery of the principles may exist alongside
a complete inability to pursue the activity to which they refer, for
the pursuit of the activity does not consist in the application of
these principles; and even if it did, the knowledge of how to apply
them (the knowledge of actually pursuing the activity) is not given in
a knowledge of them.”\footnote{Michael Oakeshott, \emph{Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays} (New York: Basic Books, 1962). As a conservative thinker in the Burkean sense of the term, Oakeshott tends to be an apologist for whatever the past has bequeathed to the present in terms of power, privilege, and property. On the other hand, his criticism of purely rationalist schemes for the design of human life and his understanding of the contingency of practice are astute and telling.}


Knowing how and when to apply the rules of thumb in \emph{a concrete
situation} is the essence of mētis. The subtleties of application are
important precisely because mētis is most valuable in settings that
are mutable, indeterminant (some facts are unknown), and
particular.\footnote{Martha C. Nussbaum, \emph{The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 302. Nussbaum is concerned particularly with the differences between moral systems that allow for the passions and attachments of human life and closed, self-sufficient moral systems that achieve “moral safety and rational power” at the expense of a fully human life. Plato, depending upon how one interprets the \emph{Symposium}, is an exemplar of the latter, and Aristotle an exemplar of the former.} Although we shall return to the question of
indeterminacy and change, here I want to explore further the localness
and particularity of mētis.


In seamanship, the difference between the more general knowledge of
navigation and the more particular knowledge of piloting is
instructive.  When a large freighter or passenger liner approaches a
major port, the captain typically turns the control of his vessel over
to a local pilot, who brings it into the harbor and to its berth. The
same procedure is followed when the ship leaves its berth until it is
safely out into the sealanes. This sensible procedure, designed to
avoid accidents, reflects the fact that navigation on the open sea (a
more “abstract” space) is the more general skill, while piloting a
ship through traffic in a particular port is a highly contextual
skill. We might call the art of piloting a “local and situated
knowledge.” What the pilot knows are local tides and currents along
the coast and estuaries, the unique features of local wind and wave
patterns, shifting sandbars, unmarked reefs, seasonal changes in
microcurrents, local traffic conditions, the daily vagaries of wind
patterns off headlands and along straits, how to pilot in these waters
at night, not to mention how to bring many different ships safely to
berth under variable conditions.\footnote{I am greatly indebted for this distinction to the brilliant doctoral thesis of Gene Ammarell, “Bugis Navigation” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Anthropology, Yale University, 1994). Ammarell’s analysis of traditional Bugis navigation techniques is the most compelling understanding of indigenous technical knowledge that I have encountered.} Such knowledge is particular, by
definition; it can be acquired only by local practice and
experience. Like a bird or an insect that has adapted brilliantly to a
narrow ecological niche, the pilot knows \emph{one} harbor.  Much of his
knowledge would be irrelevant if he were suddenly transposed to a
different port.\footnote{Compare the pilot’s knowledge with this observation, from Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987): “The dry heart of Australia \dots{} was a jigsaw of microclimates, of different minerals in the soil and different plants and animals. A man raised in one part of the desert would know its flora and fauna backwards. He knew which plant attracted game. He knew his water. He knew where there were tubers underground. In other words, by naming all the ‘things’ in his territory, he could always count on survival\dots{} But if you took him blindfolded to another country\dots{} he might end up lost and starving” (p. 269).} Despite the rather narrow context of this
knowledge, it is agreed by captains, harbormasters, and, not least,
those who insure maritime commerce against losses that the pilot’s
knowledge of a particular port must prevail. The pilot’s experience is
\emph{locally superior} to the general rules of navigation.


Mark Twain’s classic \emph{Life on the Mississippi} reflects at great
length on the knowledge acquired by riverboat pilots. Part of that
knowledge consists of rules of thumb about surface features that may
signal shallows, currents, or other navigational hazards. Much of it,
however, consists of a quite specific familiarity with their
particular stretch of the Mississippi at different seasons and water
levels—knowledge that could have been gained in that particular place
only through experience.  Although there is something that might
properly be called a knowledge of rivers in general, it is a quite
thin and unsatisfactory knowledge when it comes to making a particular
trip on a particular river. A native pilot is no less necessary on a
given river than a native tracker for a given jungle or a local guide
in Bruges or in the medina of an ancient Arab city.


The practice and experience reflected in mētis is almost always
\emph{local}.  Thus a guide on mountain climbing may be best at Zermatt,
which she has scaled often; an airplane pilot best on Boeing 747s, on
which he was trained; and the orthopedic surgeon best at knees, where
her surgical experience has given her a certain expertise. It is not
entirely clear how much of these experts’ mētis would be transferable
if they were suddenly shifted to Mont Blanc, DC3s, and hands.


Every instance of the application of a given skill will require
specific adjustments for local conditions. For a weaver, each new
supply of yarn or thread handles differently. For a potter, a new
supply of clay “works” differently. Long experience with different
materials will have the effect of making such adjustments
quasi-automatic. The specificity of knowledge goes even deeper, in the
sense that each loom or potter’s wheel has its own distinctive
qualities, which an artisan comes to know and appreciate (or work
around). Every general knowledge that is actually applied, then,
requires some imaginative translation. A consummate knowledge of looms
in general does not translate directly into the successful operation
of this particular loom with its peculiarities of design, use, woods,
and repairs. To speak of the art of one loom, the art of one river,
the art of one tractor, or the art of one automobile is not
preposterous; it is to point to the size and importance of the gap
between general knowledge and situated knowledge.


We might reasonably think of situated, local knowledge as being \emph{partisan}
knowledge as opposed to generic knowledge. That is, the holder of such
knowledge typically has a passionate interest in a particular outcome.
An insurer of commercial shipping for a large, highly capitalized
maritime firm can afford to rely on probability distributions for
accidents. But for a sailor or captain hoping for a safe voyage, it is
the outcome of the single event, a single trip, that matters. Mētis is
the ability and experience necessary to influence the outcome—to improve
the odds—in a particular instance.


The state simplifications and utopian schemes we have examined in
earlier chapters all concern activities that are carried out in
spatially and temporally unique settings. While something can indeed
be said about forestry, revolution, urban planning, agriculture, and
rural settlement in general, this will take us only so far in
understanding \emph{this} forest, \emph{this} revolution, \emph{this} farm. All
farming takes place in a unique space (fields, soil, crops) and at a
unique time (weather pattern, season, cycle in pest populations) and
for unique ends (this family with its needs and tastes). A mechanical
application of generic rules that ignores these particularities is an
invitation to practical failure, social disillusionment, or most
likely both. The generic formula does not and cannot supply the local
knowledge that will allow a successful translation of the necessarily
crude general understandings to successful, nuanced, local
applications. The more general the rules, the more they require in the
way of translation if they are to be locally successful. Nor is it
simply a matter of the captain or navigator realizing at what point
his rules of thumb are inferior to the intimate local knowledge of the
pilot. Rather, it is a matter of recognizing that the rules of thumb
themselves are largely a codification derived from the actual
practices of sailing and piloting.


One last analogy may help to clarify the relationship between general
rules of thumb and mētis. Mētis is not merely the specification of
local values (such as the local mean temperature and rainfall) made in
order to successfully apply a generic formula to a local case. Taking
language as a parallel, I believe that the rule of thumb is akin to
formal grammar, whereas mētis is more like actual speech. Mētis is no
more derivative of general rules than speech is derivative of
grammar. Speech develops from the cradle by imitation, use, trial and
error. Learning a mother tongue is a stochastic process—a process of
successive, selfcorrecting approximations. We do not begin by learning
the alphabet, individual words, parts of speech, and rules of grammar
and then trying to use them all in order to produce a grammatically
correct sentence.  Moreover, as Oakeshott indicates, a knowledge of
the rules of speech by themselves is compatible with a complete
inability to speak intelligible sentences. The assertion that the
rules of grammar are derivative of the practice of actual speech is
nearer to the truth. Modern language training that aims at competence
in speaking recognizes this and begins with simple speech and rote
repetition in order to imprint pattern and accent while leaving the
rules of grammar implicit, or else introducing them later as a way of
codifying and summarizing practical mastery.


Like language, the mētis or local knowledge necessary to the
successful practice of farming or pastoralism is probably best learned
by daily practice and experience. Like serving a long apprenticeship,
growing up in a household where that craft is continually practiced
often represents the most satisfactory preparation for its
exercise. This kind of socialization to a trade may favor the
conservation of skills rather than daring innovation. But any formula
that excludes or suppresses the experience, knowledge, and
adaptability of mētis risks incoherence and failure; learning to speak
coherent sentences involves far more than merely learning the rules of
grammar.

\subsection{The Relation with Episteme and Techne}


For the Greeks and particularly for Plato, episteme and techne
represented knowledge of an order completely different from
mētis.\footnote{In what follows I am heavily indebted to the discussions of Nussbaum, \emph{The Fragility of Goodness}, and to Stephen A. Marglin, “Losing Touch: The Cultural Conditions of Worker Accommodation and Resistance,” in Frederique Apffel Marglin and Stephen A. Marglin, eds., \emph{Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance} (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), pp. 217-82. Marglin’s argument has been elaborated in two subsequent papers: “Farmers, Seedsmen, and Scientists: Systems of Agriculture and Systems of Knowledge” (unpublished paper, May 1991, revised March 1992); and “Economics and the Social Construction of the Economy,” in Stephen Gudeman and Stephen A. Marglin, eds., \emph{People’s Ecology, People’s Economy} (forthcoming). Readers of both texts will note the disparity between Nussbaum’s and Marglin’s uses of the term “techne:” For Nussbaum, techne is analogous to episteme, at least through the work of Plato, and both are sharply distinguished from mētis or practical knowledge. Marglin uses the word “techne” (“T\Slash{}Knowledge”) in much the same way that I use “mētis,” and he distinguishes it sharply from “episteme” (“E\Slash{}Knowledge)”). I have elected to adopt the terminology of the classicist Nussbaum, who convinces me that her usage has a far stronger grounding in the original texts of Plato and Aristotle. Support for Nussbaum’s understanding comes also from Pierre Vidal-Naquet: “As G. Cambiano justly [correctly] observes, in the Platonic view, \emph{episteme, dynamis, and techne} comprise a system of concepts that mutually reinforce one another,” he writes. “\emph{The Republic}, for example, puts under the control of mathematics a unit composed of \emph{technai}, \emph{dianoiai}, and \emph{epistemai}: skills, intellectual processes, and sciences” (\emph{The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World}, trans. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1986], p. 228). Even so, those who are familiar with Marglin’s argument will note how, in drawing formal comparisons, I have relied on his contrasts while not using his terms.} Technical knowledge, or techne, could be expressed
precisely and comprehensively in the form of hard-and-fast rules
(\emph{not} rules of thumb), principles, and propositions. At its most
rigorous, techne is based on logical deduction from self-evident first
principles. As an ideal type, it radically differs from mētis in terms
of how it is organized, how it is codified and taught, how it is
modified, and the analytical precision it exhibits.


Where mētis is contextual and particular, techne is universal. In the
logic of mathematics, ten multiplied by ten equals one hundred
everywhere and forever; in Euclidean geometry, a right angle
represents ninety degrees of a circle; in the conventions of physics,
the freezing point of water is always zero degrees centigrade.\footnote{As I recall, this holds only at sea level, as with the standard temperature for water’s boiling point. The constant is, then, a universal convention and does in fact vary by altitude.}
Techne is settled knowledge; Aristotle wrote that techne “came into
being when from many notions gained from experience, a universal
judgement about a group of similar things arises.”\footnote{Quoted in Nussbaum, \emph{The Fragility of Goodness}, p. 95.} The
universality of techne arises from the fact that it is organized
analytically into small, explicit, logical steps and is both
decomposable and verifiable. This universality means that knowledge in
the form of techne can be taught more or less completely as a formal
discipline. The rules of techne provide for theoretical knowledge that
may or may not have practical applications. Finally, techne is
characterized by impersonal, often quantitative precision and a
concern with explanation and verification, whereas mētis is concerned
with personal skill, or “touch,” and practical results.


If the description of techne as an ideal or typical system of
knowledge resembles the self-image of modern science, that is no
accident. The actual \emph{practice} of science, however, is something else
again.\footnote{There is a large and rapidly growing literature on the practice or ethnomethodology of science, particularly laboratory science. Most of this literature emphasizes the difference between actual scientific practice on one hand and its codified form (in articles and lab reports, for example) on the other. For an introduction to this literature, see Bruno Latour, \emph{Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society} (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Ian Hacking, “The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences,” in Andrew Pickering, ed., \emph{Science as Practice and Culture} (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 29-64; and Andrew Pickering, “From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice,” ibid., pp. 1-26. See also Pickering, “Objectivity and the Mangle of Practice,” in Allan Megill, ed., \emph{Rethinking Objectivity} (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 109-25.} The rules of techne are the specification of how knowledge
is to be codified, expressed, and verified, \emph{once} it has been
discovered. No rules of techne or episteme can explain scientific
invention and insight.  Discovering a mathematical theorem requires
genius and perhaps mētis; the proof of the theorem, however, must
follow the tenets of techne.\footnote{Marglin, “Losing Touch,” p. 234.} Thus the systematic and impersonal
rules of techne facilitate the production of knowledge that can be
readily assembled, comprehensively documented, and formally taught,
but they cannot by themselves add to that knowledge or explain how it
came into being.\footnote{In many ways the most searching philosophical treatment of these issues is found in Michael Polanyi, \emph{Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy} (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).}


Techne is characteristic, above all, of self-contained systems of
reasoning in which the findings may be logically derived from the
initial assumptions. To the degree that the form of knowledge
satisfies these conditions, to that degree is it impersonal,
universal, and completely impervious to context. But the context of
mētis, as Detienne and Vernant emphasize, is characteristically
“situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting and
ambiguous, situations which do not lend themselves to precise
measurement, exact calculation, or rigorous logic.”\footnote{Detienne and Vernant, \emph{Cunning Intelligence}, pp. 3-4.} Nussbaum
shows convincingly how Plato attempted, especially in the \emph{Republic},
to transform the realm of love—a realm that almost by definition is
one of contingency, desire, and impulse—into a realm of techne or
episteme.\footnote{Nussbaum, \emph{The Fragility of Goodness}, chaps. 5 and 6.} Plato regarded mundane love as subject to the lower
appetites, and he hoped to purge it of these base instincts so that it
could more closely resemble the philosopher’s pure search for
truth. The superiority of pure reasoning, especially scientific and
mathematical logic, lay in the fact that it was “pure of pain,
maximally stable, and directed at the truth.” The objects of such
reasoning “are eternally what they are regardless of what human beings
do and say.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 238.} What one loved, or \emph{should} love, Plato claimed, was
not the beloved himself but rather the pure forms of unalloyed beauty
reflected in the beloved.\footnote{I use “himself” because Plato is talking about what he considered to be the highest form of love: that between men and boys.} Only in this way could love remain
straight and rational, free of the appetites.


The spheres of human endeavor that are freest of contingency,
guesswork, context, desire, and personal experience—and thus free of
mētis—hence came to be perceived as man’s highest pursuits. They are
the philosopher’s work. One can see why, on the strength of such
criteria, Euclidean geometry, mathematics, some self-contained forms
of analytical philosophy, and perhaps music are considered to be among
the purest of pursuits.\footnote{Music is, in a sense, pure form, but Plato was deeply suspicious of music’s emotional appeal and in fact believed that the ideal republic should ban certain modes of music.} Unlike the natural sciences and concrete
experiments, these disciplines exist as realms of pure thought,
untouched by the contingencies of the material world. They begin in
the mind or on a blank sheet of paper. The Pythagorean theorem,
a² + b² = c², is true for all right triangles everywhere and forever.


A recurrent theme of Western philosophy and science, including social
science, has been the attempt to reformulate systems of knowledge in
order to bracket uncertainty and thereby permit the kind of logical
deductive rigor possessed by Euclidean geometry.\footnote{An important critique of social science might well take this observation as a point of departure. Borrowing the prestige of scientific language and methods from the biological sciences, many social scientists have envisioned and tried to effect an objective, precise, and strictly replicable set of techniques—a set of techniques that gives impartial and quantitative answers. Thus most forms of formal policy analysis and cost-benefit analysis manage, through heroic assumptions and an implausible metric for comparing incommensurate variables, to produce a quantitative answer to thorny questions. They achieve impartiality, precision, and replicability at the cost of accuracy. A brief and persuasive case along these lines can be found in Theodore M. Porter, “Objectivity as Standardization: The Rhetoric of Impersonality in Measurement, Statistics, and Cost-Benefit Analysis,” in Allan Megill, ed., \emph{Rethinking Objectivity} (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 197-237.} In the natural
sciences, the results have been revolutionary. Where philosophy and
the human sciences are concerned, the efforts have been just as
persistent but the results far more ambiguous. Descartes’s famous
episteme “I think, therefore I am” mimicked the first step in a
mathematical proof and was an “answer to the disorder that threatened
to undo society.”\footnote{Marglin, “Farmers, Seedsmen, and Scientists,” p. 46.} The aim of Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarians
was, through their calculus of pleasure and pain (hedonism), to reduce
the study of ethics to a pure natural science, to an examination of
“every circumstance by which an individual can be influenced, being
remarked and inventoried, nothing \dots{} left to chance, caprice, or
unguided discretion, everything being surveyed and set down in
dimension, number, weight, and measure.”\footnote{Jeremy Bentham, \emph{Pauper Management Improved}, cited in Nussbaum, \emph{The Fragility of Goodness}, p. 89.}


Even chance (\emph{tuche}) itself, which techne was designed to master, was
eventually, thanks to statistics and probability theory, transformed
into a singular fact that might enter the formulas of techne. Risk,
providing it could be assigned a known probability, became a fact like
any other, whereas uncertainty (where the underlying probabilities are
not known) still lay outside techne’s reach.\footnote{See Hacking, \emph{The Taming of Chance}. Warren Weaver long ago distinguished between what he termed “disorganized complexity,” which could be dealt with through statistical techniques that captured average outcomes, and “organized complexity” (including, most notably, organic systems), which could not yield to such techniques because the complexity of their nonrandom, systemic relationships prevents us from fully understanding first-order effects of an intervention, let alone second- or third-order effects (“Science and Complexity,” \emph{American Scientist} 36 [1948]: 536-44).} The intellectual
“career” of risk and uncertainty is indicative of many fields of
inquiry in which the realm of analysis was reformulated and narrowed
to exclude elements that could not be quantified and measured but
could only be judged.  Better put, techniques were devised to isolate
and domesticate those aspects of key variables that might be expressed
in numbers (a nation’s wealth by gross national product, public
opinion by poll numbers, values by psychological
inventories). Neoclassical economics, for example, has undergone a
transformation along these lines. Consumer preferences are first taken
as a given and then counted, in order to bracket taste as a major
source of uncertainty. Invention and entrepreneurial activity are
treated as exogenous and cast outside the perimeter of the discipline
as too intractable to submit to measurement and prediction.\footnote{Marglin, “Economics and the Social Construction of the Economy,” pp. 44-45.} The
discipline has incorporated calculable risk while exiling those topics
where genuine uncertainty prevails (ecological dangers, shifts in
taste).\footnote{But while the focus has narrowed in economics, the reach has grown. Witness the efforts of William D. Nordhaus to treat such ecological issues as global warming with an often spurious precision. See Nordhaus, “To Slow or Not to Slow: The Economics of the Greenhouse Effect,” \emph{Economic Journal}, July 1991, pp. 920-37.} As Stephen Marglin shows, “the emphasis on self-interest,
calculation, and maximization in economics” are classical examples of
“selfevident postulates” and reflect “more an ideological commitment
to the superiority of episteme than a serious attempt to unravel the
complexities and mysteries of human motivation and behavior.”\footnote{Marglin, “Economics and the Social Construction of the Economy,” p. 31 Marglin also describes and critiques the attempts \emph{within} the boundaries of epistemic economics to deal with such issues as public goods, sustainability, and uncertainty. Friedrich Hayek himself was a skeptic: “The delusion that advancing theoretical knowledge places us everywhere increasingly in a position to reduce complex interconnections to ascertainable particular facts often leads to new scientific errors\dots{} Such errors are largely due to an arrogation of pretended knowledge, which in fact no one possesses and which even the advance of science is not likely to give us” (\emph{Studies in Philosophy, Economics, and Politics} [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967], p. 197).}


The logic of such reformulations is analogous to the experimental
practice and self-imposed boundaries of modern scientific agriculture.
By constricting its field of inquiry, it gained enormously in
precision and scientific power at the possible expense of irrelevance
or unpleasant surprises from beyond its artificial perimeters.\footnote{At its most extreme, this strategy is analogous to that of tracking body counts during the Vietnam War—a technique that offered at least one precise measure, it was thought, for military progress.}
Techne is most suitable to activities “that have a singular end or
goal, an end that is specifiable apart from the activity itself, and
one susceptible to quantitative measurement.”\footnote{Nussbaum, \emph{The Fragility of Goodness}, p. 99.} Thus the problem
most successfully addressed by scientific agriculture is how to grow
the largest number of bushels of a crop at the least cost per acre, as
revealed through one-variable-at-a-time trials conducted on
experimental plots. Issues of farming life and community, family
needs, long-term soil structure, ecological diversity, and
sustainability are either difficult to incorporate or excluded
altogether. Formulas of efficiency, production functions, and rational
action are specifiable only when the ends sought are simple, sharply
defined, and hence measurable.


The problem, as Aristotle recognized, is that certain practical
choices cannot, “even in principle, be adequately and completely
captured in a system of universal rules.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 302.} He singled out
navigation and medicine as two activities in which the practical
wisdom of long experience is indispensable to superior
performance. They were mētis-laden activities in which responsiveness,
improvisation, and skillful, successive approximations were
required. If Plato can be credited, Socrates deliberately refrained
from writing down his teachings, because he believed that the activity
of philosophy belonged more to mētis than to episteme or techne. A
written text, even if it takes the form of a philosophical dialogue,
is a cut-and-dried set of codified rules. An oral dialogue, by
contrast, is alive and responsive to the mutuality of the
participants, reaching a destination that cannot be specified in
advance. Socrates evidently believed that the interaction between
teacher and students that we now call the Socratic method, and not the
resulting text, \emph{is} philosophy.\footnote{Ibid., p. 125. Thus in the \emph{Phaedrus}, Socrates, speaking through Plato, deplores the invention of writing and claims that books cannot reply to questions. He argues for the organic unity of a work of art, one whose arguments and style should take into account the prospective audience. In his \emph{Seventh Letter}, Plato writes that his deepest teachings are not written. See R. B. Rutherford, \emph{The Art of Plato: Ten Essays in Platonic Interpretation} (London: Duckworth, 1996).}

\subsection{Practical Knowledge Versus Scientific Explanation}


Only by grasping the potential achievement and range of mētis is it
possible to appreciate the valuable knowledge that high-modernist
schemes deprive themselves of when they simply impose their plans. One
major reason why mētis is denigrated, particularly in the hegemonic
imperium of scientific knowledge, is that its “findings” are
practical, opportune, and contextual rather than integrated into the
general conventions of scientific discourse.


We have seen the idiosyncracies of mētis at work in the historical
vernaculars of measurement of area, weight, and volume. The aim was
always to achieve a local purpose or to express an important local
feature (such as “a farm of two cows”) rather than to accommodate some
universal unit of measurement. Like Squanto’s maxim, such vernacular
measures apparently often conveyed more information than an abstract
measure could. They certainly conveyed information that was more
\emph{locally} relevant. It was just this local, practical index, which
varied from place to place, that ensured that mētis would be
confusing, incoherent, and unassimilable for purposes of statecraft.


The classification of flora follows much the same logic among
indigenous people. What matters is local use and value. Thus the
categories into which various plants are sorted follow a logic of
practical use: good for making soup, good for making twine, helpful in
healing cuts, effective for settling an upset stomach, poisonous for
cattle, useful for weaving our cloth, favored by rabbits as food, good
for making fences, and so on. This knowledge is never static, however;
it is constantly being expanded through practical experimentation. And
the categories into which floral reality is divided are clearly not
the occasionally invisible Linnaean botanical categories favored by
scientific researchers.\footnote{See Harold Conklin, \emph{Hanunoo Agriculture: A Report on an Integral System of Shi jting Cultivation in the Philippines} (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1957).}


The litmus test for mētis is practical success. Did the navigator make
the trip safely? Did Odysseus’s stratagems outwit the Cyclops? Did the
poultice cure the boil? Was the farmer’s harvest abundant? If a
technique works effectively and repeatedly for the purpose intended,
the practitioners of mētis do not pause long to ask why and how it
worked, to define the precise mechanism of cause and effect. Their
intent is not to contribute to a wider body of knowledge but to solve
the concrete problems they face. This does not mean that the
practitioners of mētis do not invent new solutions. They most
decidedly do. Until quite recently virtually all the improvements in
agriculture have come from the field rather than from industry or
science. What it does mean, however, is that the innovations of mētis
will typically represent a recombination (\emph{bricolage}, to use
Lévi-Strauss’s term)\footnote{Claude Lévi-Strauss, \emph{La pensée sauvage} (Paris: Plon, 1962).} of existing elements; farmers did not invent
the tractor to solve their problems of traction power.\footnote{Once the tractor became available (especially the tractor with power takeoff, or PTO), however, it was imaginatively adapted by farmers and mechanics to serve purposes its inventors had never imagined.} By the
same token, the bricolage of practical knowledge has often produced
complex techniques—such as polycropping and soil-building
strategies—that work admirably but that science has not (yet?)
understood.


The power of practical knowledge depends on an exceptionally close and
astute observation of the environment. It should by now be rather
obvious why traditional cultivators like Squanto are such consummate
observers of their environment, but the reasons bear repeating in the
context of a comparison with scientific knowledge. First, these
cultivators have a vital, direct stake in the results of close
observation. Unlike the research scientist or extension agent who does
not have to take her own advice, the peasant is the immediate consumer
of his own conclusions. Unlike the typical modern-day farmer, the
peasant has no outside experts to rely on beyond his experienced
neighbors; he must make decisions based on what he knows.


Second, the poverty or marginal economic status of many of these
cultivators is itself, I would argue, a powerful impetus to careful
observation and experimentation. Consider the hypothetical case of two
fishermen, both of whom must make their living from a river. One
fisherman lives by a river where the catch is stable and abundant. The
other lives by a river where the catch is variable and sparse,
affording only a bare and precarious subsistence. The poorer of the
two will clearly have an immediate, life-and-death interest in
devising new fishing techniques, in observing closely the habits of
fish, in the careful siting of traps and weirs, in the timing and
signs of seasonal runs of different species, and so forth.


Nor should we forget that the peasant cultivator or pastoralist lives
year in and year out in the field of observation. He or she will
likely know things that neither an absentee cultivator nor a research
scientist would ever notice.\footnote{Later in this chapter I offer, as anecdotal evidence of this truism, an account about how a Malaysian villager rid a mango tree of an infestation of red ants.} Finally, as mentioned in the
previous chapter, such a cultivator is always a member of a community
that serves as a living, oral reference library for observations,
practices, and experiments—a body of knowledge that an individual
could never amass alone.


The experimental temper of “prescientific” peoples, often impelled by
mortal threats, resulted in many important, efficacious discoveries.
South American Indians discovered that chewing the bark of the
cinchona tree was an effective remedy for malaria, without knowing
that its active ingredient was quinine or why it worked. Westerners
knew that certain foods consumed in the early spring, such as rhubarb,
could relieve the symptoms of wintertime scurvy, without knowing
anything about Vitamin C. The mold from certain breads was used to
stem infections long before the isolation of penicillin.\footnote{Gladys L. Hobby, \emph{Penicillin: Meeting the Challenge} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).}
According to Anil Gupta, roughly three-quarters of the modern
pharmacopoeia are derivatives of traditionally known medicines.\footnote{Anil Gupta, paper presented at a congress entitled “Agrarian Questions: The Politics of Farming Anno 1995,” May 22-24, 1995, Wageningen, The Netherlands. The fact that in the past two or three decades research laboratories have begun to inventory and analyze large numbers of traditional medicines is an indication of the rich capital of findings which mētis has bequeathed to modern medicine and pharmacology. For questions of property rights in such products, see Jack Ralph Kloppenberg, Jr., \emph{First the Seed: The Political Econoniv of Plant Biotechnology, 1492-2000} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).}
Even in the absence of remedies, people often knew what measures would
lessen their chances of contracting a dreaded contagious disease. The
Londoners in Daniel Defoe’s \emph{Journal of the Plague Year} knew that
moving to the country or, failing that, sealing oneself up in one’s
rooms vastly improved one’s chances of surviving the bubonic plague of
1665.\footnote{Daniel Defoe, \emph{Journal of the Plague Year} (1722; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). It is worth noting that these stratagems were more practical for the rich than for the poor. The result was that, far from being indiscriminate, the plague wreaked its greatest havoc among poor Londoners.} Knowing, as we now do, that the vectors of the plague were
the fleas carried by rats, we can appreciate why these strategies
often worked, but Defoe’s contemporaries hit on these effective
solutions even though they thought that the plague was caused by
vapors.


A most striking illustration of practice preceding science is the
widespread use of variolation to check the spread of smallpox long
before Sir William Jenner’s heralded development of vaccination in
1798.  The story, which Frédérique Apffel Marglin analyzes in
impressive detail, is valuable because it demonstrates how purely
mētis skills led to a form of inoculation that mimicked or presaged
what is justifiably seen as a great milestone in scientific
medicine.\footnote{Frederique Apffel Marglin, “Smallpox in Two Systems of Knowledge,” in Marglin and Marglin, \emph{Dominating Knowledge}, pp. 102-44.} Let me make it clear that the last thing I intend here
is a defense of traditional medicine vis-à-vis modern medical research
and experimental method.\footnote{There are different models of scientific medicine as well, some of which require a fundamentally different optic than standard allopathic practice. Thus Darwinian medicine looks at the adaptive functions of what are otherwise seen as pathological conditions. One example is morning sickness, which occurs for many women during the first trimester of pregnancy and which is thought to be an adaptive rejection of foods, particularly of fruits and vegetables, that are most likely to carry toxins harmful to the fetus. Another example is fever during the course of ordinary influenza or a cold, which is thought to be an adaptive mechanism for triggering elements of the immune system to combat infection. To the degree that the Darwinian perspective is correct, it forces us to ask what the beneficial or, more precisely, the adaptive functions of a medical condition might be. Surely, a view of plant disease from this angle might lead to novel insights. For an accessible introduction, see Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams, \emph{Evolution and Healing: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine} (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995).} What this account does highlight,
however, is how frequently local knowledge, trial and error, or what
we might more generously call the stochastic method have produced
practical solutions without benefit of scientific method.


By at least the sixteenth century, the technique of variolation was
widely practiced in India, the Middle East, Europe, and China. The
practice consisted of using human smallpox matter, scratched into the
skin or inhaled, which gave the recipient a mild, rarely fatal case of
smallpox. “Fresh” smallpox matter—from the pustules or scabs of
someone with an active infection contracted in the usual way—was never
used. The inoculation was typically made with attenuated matter saved
from those who had had mild cases during last year’s epidemic or with
matter taken from the pustules of those who had been inocu lated the
previous year.  Dosage could be regulated according to the size and
age of the patient.


The principle behind variolation, the same principle that forms the
basis of homeopathy, reflected a much older practice. Inoculation in
one form or another was widely practiced well before the rise of
modern medicine. In India, variolation was carried out by ritual
specialists and was thoroughly integrated with the worship of the
goddess Sithala.\footnote{Much of F. A. Marglin’s account is concerned with the undoubtedly well-intended but coercive efforts made by the British to suppress variolation and to substitute vaccination, as well as the popular resistance to these efforts. Marglin implies that the British pretty quickly succeeded in replacing variolation with vaccination, but Sumit Guha, an Indian colleague who has also studied these matters, believes that it is unlikely that the British had either the personnel or the power to stamp out variolation so quickly.} In other societies, its cultural setting was no
doubt different, although the actual procedures were remarkably
parallel.


Jenner’s discovery of vaccination using cowpox matter was therefore
not entirely novel. A young girl had told him that she was protected
against smallpox because she had already had cowpox. Jenner, following
this lead, inoculated his own children with cowpox matter and observed
that they showed no reaction to a subsequent smallpox vaccination.
Vaccination was, of course, a great advance over variolation. Because
it used live smallpox matter, variolation induced a mild but active
case that was contagious, and 1 to 3 percent of those so treated died
from the treatment, a ratio that nonetheless compared favorably with
the one or two in six who perished in an epidemic. Jenner’s technique
used killed virus, thus avoiding contagion, and his vaccination had a
remarkably low iatrogenic rate: only one in a thousand died of the
vaccination itself. His achievement is rightly celebrated, but it is
important to recognize that “Jennerian vaccination was not an abrupt
break with the past, but the direct descendant and heir of
inoculation.”\footnote{Donald R. Hopkins, \emph{Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History} (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 77, cited in Marglin, “Losing Touch,” p. 112. For the scientific career of vaccination and its application to anthrax and rabies, see Gerald L. Geison, \emph{The Private Science of Louis Pasteur} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).}


Variolation, though hardly to be preferred to vaccination, was an
impressive accomplishment of practical prescientific medicine. The
principle of inoculation had long been grasped, and, one imagines, a
great many practitioners in affected communities were trying to
develop a successful technique. Once the efficacy of a new treatment
was established, the news must have traveled faster than any epidemic
and quickly displaced less successful preventative measures. There is
no magic here. The ingredients of such practical knowledge are simple:
a pressing need (in this case, a matter literally of life and death),
a few promising leads that worked in analogous contexts (inoculation),
a vast army of freelance experimenters willing to try almost
anything,\footnote{There were literally thousands of competitors for cures and preventatives, as there always are with diseases that seem incurable.} time to “simmer” (as the experimenters and their
clients observed the results of various stratagems through successive
epidemics), and the sharing (through chains of communication) of the
experimental results.  As long as it didn’t require an electron
microscope, it would in fact be surprising if such a combination of
passionate interest, close observation, large numbers of amateur
specialists trying different possibilities, and the time necessary
for trial and error did not produce many novel solutions to practical
problems. The variolators before Jenner were not unlike the
polycropping cultivators described by Paul Richards. They had devised,
not just stumbled upon, something that worked, without quite knowing
exactly why it worked. While this increased their risk of drawing
false inferences from what they saw, it did not diminish the practical
achievements of their bricolage.


Mētis, with the premium it places on practical knowledge, experience,
and stochastic reasoning, is of course not merely the now-superseded
precursor of scientific knowledge. It is the mode of reasoning most
appropriate to complex material and social tasks where the
uncertainties are so daunting that we must trust our (experienced)
intuition and feel our way. Albert Howard’s description of water
management in Japan offers an instructive example: “Erosion control in
Japan is like a game of chess. The forest engineer, after studying his
eroding valley, makes his first move, locating and building one or
more check dams. He waits to see what Nature’s response is. This
determines the forest engineer’s next move, which may be another dam
or two, an increase in the former dam, or the construction of side
retaining walls. Another pause for observation, the next move is made,
and so on, until erosion is checkmated. The operations of natural
forces, such as sedimentation and re-vegetation, are guided and used
to the best advantage to keep down costs and to obtain practical
results. \emph{No more is attempted than Nature has already done in the
region}.”\footnote{Albert Howard, \emph{An Agricultural Testament} (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 144 (emphasis in original). Howard is paraphrasing here a work by Lowdermilk, and although Howard provides no reference, I believe he is referring to A. W. C. Lowdermilk, who visited Basutoland in 1949 and whose papers are at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library.} The engineer in Howard’s account recognizes implicitly
that he is dealing with “an art of one valley.”  Each prudent, small
step, based on prior experience, yields new and not completely
predictable effects that become the point of departure for the next
step. Virtually any complex task involving many variables whose values
and interactions cannot be accurately forecast belongs to this genre:
building a house, repairing a car, perfecting a new jet engine,
surgically repairing a knee, or farming a plot of land.\footnote{For the case of jet engines, the performance of which “remains notoriously uncertain in the development process” and which have to be adjusted by engineers with long experience after pilots conduct in-flight testing, see Nathan Rosenberg, \emph{Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics} (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), especially pp. 120-41. Rosenberg makes it clear that the limits of scientific methodology in this case have to do with the impossibility of anticipating the interactive consequences of the enormous number of independent variables (including different technologies) at work in a jet engine. See also Kenneth Arrow, “The Economics of Learning by Doing,” \emph{Review of Economic Studies}, June 1962, pp. 45-73.} Where the
interactions involve not just the material environment but social
interaction as well—building and peopling new villages or cities,
organizing a revolutionary seizure of power, or collectivizing
agriculture—the mind boggles at the multitude of interactions and
uncertainties (as distinct from calculable risks).


More than thirty-five years ago, in recognition of the refractory
complexity of ambitious social policy, Charles Lindblom coined the
memorable expression “the science of muddling through.”\footnote{Charles E. Lindblom, “The Science of Muddling Through,” \emph{Public Administration Review} 19 (Spring 1959): 79-88. Twenty years after this article appeared, Lindblom extended the argument in another article with a catchy title: “Still Muddling, Not Yet Through.” See Lindblom, \emph{Democracy and the Market System} (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1988), pp. 237-59.} The
phrase was meant to capture the spirit of a practical approach to
large-scale policy problems that could not be completely understood,
let alone comprehensively addressed. Models of public administration,
Lindblom complained, implicitly assumed a synoptic mastery of a
policy initiative, when in practice, knowledge was both limited and
fragmentary, and means could never be neatly separated from goals. His
characterization of actual policy practice emphasized a piecemeal
approach of limited comparisons, a sequence of trials and errors
followed by revised trials, reliance on past experience, and
“disjointed incrementalism.”\footnote{Lindblom, “Still Muddling, Not Yet Through.”} Albert Hirschman has made the same
point, rather more metaphorically, by comparing social policy to house
building: “The architect of social change can never have a reliable
blueprint. Not only is each house he builds different from any other
that was built before, but it necessarily uses new construction
materials and even experiments with untested principles of stress and
structure. Therefore what can be most usefully conveyed by the
builders of one house is an understanding of the experience that made
it at all possible to build under these trying circumstances.”\footnote{Albert O. Hirschman, “The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding,” \emph{World Politics} 22 (April 1970): 243.}


Taken together, Lindblom’s and Hirschman’s positions amount to a
well-reasoned strategic retreat from the ambition to comprehensive,
rational planning. If we can make allowances for the social-science
jargon, the concepts behind such terms as “bounded rationality”
(rather than “synoptic mastery”) and “satisficing” (rather than
“maximizing”), terms invented to describe a world working by educated
guesswork and rules of thumb, sound very much like mētis.

\subsection{Learning Beyond the Book}


A step-by-step “muddling through” approach would seem to be the only
prudent course in a field like erosion management or public policy
implementation, where surprises are all but guaranteed. The fact that
in these cases the level of uncertainty and hence of potential
disaster can be reduced by breaking down the process into more
manageable steps does \emph{not} imply that any novice could then take
charge. On the contrary, only someone with wide experience will be
able to interpret the results of and reactions to an initial step in
order to determine the next step.  One would want hydrologists and
policy managers who had been surprised many times and have had many
successes behind them. Their repertoire of responses would be larger,
their judgment in reading the environment surer, their sense of what
surprises might await them more accurate.  Once again, some of their
competence could be interpreted and taught, but much of it would
remain implicit—a sixth sense that comes with long practice. At the
risk of trying to pinpoint the ineffable, I want to suggest how
important such knowledge is and how difficult it is to translate it
into codified form.\footnote{Implicit knowledge is almost a staple of discourse in the philosophy of knowledge and in the psychology of cognition. See, for example, Gilbert Ryle, \emph{Concept of the Mind} (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949), whose distinction between “knowing how” and “knowing that” mimics my distinction between mētis and episteme, and Jerome Bruner, \emph{On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand} (Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1962).}


Mētis knowledge is often so implicit and automatic that its bearer is
at a loss to explain it.\footnote{A great basketball move may be diagrammed and even taught, but the ability to make that same move in the traffic and rush of a real game is, alas, another thing altogether.} A staple of early medical training, I
have been told, is the story of a physician who, at the turn of the
century, had a spectacularly high success rate in diagnosing syphilis
in its early stages. Laboratory tests confirmed his diagnoses, but he
himself did not know precisely what it was that he detected in the
physical exams that led him to his conclusions. Intrigued by his
success, hospital administrators asked two other doctors to closely
observe his examination of patients over several weeks and to see if
they could spot what he was picking up. At long last, they and the
doctor realized that he was unconsciously registering the patients’
slight eye tremor. The eye tremor then became a universally recognized
symptom of syphilis.  Although this insight could be codified, what is
instructive here is that it could have been achieved only through
close observation and long clinical experience and that, even before
then, it could have been known subliminally.


Any experienced practitioner of a skill or craft will develop a large
repertoire of moves, visual judgments, a sense of touch, or a
discriminating gestalt for assessing the work as well as a range of
accurate intuitions born of experience that defy being communicated
apart from practice. A few brief examples will help to convey the
subtlety and nuance of this knowledge. In Indonesia, older Bugis sea
captains, sound asleep below decks, will awaken the moment there is a
change in direction, weather, current, or some combination of the
three.  As the ocean’s waves change amplitude or begin striking the
ship from a different direction, a captain immediately senses the
change through the resulting slight alterations in the roll and pitch
of the ship.


In the days when a case of diphtheria in town was still an occasion
for quarantining the patient at home, a doctor was taking a young
medical student along with him on his rounds. When they had been
admitted to the front hall of a quarantined house but before they had
seen the patient, the older man paused and said, “Stop. Smell the
odor! Never forget this smell; this is the smell of a house with
diphtheria.”\footnote{A similar story tells of a man dying in a Chicago hospital of a disease that the physicians could not diagnose. Although they knew that the man’s trips abroad meant that he could have been suffering from a tropical ailment, their tests and researches were to no avail. One day, an experienced doctor from India was simply walking through the ward with a colleague on his way to an appointment when he stopped, sniffed the air, and said, “There’s a bloke here with X” (I don’t recall the name of the disease). He was correct, but unfortunately the patient was too far gone to be saved.} Another doctor once told me that, after seeing
thousands of infants at a busy clinic, he believed that he could tell
with a high degree of accuracy, just by looking, whether an infant was
seriously ill and needed immediate attention. He couldn’t quite put
his finger on the exact visual cue that informed his judgment, but he
supposed that it was some combination of complexion, the expression of
the eyes, body tone, and animation. Albert Howard once again makes a
persuasive case for the “practiced eye”: “An experienced farmer can
tell the health of the soil and the quality of the humus by the
plants—their vigor, their growth, the profuse roots, the ‘glow’ of
health\dots{} The same is true for the health of animals on good land.”
Indeed, he continues, “it is not necessary to weigh or measure them. A
glance on the part of the successful grazier, or a butcher accustomed
to deal with high class animals, is sufficient to tell him whether all
is well or whether there is something wrong with the soil or the
management of the animals, or both.”\footnote{Howard, \emph{An Agricultural Testament}, pp. 29-30.}


What is the status of such insight or intuition? We might call these
skills the “tricks of the trade” (in the nondeceptive sense) that most
“crafty” practitioners acquire.\footnote{Marglin has noted how the word “crafty” brings the idea of experienced knowledge of a craft together with the concept of “cunning” connoted by “mētis” See “Economics and the Social Construction of the Economy,” p. 60.} Notice that virtually all the
experienced judgments described in these anecdotes could be verified
by tests and measurements. Diphtheria can be detected in the
laboratory, a child’s anemia can be verified by blood tests, and the
Bugis sea captain can go on deck to confirm the shift in the wind. It
is doubtless reassuring to those who have both the intuition and
access to formal measurement to know that their judgment can be
checked. But the epistemic alternative to mētis is far slower, more
laborious, more capital intensive, and not always decisive. When rapid
judgments of high (not perfect) accuracy are called for, when it is
important to interpret early signs that things are going well or
poorly, then there is no substitute for mētis. In the case of the
experienced doctor, in fact, it is mētis that informs a decision about
whether tests are needed and, if so, which tests.


Even the part of mētis that can be conveyed by rules of thumb is the
codification of practical experience. The boiling down of maple sap
into syrup is a tricky business. If one goes too far, the sap will
boil over.  The stopping point can be determined by a thermometer or
by a hydrometer (which indicates specific gravity). But those with
experience look for the mass of small bubbles that forms on the
surface of the sap just before it begins to boil over—a visual rule of
thumb that is far easier to use. Achieving the insight, however,
\emph{requires} that, at least once, the syrup maker make a mistake and go
too far. Chinese recipes, it has always amused me, often contain the
following instruction: “Heat the oil until it is \emph{almost} smoking.”
The recipes assume that the cook has made enough mistakes to know what
oil looks like just before it begins smoking. The rule of thumb for
maple syrup and for oil are, by definition, the rules of experience.


Those who do not have access to scientific methods and laboratory
verification have often relied on mētis to develop rich knowledge
systems that are remarkably accurate. Traditional navigation skills
before the eras of sextants, magnetic compasses, charts, and sonar are
a case in point. I refer again to the Bugis in this context, because
their skills have been so brilliantly documented by Gene
Ammarell.\footnote{Bugis sailors are exceptionally astute observers of their environment at sea and have assembled a large array of signs to forecast weather, wind, landfall, and tides. The dominant color of rainbows carries meaning: yellow means more rain, blue means more wind. A morning rainbow in the northwest signals the beginning of the western monsoon. The slaty-breasted rail’s call, if it is a buzzing “kech, kech, kech,” means a change in the wind. When raptors soar very high, rain is no more than two days away. Many of these reliable associations could perhaps be explained more “scientifically,” but they have served as rapid, accurate, and occasionally lifesaving signals for generations.} In the absence of formal tide tables, the Bugis have
elaborated a thoroughly reliable scheme for forecasting rising and
falling tides, the direction of currents, and the relative strength of
tides—all of which are vitally important to their sailing plans and
safety.\footnote{Ammarell, “Bugis Navigation,” chap. 5, pp. 220-82.} Calculating on the basis of time of day, the number of
days into the lunar cycle, and the monsoon season, the Bugis captain
holds in his head a system that provides all the accurate information
he needs about tides. From an astronomer’s perspective, it seems odd
that the scheme makes no reference to the angle of declination of the
moon. But since the monsoon is directly related to the declination of
the moon, it serves effectively as a proxy. The cognitive map of the
Bugis captain can be reconstructed in written form, as Ammarell has
done, for illustrative purposes, but it was learned orally and by
informal apprenticeship among the Bugis. Given the complexity of the
phenomena it is meant to address, the system for evaluating and
predicting tides is elegantly simple and eminently effective.

\subsection{The Dynamism and Plasticity of Mētis}


The term “traditional,” as in “traditional knowledge”—a term that I
have carefully avoided—is a misnomer, sending all the wrong
signals.\footnote{An alternative, the subject of a growing literature, is the term “indigenous knowledge” or “indigenous technical knowledge.” Although I have nothing against this term per se, inasmuch as it points to the skills and experience already in the possession of the subjects of development schemes, it has come in some hands to connote something self-contained, completely sufficient, and intractably opposed to modern scientific knowledge, when in fact it is constantly changing through experimentation and through contact with the outside. For two exceptionally perceptive critiques of the term, see Akil Gupta, “The Location of ‘the Indigenous’ in Critiques of Modernity,” Ninety-First Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, December 2-6, 1992, and Arun Agrawal, “Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge,” Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor 4, no. 1 (April 1996): 1-11, and the commentary following it. See also Agrawal, “Dismantling the Divide Between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge.” Development and Change 26, no. 3 (1995): 413-39.} In the mid-nineteenth century, explorers in West Africa
stumbled upon groups growing maize, a New World grain, as their main
staple. Although it was unlikely that the West Africans had been
growing maize for longer than two generations, its cultivation was
already surrounded by elaborate rituals and myths about a maize
goddess or spirit who had given them the first kernels. What was
striking was both the alacrity with which they had adopted maize and
the speed with which they had integrated it into their
traditions.\footnote{For a general argument along these line, see Eric Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger, \emph{The Invention of Tradition} (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Although Hobsbawm and Ranger are largely concerned with traditions “invented” by elites to legitimate their rule and legitimacy, their general point about the nonantiquity of many so-called traditions is well taken.} The apparent spread of variolation across four
continents is a further instance of how widely and how rapidly
“traditional peoples” will embrace techniques that solve vital
problems. Examples could be multiplied. Sewing machines, matches,
flashlights, kerosene, plastic bowls, and antibiotics are only a tiny
sample of the products that solved vital problems or eliminated great
drudgery and were thus readily accepted.\footnote{I do not deal here with such related issues as how readily people abandon habits and norms that are perhaps closer to the center of their self-identity: death rituals, religious beliefs, ideas about friendship, and so on. One of the most curious and important aspects of adaptation, however, is that the poor and marginal are often in the vanguard of innovations that do not require a lot of capital. This is not at all surprising when one considers that, for the poor, a gamble often makes sense if their current practices are failing them. Occasionally, when a whole community or a culture experiences an overwhelming sense of powerlessness and its categories no longer make sense of the world, such gambles take on millennial tones, with new prophets arising to proclaim the way forward. The colonial conquest of preindustrial peoples, the German Peasant War at the time of the Reformation, the English Civil War, and the French Revolution seem to belong in this category.} Practical efficacy is,
as we have noted, the key test of mētis knowledge, and all these
products passed with flying colors.


The point that I am making would hardly need emphasis or elaborate
illustration except for the fact that a certain understanding of
science, modernity, and development has so successfully structured the
dominant discourse that all other kinds of knowledge are regarded as
backward, static traditions, as old wives’ tales and
superstitions. High modernism has needed this “other,” this dark twin,
in order to rhetorically present itself as the antidote to
backwardness.\footnote{James Ferguson, \emph{The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).} The binary opposition also comes from a history of
competition between the institutions and personnel that sprang up
around these two forms of knowledge. Modern research institutions,
agricultural experiment stations, sellers of fertilizer and machinery,
high-modernist city planners, Third World developers, and World Bank
officials have, to a considerable degree, made their successful
institutional way in the world by the systematic denigration of the
practical knowledge that we have called mētis.


Their characterization could not, in this context, be further from the
truth. Mētis, far from being rigid and monolithic, is plastic, local,
and divergent.\footnote{See Arturo Escobar’s elaboration of the concept of hybridization in Marglin and Gudeman, \emph{People’s Economy, People’s Ecology}.} It is in fact the idiosyncracies of mētis, its
contextualness, and its fragmentation that make it so permeable, so
open to new ideas. Mētis has no doctrine or centralized training; each
practitioner has his or her own angle. In economic terms, the market
for mētis is often one of nearly perfect competition, and local
monopolies are likely to be broken by innovation from below and
outside. If a new technique works, it is likely to find a clientele.


In his defense of traditionalism against rationalism, Michael
Oakeshott emphasizes the pragmatism of real, existing traditions: “The
big mistake of the rationalist—though it is not inherent in the
method-is to assume that ‘tradition,’ or what is better called
‘practical knowledge,’ is rigid, fixed and unchanging—in fact it is
‘preeminently fluid.’”\footnote{Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics,” in \emph{Rationalism in Politics}, p. 31.} Tradition, in part because of its local
variation, is pliable and dynamic. “No traditional way of behavior, no
traditional skill ever remains fixed,” he says elsewhere. “Its history
is one of continual change.”\footnote{Oakeshott, “The Tower of Baal,” in \emph{Rationalism in Politics}, p. 64.} The changes are likely to be small
and gradual (incrementalism) rather than sudden and discontinuous.


It is worth emphasizing the degree to which oral cultures, as opposed
to written cultures, may avoid the rigidity of orthodoxy. Because an
oral culture has no textual reference point for marking deviations,
its religious myths, rituals, and folklore are likely to drift. The
tales and traditions currently in circulation vary with the speaker,
the audience, and local needs. Having no yardstick like a sacred text
to measure the degree of drift from its Ur-tradition, such a culture
can change greatly over time and simultaneously think of itself as
remaining faithful to tradition.\footnote{If innovation in such societies must be represented as compatible with tradition in order to gain acceptance, this is another reason for the plasticity of tradition.}


Perhaps the best analogy for a society’s stock of mētis is its
language.  Yes, there are rules of thumb for expression: clichés,
formulas of politeness, customs for swearing, and conventional
conversations. But unless there is a central committee of grammarians
with draconian police powers, the language is always being added to as
new expressions and novel combinations are invented and puns and irony
undermine old formulas. Under great pressure and rapid change, the
language may change rather dramatically and new hybrids arise, but for
the people who speak it, it remains recognizably \emph{their}
language. Influence over the direction of a language is never equally
distributed, but innovation comes from far and wide, and if others
find a particular innovation useful or apposite, they will adopt it as
part of their language. In language as in mētis, seldom is the name of
an innovator remembered, and this, too, helps to make the result a
joint, mutual product.

\section{The Social Context of Mētis and Its Destruction}


While doing fieldwork in a small village in Malaysia, I was constantly
struck by the breadth of my neighbors’ skills and their casual
knowledge of local ecology. One particular anecdote is
representative. Growing in the compound of the house in which I lived
was a locally famous mango tree. Relatives and acquaintances would
visit when the fruit was ripe in the hope of being given a few fruits
and, more important, the chance to save and plant the seeds next to
their own house. Shortly before my arrival, however, the tree had
become infested with large red ants, which destroyed most of the fruit
before it could ripen. It seemed nothing could be done short of
bagging each fruit. Several times I noticed the elderly head of
household, Mat Isa, bringing dried nipah palm fronds to the base of
the mango tree and checking them. When I finally got around to asking
what he was up to, he explained it to me, albeit reluctantly, as for
him this was pretty humdrum stuff compared to our usual gossip. He
knew that small black ants, which had a number of colonies at the rear
of the compound, were the enemies of large red ants. He also knew that
the thin, lancelike leaves of the nipah palm curled into long, tight
tubes when they fell from the tree and died. (In fact, the local
people used the tubes to roll their cigarettes.) Such tubes would
also, he knew, be ideal places for the queens of the black ant
colonies to lay their eggs. Over several weeks he placed dried nipah
fronds in strategic places until he had masses of black-ant eggs
beginning to hatch. He then placed the egg-infested fronds against the
mango tree and observed the ensuing week-long Armageddon. Several
neighbors, many of them skeptical, and their children followed the
fortunes of the ant war closely. Although smaller by half or more, the
black ants finally had the weight of numbers to prevail against the
red ants and gain possession of the ground at the base of the mango
tree. As the black ants were not interested in the mango leaves or
fruits while the fruits were still on the tree, the crop was saved.


This successful field experiment in biological controls presupposes
several kinds of knowledge: the habitat and diet of black ants, their
egg-laying habits, a guess about what local material would substitute
as movable egg chambers, and experience with the fighting proclivities
of red and black ants. Mat Isa made it clear that such skill in
practical entomology was quite widespread, at least among his older
neighbors, and that people remembered something like this strategy
having worked once or twice in the past. What is clear to me is that
no agricultural extension official would have known the first thing
about ants, let alone biological controls; most extension agents were
raised in town and in any case were concerned entirely with rice,
fertilizer, and loans.  Nor would most of them think to ask; they
were, after all, the experts, trained to instruct the peasant. It is
hard to imagine this knowledge being created and maintained except in
the context of lifelong observation and a relatively stable,
multigenerational community that routinely exchanges and preserves
knowledge of this kind.


One purpose of this illustration is to alert us to the social
conditions necessary for the reproduction of comparable practical
knowledge. These social conditions, at a minimum, would seem to
require a community of interest, accumulated information, and ongoing
experimentation.  Occasionally there are formal institutions that seem
almost perfectly tailored to the collection and exchange of practical
information, such as the \emph{veilleés} of nineteenth-century France. The
veillée, as its name implies, was a traditional pattern of gathering
practiced by farm families during winter evenings, often in barns to
take advantage of the warmth generated by the livestock and thus save
on fuel. With no agenda save sociability and economy, the gatherings
amounted to local assemblies where opinions, stories, agricultural
news, advice, gossip, and religious or folk tales were exchanged while
the participants shelled nuts or embroidered. Given the fact that each
member there possessed a lifetime of interested observation and
practice in which every family paid for the consequences of its
agricultural decisions, the veillée was an unheralded daily seminar on
practical knowledge.


This brings us squarely to two of the great ironies of mētis. The
first is that mētis is not democratically distributed. Not only does
it depend on a touch or a knack that may not be common, but access to
the experience and practice necessary for its acquisition may be
restricted.  Artisan guilds, gifted craftsmen, certain classes,
religious fraternities, entire communities, and men in general often
treat some forms of knowledge as a monopoly they are reluctant to
share. Better stated, the availability of such knowledge to others
depends greatly on the social structure of the society and the
advantages that a monopoly in some forms of knowledge can confer.\footnote{Access to codified, epistemic knowledge is also sharply restricted by such markers as wealth, gender, social position, and region in developed countries as well. The difference is that, in principle, in developed societies the secrets of medicine, science, engineering, ecology, and so on are open secrets, available to all to use and modify.}
In this respect mētis is not unitary, and we should perhaps speak of
metises, recognizing its nonhomogeneity. The second irony is that,
however plastic and receptive mētis is, some forms of it seem to
depend on key elements of preindustrial life for their elaboration and
transmission. Communities that are marginal to markets and to the
state are likely to retain a high degree of mētis; they have no
choice, as they have to rely disproportionately on the knowledge and
materials at hand. If, while shopping at the local store or visiting
at the farmers’ association, Mat Isa had found a cheap pesticide that
would have finished off the red ants, I don’t doubt that he would have
used it.


Some forms of mētis are disappearing every day.\footnote{It goes without saying that new forms of mētis are constantly being created. Computer hacking would fall into this category. Mētis, it should be quite clear, is ubiquitous in modern and in less modern societies alike, and perhaps the crucial difference is that, compared to preindustrial societies, modern societies are particularly reliant on codified, epistemic knowledge, usually conveyed through formal instruction.} As physical
mobility, commodity markets, formal education, professional
specialization, and mass media spread to even the most remote
communities, the social conditions for the elaboration of mētis are
undermined. One could, with great justice, welcome a great many of
these extinctions of local knowledge. Once matches become widely
available, why would anyone want to know, except as a matter of idle
curiosity, how to make fire with flint and tinder? Knowing how to
scrub clothes on a washboard or on a stone in the river is undoubtedly
an art, but one gladly abandoned by those who can afford a washing
machine. Darning skills were similarly lost, without much nostalgia,
when cheap, machine-made stockings came on the market. As the older
Bugis seamen say, “These days, with charts and compasses, \emph{anyone} can
steer.”\footnote{Ammarell, “Bugis Navigation,” p. 372.} And why not? The production of standardized knowledge has
made certain skills more broadly—more democratically—available, as
they are no longer the preserve of a guild that may refuse admission
or insist on a long apprenticeship.\footnote{There is little doubt that many apprenticeships were longer than necessary for training a young craftsmen and were a thinly disguised form of indentured labor designed to increase the profits of an oligopoly of master craftsmen.} Much of the world of mētis
that we have lost is the all but inevitable result of
industrialization and the division of labor. And much of this loss was
experienced as a liberation from toil and drudgery.


But it would be a serious error to believe that the destruction of mētis
was merely the inadvertent and necessary by-product of economic
progress. The destruction of mētis and its replacement by standardized
formulas legible only from the center is virtually inscribed in the
activities of both the state and large-scale bureaucratic capitalism. As
a “project,” it is the object of constant initiatives which are never
entirely successful, for no forms of production or social life can be
made to work by formulas alone—that is, without mētis. The logic
animating the project, however, is one of control and appropriation.
Local knowledge, because it is dispersed and relatively autonomous, is
all but unappropriable. The reduction or, more utopian still, the
elimination of mētis and the local control it entails are preconditions,
in the case of the state, of administrative order and fiscal
appropriation and, in the case of the large capitalist firm, of worker
discipline and profit.


The subordination of mētis is fairly obvious in the development of
mass production in the factory. A comparable de-skilling process is, I
believe, more compelling and, given the intractable obstacles to
complete standardization, ultimately less successful in agricultural
production.


As Stephen Marglin’s early work has convincingly shown, capitalist
profit requires not only efficiency but the \emph{combination} of
efficiency and control.\footnote{The desire for control over the work process is not merely a short-term prerequisite to capturing profits; it is crucial to the capacity of managers to transform the work process from above for adapting to the market and meeting the demands of their superiors. Ken C. Kusterer calls management control over the production process the “steerability” of a firm. See Kusterer, \emph{Know-How on the Job: The Important Working Knowledge of “Unskilled” Workers} (Boulder: Westview Press, 1978).} The crucial innovations of the division
of labor at the subproduct level and the concentration of production
in the factory represent the key steps in bringing the labor process
under unitary control. Efficiency and control might coincide, as in
the case of the mechanized spinning and weaving of cotton. At times,
however, they might be unrelated or even contradictory. “Efficiency at
best creates a \emph{potential} profit,” notes Marglin. “Without control
the capitalist cannot realize that profit. Thus organizational forms
which enhance capitalist control may increase profits and find favor
with capitalists even if they affect productivity and efficiency
adversely. Conversely, more efficient ways of organizing production
which reduce capitalist control may end up reducing profits and being
rejected by capitalists.”\footnote{Marglin, “Losing Touch,” p. 220.} The typical structure of artisanal
production was often an impediment to efficiency. But it was nearly
\emph{always} an obstacle to capitalist profits.  In the “putting-out”
system in textiles that prevailed before factory organization, cottage
workers had control over the raw material, could set the pace of the
work, and could increase their return by various stratagems that were
difficult to monitor. The crucial advantage of the factory, from the
boss’s point of view, was that he could more directly fix the hours
and the intensity of the work and control the raw materials.\footnote{Ibid., p. 222. But as the capitalists were shortly to discover, one advantage of the putting-out system was a diminished exposure to large-scale industrial strikes and equipment breakdowns.} To
the degree that efficient production could still be organized on an
artisanal basis (such as early woolen manufacturing and silk ribbon
weaving, according to Marglin), to that degree was it difficult for
the capitalist to appropriate the profits of a dispersed craft
population.


The genius of modern mass-production methods, Frederick Taylor, saw
the issue of destroying mētis and turning a resistant,
quasiautonomous, artisan population into more suitable units, or
“factory hands,” with great clarity. “Under scientific management
\dots{} the managers assume \dots{}  the burden of gathering together all of
the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the
workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this
knowledge to rules, laws, formulae\dots{}  Thus all of the planning which
under the old system was done by the workmen, must of necessity under
the new system be done by management in accordance with the law of
science.”\footnote{Taylor, quoted in ibid., p. 220 n. 3.} In the Taylorized factory, only the factory manager had
the knowledge and command of the whole process, and the worker was
reduced to the execution of a small, often minute, part of the overall
process. The result was often remarkably efficient, as in the early
Ford plants; it was always, however, a great boon to control and
profit.\footnote{As Marglin notes, “Only a recapitulation of workers’ knowledge in the form of an episteme to which management alone had access would provide a firm basis for managerial control” (ibid., p. 247).}


The utopian dream of Taylorization—a factory in which every pair of
hands was more or less reduced to automatic movements, on the model of
programmed robots—was unrealizable. Not that it wasn’t tried. David
Noble has described the well-funded attempt to make machine tools
through numerical controls because it promised “emancipation from the
human worker.”\footnote{David F. Noble, \emph{Forces of Production: A Social History of Automation} (New York: Oxford Press, 1984), p. 250, quoted in ibid., p. 248.} Its ultimate failure came precisely because the
system had designed out mētis—the practical adjustments that an
experienced worker would make to compensate for slight changes in
material, temperatures, the wear on or irregularities in the machine,
mechanical malfunction, and so forth. As one operator said, “Numerical
controls are supposed to be like magic, but all you can do
automatically is produce scrap.”\footnote{Noble, \emph{Forces of Production}, p. 277, quoted in Marglin, “Losing Touch,” p. 250.} This conclusion could be
generalized. In a brilliant ethnography of the work routines of
machine operators whose jobs appeared to have been thoroughly
de-skilled, Ken Kusterer has shown how the workers nevertheless had to
develop individual skills that were absolutely necessary to successful
production but that could never be reduced to formulas a novice could
immediately use. One machine operator, whose job was classified as
“unskilled,” drew an analogy between performing his job and driving a
car: “Cars are basically the same but every car is different\dots{} At
first when you’re learning, you just learn rules about driving. But as
you get to know how to drive, you get a feel for the car you’re
driving-you know, things like how it feels at different speeds, how
well the brakes work, when it’s going to overheat, how to start it
when it’s cold\dots{} Then if you think about old cars like these
machines, been running three shifts for twenty years, some of them,
like maybe you’ve got a car with no horn, that wants to turn right
when you hit the brake, that don’t start right unless you pump the gas
in a certain way—then maybe you see what it’s like trying to run these
old machines they’ve got down here.”\footnote{Quoted in Kusterer, \emph{Know-How on the Job}, p. 50.}


Taylorization has its analogue in agricultural production as well, an
analogue with a far longer and more variegated history. In
agriculture, as in manufacturing, the mere efficiency of a form of
production is not sufficient to ensure the appropriation of taxes or
profits. Independent smallholder agriculture may, as we have noted, be
the most efficient way to grow many crops. But such forms of
agriculture, although they may present possibilities for taxation and
profit when their products are bulked, processed, and sold, are
relatively illegible and hard to control. As is the case with
autonomous artisans and petit-bourgeois shopkeepers, monitoring the
commercial fortunes of small-fry farms is an administrative
nightmare. The possibilities for evasion and resistance are numerous,
and the cost of procuring accurate, annual data is high, if not
prohibitive.\footnote{This is why, before the income tax, the administrators of the older systems of taxation found it easiest to assess taxes by relying solely on the more permanent fact of land or real property ownership.}


A state mainly concerned with appropriation and control will find
sedentary agriculture preferable to pastoralism or shifting
agriculture.  For the same reasons, such a state would generally
prefer largeholding to smallholding and, in turn, plantation or
collective agriculture to both. Where control and appropriation are
the overriding considerations, only the last two forms offer direct
control over the workforce and its income, the opportunity to select
cropping patterns and techniques, and, finally, direct control over
the production and profit of the enterprise. Although collectivization
and plantation agriculture are seldom very efficient, they represent,
as we have seen, the most legible and hence appropriable forms of
agriculture.


The large capitalist agricultural producer faces the same problem as
the factory owner: how to transform the essentially artisanal or mētis
knowledge of farmers into a standardized system that will allow him
greater control over the work and its intensity. The plantation was
one solution. In colonial countries, where able-bodied men were
pressed into service as gang labor, the plantation represented a kind
of private collectivization, inasmuch as it relied on the state for
the extramarket sanctions necessary to control its labor force. More
than one plantation sector has made up what it lacked in efficiency by
using its political clout to secure subsidies, price supports, and
monopoly privileges.


The control made possible by the plantation, not to mention the
collective farm, has proved, with few exceptions, to entail such high
costs in supervision, rigidity, and overhead as to be inefficient. Now
that plantation agriculture has been discredited, some of the newer
alternatives devised to replicate its control and standardization are
instructive, as they indicate the functional similarity that may lie
behind different forms.\footnote{A branch of social theory called principal-agent analysis is devoted to the various techniques by which one person can be persuaded to do another persons bidding. As one might imagine, its most immediate applications have been in management science.} The invention of contract farming
worldwide is just one noteworthy example.\footnote{Michael J. Watts, “Life Under Contract: Contract Farming, Agrarian Restructuring, and Flexible Accumulation,” in Michael J. Watts and Peter O. Little, eds., \emph{Living Under Contract: Contract Farming and Agrarian Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa} (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), pp. 21-77. See also Allan Pred and Michael J. Watts, \emph{Reworking Modernity: Capitalism and Symbolic Discontent} (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992).} When chicken farmers
realized that huge, centralized operations for raising fryers not only
were inefficient but posed serious disease and environmental problems,
they devised a kind of high-tech putting-out system.\footnote{The system with fryers also involved farms that specialized in hatching and caring for chicks and farms that grew certain elements of the feed. Contract farming for vegetables is widespread in the Third World and has recently been extended to the raising of pigs.} The large
firm contracts with a farmer to supply him with chicks and then to buy
back (after six weeks or so) a certain number of chickens meeting
their standards. The farmer, for his part, is obliged to construct and
pay for a building that meets corporate specifications and to feed,
water, and medicate the chickens with rations supplied by the
corporation and according to their precise timetable. An inspector
frequently verifies compliance. For the corporation, the advantages
are enormous: it risks no capital except what is invested in the
birds; it needs no land of its own; its management expenses are small;
it achieves uniform product standards; and, not least, it can fail to
renew a contract or change the price paid after each round at no cost
to itself.


The logic, although not the form, is the same as on the plantation.
Given its national or international market, what the corporation
requires is absolute, guaranteed uniformity of product and a stable
supply.\footnote{The uniformity is achieved at the outset, of course, by means of scientific breeding.} The need to administer the production of uniform fryers
in many different localities requires an optic of standardization and
aggregation. As we saw in the case of scientific forestry, this is not
merely a question of inventing measures that accurately reflect the
facts on the ground and that can be conveyed to administrators. It is,
above all, a question of changing the environment so that it is more
standardized to begin with. Only the standardized breeding, the
building constructed to specifications, the fixed formula for feed,
and the mandatory feeding schedule—all disciplined by the
contract—make it possible for a single specialist to inspect one
hundred poultry farms raising fryers for, say, Kentucky Fried Chicken,
and to ensure that the variation is minimal. One can visualize his
handy checklist. The purpose of contract farming is not to understand
farms and adapt to them; rather, it is to transform farms and farm
labor at the outset so that they fit the grid of the contract.


For farmers who sign up, as long as the contracts are rolled over,
there are profits to be made, although at considerable risk. The
contracts are short term, the work schedules detailed, and the set-up
and supplies mandatory. The contract farmers are in theory
small-business entrepreneurs, but aside from the fact that they risk
their land and buildings, they have not much more control over their
working day than do assembly-line workers.

\section{The Case Against Imperial Knowledge}



\begin{quote}


They said \dots{} that he was so devoted to Pure Science \dots{} that he would
rather have people die by the right therapy than be cured by the wrong.



\end{quote}


— Sinclair Lewis, \emph{Arrowsmith}


The argument that I have been venturing is not a case against high
modernism or state simplifications per se or, to be sure, against
epistemic knowledge per se. Our ideas about citizenship, public-health
programs, social security, transportation, communication, universal
public education, and equality before the law are all powerfully
influenced by state-created, high-modernist simplifications. I will go
further and say that the \emph{initial} land reforms in Bolshevik Russia
and in postrevolutionary China were state-abetted simplifications that
effectively enfranchised millions who had lived in virtual serfdom.
Epistemic knowledge, though never separate in its practice from mētis,
has provided us with a knowledge of the world that, for all its darker
aspects, few of us would want to surrender.


What has proved to be truly dangerous to us and to our environment, I
think, is the \emph{combination} of the universalist pretensions of
epistemic knowledge and authoritarian social engineering. Such a
combination has been at work in city planning, in Lenin’s view of
revolution (but not his practice), in collectivization in the Soviet
Union, and in villagization in Tanzania. The combination is implicit
in the logic of scientific agriculture and explicit in its colonial
practice. When schemes like these come close to achieving their
impossible dreams of ignoring or suppressing mētis and local
variation, they all but guarantee their own practical failure.


Universalist claims seem inherent in the way in which rationalist
knowledge is pursued. Although I am no philosopher of knowledge, there
seems to be no door in this epistemic edifice through which mētis or
practical knowledge could enter on its own terms. It is this
\emph{imperialism} that is troubling. As Pascal wrote, the great \emph{failure}
of rationalism is “not its recognition of technical knowledge, but its
failure to recognize any other.”\footnote{Quoted in Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics,” p. 20 (emphasis added).} By contrast, mētis does not put
all its eggs in one basket; it makes no claim to universality and in
this sense is pluralistic. Of course, certain structural conditions
can thwart this imperialism of epistemic claims. Democratic and
commercial pressures sometimes oblige agricultural scientists to
premise their work on practical problems as defined by farmers. During
the Meiji Restoration, three-person technical teams began by
investigating farmers’ innovations and then taking them back to the
laboratory to perfect them. The construction workers who refused to
leave Brasília as planned or the disillusioned ujamaa villagers who
fled from their settlements to some degree undid the plans made for
them. Such resistance, however, comes from outside the paradigm of
epistemic knowledge itself. When someone like Albert Howard, himself a
meticulous scientist, recognizes the “art” of farming and the
nonquantifiable ways of knowing, he steps outside the realm of
codified, scientific knowledge.


Authoritarian high-modernist states in the grip of a self-evident (and
usually half-baked) social theory have done irreparable damage to
human communities and individual livelihoods. The danger was
compounded when leaders came to believe, as Mao said, that the people
were a “blank piece of paper” on which the new regime could write. The
utopian industrialist Robert Owen had the same vision for the factory
town New Lanark, although on a civic rather than national level: “Each
generation, indeed each administration, shall see unrolled before it
the blank sheet of infinite possibility, and if by chance this tabula
rasa had been defaced by the irrational scribblings of
tradition-ridden ancestors, then the first task of the rationalist
must be to scrub it clean.”\footnote{Quoted in ibid., p. 5.}


What conservatives like Oakeshott miss, I think, is that high
modernism has a natural appeal for an intelligentsia and a people who
may have ample reason to hold the past in contempt.\footnote{It is in fact impossible for most modern readers to take in the vast complacency with which Oakeshott regards what the past has bequeathed to him in its habits, practices, and morals without wondering if Jews, women, the Irish, and the working class in general might not feel as blessed by the deposit of history as did this Oxford don.} Late colonial
modernizers sometimes wielded their power ruthlessly in transforming a
population that they took to be backward and greatly in need of
instruction.  Revolutionaries have had every reason to despise the
feudal, poverty-stricken, inegalitarian past that they hoped to banish
forever, and sometimes they have also had a reason to suspect that
immediate democracy would simply bring back the old
order. Postindependence leaders in the nonindustrial world
(occasionally revolutionary leaders themselves) could not be faulted
for hating their past of colonial domination and economic stagnation,
nor could they be faulted for wasting no time or democratic
sentimentality on creating a people that they could be proud
of. Understanding the history and logic of their commitment to
high-modernist goals, however, does not permit us to overlook the
enormous damage that their convictions entailed when combined with
authoritarian state power.

\chapter{Chapter 10. Conclusion}



\begin{quote}


They would reconstruct society on an imaginary plan, much like the
astronomers for their own calculation would make over the system of
the universe.



\end{quote}


— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, \emph{on the utopian socialists}



\begin{quote}


Yet a man who uses an imaginary map, thinking that it is a true one,
is likely to be worse off than someone with no map at all; for he will
fail to inquire whenever he can, to observe every detail on his way,
and to search continuously with all his senses and all his
intelligence for indications of where he should go.



\end{quote}


— E. F. Schumacher, \emph{Small Is Beautiful}


The great high-modernist episodes that we have examined qualify as
tragedies in at least two respects. First, the visionary intellectuals
and planners behind them were guilty of hubris, of forgetting that
they were mortals and acting as if they were gods. Second, their
actions, far from being cynical grabs for power and wealth, were
animated by a genuine desire to improve the human condition—a desire
with a fatal flaw. That these tragedies could be so intimately
associated with optimistic views of progress and rational order is in
itself a reason for a searching diagnosis. Another reason lies in the
completely ecumenical character of the high-modernist faith. We
encounter it in various guises in colonial development schemes,
planned urban centers in both the East and the West, collectivized
farms, the large development plans of the World Bank, the resettlement
of nomadic populations, and the management of workers on factory
floors.


If such schemes have typically taken their most destructive human and
natural toll in the states of the former socialist bloc and in
revolutionary Third World settings, that is surely because there
authoritarian state power, unimpeded by representative institutions,
could nullify resistance and push ahead. The ideas behind them,
however, on which their legitimacy and appeal depended, were
thoroughly Western.  Order and harmony that once seemed the function
of a unitary God had been replaced by a similar faith in the idea of
progress vouchsafed by scientists, engineers, and planners. Their
power, it is worth remembering, was least contested at those moments
when other forms of coordination had failed or seemed utterly
inadequate to the great tasks at hand: in times of war, revolution,
economic collapse, or newly won independence. The plans that they
hatched bore a family resemblance to the schemes of legibility and
standardization devised by the absolutist kings of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. What was wholly new, however, was the magnitude
of both the plans for the wholesale transformation of society and the
instruments of statecraft—censuses, cadastral maps, identity cards,
statistical bureaus, schools, mass media, internal security
apparatuses—that could take them farther along this road than any
seventeenth-century monarch would have dreamed. Thus it has happened
that so many of the twentieth century’s political tragedies have flown
the banner of progress, emancipation, and reform.


We have examined in considerable detail how these schemes have failed
their intended beneficiaries. If I were asked to condense the reasons
behind these failures into a single sentence, I would say that the
progenitors of such plans regarded themselves as far smarter and
farseeing than they really were and, at the same time, regarded their
subjects as far more stupid and incompetent than \emph{they} really
were. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to expanding on this
cursory judgment and advancing a few modest lessons.

\section{“It’s Ignorance, Stupid!”}



\begin{quote}


The mistake of our ancestors was to think that they were “the last
number,” but since numbers are infinite, they could not be the last
number.



\end{quote}


— Eugene Zamiatin, \emph{We}


The maxim that serves as the heading for this section is not simply
suitable for bumper stickers mimicking the insider slogan of Bill
Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid!” It
is meant to call attention to how routinely planners ignore the
radical contingency of the future. How rare it is to encounter advice
about the future which \emph{begins} from a premise of incomplete
knowledge. One small exception—a circular on nutrition published by
the health clinic at Yale University, where I teach—will underscore
its rarity. Normally, such circulars explain the major food groups,
vitamins, and minerals known to be essential for balanced nutrition
and advise a diet based on these categories. This circular, however,
noted that many new, essential elements of proper nutrition had been
discovered in the past two decades and that many more elements will
presumably be identified by researchers in the decades
ahead. Therefore, \emph{on the basis of what they did not know}, the
writers of this piece recommended that one’s diet be as varied as
possible, on the prudent assumption that it would contain many of
these yet unidentified essentials.


Social and historical analyses have, almost inevitably, the effect of
diminishing the contingency of human affairs. A historical event or
state of affairs simply is the way it is, often appearing determined
and necessary when in fact it might easily have turned out to be
otherwise.  Even a probabilistic social science, however careful it
may be about establishing ranges of outcomes, is apt to treat these
probabilities, for the sake of analysis, as solid facts. When it comes
to betting on the future, the contingency is obvious, but so is the
capacity of human actors to influence this contingency and help to
shape the future. And in those cases where the bettors thought that
they knew the shape of the future by virtue of their grasp of
historical laws of progress or scientific truth, whatever awareness
they retained of the contingency seemed to dissolve before their
faith.


And yet each of these schemes, as might also have been predicted, was
largely undone by a host of contingencies beyond the planners’ grasp.
The scope and comprehensiveness of their plans were such that they
would have had indeterminate outcomes even if their historical laws
and the attendant specification of variables and calculations had been
correct.  Their temporal ambitions meant that although they might,
with some confidence, guess the immediate consequences of their moves,
no one could specify, let alone calculate, the second- or third-order
consequences or their interaction effects. The wild cards in their
deck, however, were the human and natural events outside their
models—droughts, wars, revolts, epidemics, interest rates, world
consumer prices, oil embargoes. They could and did, of course, attempt
to adjust and improvise in the face of these contingencies. But the
magnitude of their initial intervention was so great that many of
their missteps could not be righted. Stephen Marglin has put their
problem succinctly: If “the only certainty about the future is that
the future is uncertain, if the only sure thing is that we are in for
surprises, then no amount of planning, no amount of prescription, can
deal with the contingencies that the future will reveal.”\footnote{Stephen A. Marglin, “Economics and the Social Construction of the Economy,” in Stephen Gudeman and Stephen Marglin, eds., \emph{People’s Ecology, People’s Economy} (forthcoming).}


There is a curiously resounding unanimity on this point, and on no
others, between such right-wing critics of the command economy as
Friedrich Hayek and such left-wing critics of Communist
authoritarianism as Prince Peter Kropotkin, who declared, “It is
impossible to legislate for the future.” Both had a great deal of
respect for the diversity of human actions and the insurmountable
difficulties in successfully coordinating millions of transactions. In
a blistering critique of failed development paradigms, Albert
Hirschman made a comparable case, calling for “a little more
‘reverence for life,’ a little less straitjacketing of the future, a
little more allowance for the unexpected—and a little less wishful
thinking.”\footnote{Albert O. Hirschman, “The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding,” \emph{World Politics} 22 (April 1970): 239. Elsewhere Hirschman takes social science in general to task in much the same fashion: “But after so many failed prophecies, is it not in the interest of social science to embrace complexity, be it at some sacrifice of its claim to predictive power?” (“Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble?” \emph{Journal of Economic Literature} 20 [December 1982]: 1463-84).}


One might, on the basis of experience, derive a few rules of thumb
that, if observed, could make development planning less prone to
disaster.  While my main goal is hardly a point-by-point reform of
development practice, such rules would surely include something along
the following lines.


\emph{Take small steps.} In an experimental approach to social change,
presume that we cannot know the consequences of our interventions in
advance.  Given this postulate of ignorance, prefer wherever possible
to take a small step, stand back, observe, and then plan the next
small move. As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane metaphorically described
the advantages of smallness: “You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard
mineshaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and
walks away. A rat is killed, a man broken, a horse splashes.”\footnote{Quoted in Roger Penrose, “The Great Diversifier,” a review of Freeman Dyson, \emph{From Eros to Gaia}, in the \emph{New York Review of Books}, March 4, 1993, p. 5.}


\emph{Favor reversibility.} Prefer interventions that can easily be undone
if they turn out to be mistakes.\footnote{Like all rules of thumb, this rule is not absolute. It could be waived, for example, if catastrophe seems imminent and quick decisions are essential.} Irreversible interventions have
irreversible consequences.\footnote{This is, I believe, the strongest argument against capital punishment for those who are not opposed to it on other grounds.} Interventions into ecosystems require
particular care in this respect, given our great ignorance about how
they interact. Aldo Leopold captured the spirit of caution required:
“The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the
parts.”\footnote{Aldo Leopold, quoted in Donald Worster, \emph{Nature’s Economy}, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 289.}


\emph{Plan on surprises.} Choose plans that allow the largest accommodation
to the unforeseen. In agricultural schemes this may mean choosing and
preparing land so that it can grow any of several crops. In planning
housing, it would mean “designing in” flexibility for accommodating
changes in family structures or living styles. In a factory it may
mean selecting a location, layout, or piece of machinery that allows
for new processes, materials, or product lines down the road.


\emph{Plan on human inventiveness.} Always plan under the assumption that
those who become involved in the project later will have or will
develop the experience and insight to improve on the design.

\section{Planning for Abstract Citizens}


The power and precision of high-modernist schemes depended not only on
bracketing contingency but also on standardizing the subjects of
development. Some standardization was implicit even in the noblest
goals of the planners. The great majority of them were strongly
committed to a more egalitarian society, to meeting the basic needs of
its citizens (especially the working class), and to making the
amenities of a modern society available to all.


Let us pause, however, to consider the kind of human subject for whom
all these benefits were being provided. This subject was singularly
abstract. Figures as diverse as Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, the
collectivizers of the Soviet Union, and even Julius Nyerere (for all
his rhetorical attention to African traditions) were planning for
generic subjects who needed so many square feet of housing space,
acres of farmland, liters of clean water, and units of transportation
and so much food, fresh air, and recreational space. Standardized
citizens were uniform in their needs and even interchangeable. What is
striking, of course, is that such subjects—like the “unmarked
citizens” of liberal theory—have, for the purposes of the planning
exercise, no gender, no tastes, no history, no values, no opinions or
original ideas, no traditions, and no distinctive personalities to
contribute to the enterprise. They have none of the particular,
situated, and contextual attributes that one would expect of any
population and that we, as a matter of course, always attribute to
elites.


The lack of context and particularity is not an oversight; it is the
necessary first premise of any large-scale planning exercise. To the
degree that the subjects can be treated as standardized units, the
power of resolution in the planning exercise is enhanced. Questions
posed within these strict confines can have definitive, quantitative
answers.  The same logic applies to the transformation of the natural
world.  Questions about the volume of commercial wood or the yield of
wheat in bushels permit more precise calculations than questions
about, say, the quality of the soil, the versatility and taste of the
grain, or the well-being of the community.\footnote{The typical social science solution to this sort of issue is to turn it into a quantitative exercise by, say, asking citizens to assess the well-being of the community on a predetermined scale.} The discipline of
economics achieves its formidable resolving power by transforming what
might otherwise be considered qualitative matters into quantitative
issues with a single metric and, as it were, a bottom line: profit or
loss.\footnote{“Everything becomes crystal clear after you have reduced reality to oneone only—of its thousand aspects. You know what to do\dots{} There is at the same time the perfect measuring rod for the degree of success or failure\dots{} The point is that the real strength of the theory of private enterprise lies in its ruthless simplification, which fits so admirably into the mental patterns created by the phenomenal successes of science. The strength of science too derives from its ‘reduction’ of reality to one or another of its many aspects, primarily the reduction of quality to quantity” (E. F. Schumacher, \emph{Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered} [London: Blond and Briggs, 1973], pp. 272-73).} Providing one understands the heroic assumptions required
to achieve this precision and the questions that it cannot answer, the
single metric is an invaluable tool. Problems arise only when it
becomes hegemonic.


What is perhaps most striking about high-modernist schemes, despite
their quite genuine egalitarian and often socialist impulses, is how
little confidence they repose in the skills, intelligence, and
experience of ordinary people. This is clear enough in the Taylorist
factory, where the logic of work organization is to reduce the factory
hands’ contribution to a series of repetitive, if practiced,
movements—operations as machinelike as possible. But it is also clear
in collectivized farms, ujamaa villages, and planned cities, where the
movements of the populace have been to a large degree inscribed in the
designs of these communities. If Nyerere’s aspirations for cooperative
state farming were frustrated, it was not because the plans had
failed to integrate a scheme of cooperative labor. The more ambitious
and meticulous the plan, the less is left, theoretically, to chance
and to local initiative and experience.

\section{Stripping Reality to Its Essentials}



\begin{quote}


The quantitative technologies used to investigate social and economic
life work best if the world they aim to describe can be remade in
their image.



\end{quote}


— Theodore M. Porter, \emph{Trust in Numbers}



\begin{quote}


If the facts—that is, the behavior of living human beings—are
recalcitrant to such an experiment, the experimenter becomes annoyed
and tries to alter the facts to fit the theory, which, in practice,
means a kind of vivisection of societies until they become what the
theory originally declared that the experiment should have caused them
to be.



\end{quote}


— Isaiah Berlin, \emph{“On Political Judgment”}


The clarity of the high-modernist optic is due to its resolute
singularity. Its simplifying fiction is that, for any activity or
process that comes under its scrutiny, there is only one thing going
on.  In the scientific forest there is only commercial wood being
grown; in the planned city there is only the efficient movement of
goods and people; in the housing estate there is only the effective
delivery of shelter, heat, sewage, and water; in the planned hospital
there is only the swift provision of professional medical
services. And yet both we and the planners know that each of these
sites is the intersection of a host of interconnected activities that
defy such simple descriptions.  Even something as apparently
monofunctional as a road from \emph{A} to \emph{B} can at the same time function
as a site for leisure, social intercourse, exciting diversions, and
enjoying the view \emph{between} \emph{A} and \emph{B}.\footnote{See John Brinckerhoff Jackson, \emph{A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 190.}


For any such site, it is helpful to imagine two different maps of
activity. In the case of a planned urban neighborhood, the first map
consists of a representation of the streets and buildings, tracing the
routes that the planners have provided for the movements between
workplaces and residences, the delivery of goods, access to shopping,
and so on. The second map consists of tracings, as in a time-lapse
photograph, of all the \emph{unplanned} movements—pushing a baby carriage,
window shopping, strolling, going to see a friend, playing hopscotch
on the sidewalk, walking the dog, watching the passing scene, taking
shortcuts between work and home, and so on. This second map, far more
complex than the first, reveals very different patterns of
circulation.  The older the neighborhood, the more likely that the
second map will have nearly superseded the first, in roughly the same
way that planned, suburban Levittowns have, after fifty years, become
thoroughly different settings from what their designers envisioned.


If our inquiry has taught us anything, it is that the first map, taken
alone, is misrepresentative and indeed nonsustainable. A same-age,
monocropped forest with all the debris cleared is in the long run an
ecological disaster. No Taylorist factory can sustain production
without the unplanned improvisations of an experienced
workforce. Planned Brasília is, in a thousand ways, underwritten by
unplanned Brasília.  Without at least some of the diversity identified
by Jacobs, a stripped-down public housing project (like Pruitt-Igoe in
Saint Louis or Cabrini Green in Chicago) will fail its residents. Even
for the limited purposes of a myopic plan—commercial timber, factory
output—the one-dimensional map will simply not do. As with industrial
agriculture and its dependency on landraces, the first map is possible
only because of processes lying outside its parameters, which it
ignores at its peril.


Our inquiry has also taught us that such maps of legibility and
control, especially when they are backed by an authoritarian state,
\emph{do} partly succeed in shaping the natural and social environment
after their image.  To the degree that such thin maps do manage to
impress themselves on social life, what kind of people do they foster?
Here I would argue that just as the monocropped, same-age forest
represents an impoverished and unsustainable ecosystem, so the
high-modernist urban complex represents an impoverished and
unsustainable social system.


Human resistance to the more severe forms of social straitjacketing
prevents monotonic schemes of centralized rationality from ever being
realized. Had they been realized in their austere forms, they would
have represented a very bleak human prospect. One of Le Corbusier’s
plans, for example, called for the segregation of factory workers and
their families in barracks along the major transportation arteries. It
was a theoretically efficient solution to transportation and
production problems. If it had been imposed, the result would have
been a dispiriting environment of regimented work and residence
without any of the animation of town life. This plan had all the charm
of a Taylorist scheme where, using a comparable logic, the efficient
organization of work was achieved by confining the workers’ movements
to a few repetitive gestures. The cookie-cutter design principles
behind the layout of the Soviet collective farm, the ujamaa village,
or the Ethiopian resettlement betray the same narrowness of
vision. They were designed, above all, to facilitate the central
administration of production and the control of public life.


Almost all strictly functional, single-purpose institutions have some of
the qualities of sensory-deprivation tanks used for experimental
purposes. At the limit, they approach the great social control
institutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: asylums,
workhouses, prisons, and reformatories. We have learned enough of such
settings to know that over time they can produce among their inmates a
characteristic institutional neurosis marked by apathy, withdrawal, lack
of initiative and spontaneity, uncommunicativeness, and intractability.
The neurosis is an accommodation to a deprived, bland, monotonous,
controlled environment that is ultimately stupifying.\footnote{For this insight I am much indebted to Colin Ward’s \emph{Anarchy in Action} (London: Freedom Press, 1988), pp. 110-25.}


The point is simply that high-modernist designs for life and
production tend to diminish the skills, agility, initiative, and
morale of their intended beneficiaries. They bring about a mild form
of this institutional neurosis. Or, to put it in the utilitarian terms
that many of their partisans would recognize, these designs tend to
reduce the “human capital” of the workforce. Complex, diverse,
animated environments contribute, as Jacobs saw, to producing a
resilient, flexible, adept population that has more experience in
confronting novel challenges and taking initiative. Narrow, planned
environments, by contrast, foster a less skilled, less innovative,
less resourceful population. This population, once created, would
ironically have been exactly the kind of human material that would in
fact have needed close supervision from above. In other words, the
logic of social engineering on this scale was to produce the sort of
subjects that its plans had assumed at the outset.


That authoritarian social engineering failed to create a world after
its own image should not blind us to the fact that it did, at the very
least, damage many of the earlier structures of mutuality and practice
that were essential to mētis. The Soviet kolkhoz hardly lived up to
its expectations, but by treating its workforce more like factory
hands than farmers, it did destroy many of the agricultural skills the
peasantry had possessed on the eve of collectivization. Even if there
was much in the earlier arrangements that ought to have been abolished
(local tyrannies based on class, gender, age, and lineage), a certain
institutional autonomy was abolished as well. Here, I believe, there
is something to the classical anarchist claim—that the state, with its
positive law and central institutions, undermines individuals’
capacities for autonomous self-governance—that might apply to the
planning grids of high modernism as well. Their own institutional
legacy may be frail and evanescent, but they may impoverish the local
wellsprings of economic, social, and cultural self-expression.

\section{The Failure of Schematics and the Role of Mētis}



\begin{quote}


Everything is said to be under the leadership of the Party. No one is
in charge of the crab or the fish, but they are all alive.



\end{quote}


— Vietnamese villager, \emph{Xuan Huy village}


Not long after the decisive political opening in 1989, in what was
then still the Soviet Union, a congress of agricultural specialists
was convened to consider reforms in agriculture. Most participants
were in favor of breaking up the collectives and privatizing the land
in the hope of recreating a modern version of the private sector that
had thrived in the 1920s and that Stalin had destroyed in 1930. And
yet they were nearly unanimous in their despair over what three
generations had done to the skills, initiative, and knowledge of the
kolkhozniki. They compared their situation unfavorably to that of
China, where a mere twenty-five years of collectivization had, they
imagined, left much of the entrepreneurial skill of the peasantry
intact. Suddenly a woman from Novosibirsk scolded them: “How do you
think the rural people survived sixty years of collectivization in the
first place? If they hadn’t used their initiative and wits, they
wouldn’t have made it through! They may need credit and supplies, but
there’s nothing wrong with their initiative.”\footnote{Personal notes from the first congress of the Agrarian Scientists’ Association, “Agrarian Reform in the USSR,” held in Moscow, June 24-28, 1991.}


Despite the manifold failures of collectivization, it seems, the
kolkhozniki had found ways and means to at least get by. We should not
forget in this context that the first response to collectivization in
1930 was determined resistance and even rebellion. Once that
resistance was broken, the survivors had little choice but to comply
outwardly.  They could hardly make the rural command economy a
success, but they could do what was necessary to meet minimal quotas
and ensure their own economic survival.


An indication of the kinds of improvisations both tolerated and
required may be inferred from an astute case study of two East German
factories before the Wall came down in 1989.\footnote{Birgit Müller, \emph{Toward an Alternative Culture of Work: Political Idealism and Economic Practices in a Berlin Collective Enterprise} (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 51-82.} Each factory was
under great pressure to meet production quotas—on which their
all-important bonuses depended—in spite of old machinery, inferior raw
materials, and a lack of spare parts. Under these draconian
conditions, two employees were indispensable to the firm, despite
their modest place in the official hierarchy. One was the
jack-of-all-trades who improvised short-term solutions to keep
machinery running, to correct or disguise production flaws, and to
make raw materials stretch further. The second was a wheeler-dealer
who located and bought or bartered for spare parts, machinery, and raw
material that could not be obtained through official channels in
time. To facilitate the wheeler-dealer’s work, the factory routinely
used its funds to stock up on such valued nonperishable goods as soap
powder, cosmetics, quality paper, yarn, good wine and champagne,
medicines, and fashionable clothes. When it seemed that the plant
would fall short of the quota because it lacked a key valve or machine
tool, these knowledgeable dealers would set off across the country,
their small Trabant autos jammed with barter goods, to secure what was
needed.  Neither of these roles was provided for in the official table
of organization, and yet the survival of the factory depended more on
their skills, wisdom, and experience than on those of any other
employee. A key element in the centrally planned economy was
underwritten, always unofficially, by mētis.


Cases like the one just described are the rule, not the
exception. They serve to illustrate that the formal order encoded in
social-engineering designs inevitably leaves out elements that are
essential to their actual functioning. If the factory were forced to
operate only within the confines of the roles and functions specified
in the simplified design, it would quickly grind to a
halt. Collectivized command economies virtually everywhere have limped
along thanks to the often desperate improvisation of an informal
economy wholly outside its schemata.


Stated somewhat differently, all socially engineered systems of formal
order are in fact subsystems of a larger system on which they are
ultimately dependent, not to say parasitic. The subsystem relies on a
variety of processes—frequently informal or antecedent—which alone it
cannot create or maintain. The more schematic, thin, and simplified
the formal order, the less resilient and the more vulnerable it is to
disturbances outside its narrow parameters. This analysis of high
modernism, then, may appear to be a case for the invisible hand of
market coordination as opposed to centralized economies. An important
caution, however, is in order. The market is itself an instituted,
formal system of coordination, despite the elbow room that it provides
to its participants, and it is therefore similarly dependent on a
larger system of social relations which its own calculus does not
acknowledge and which it can neither create nor maintain. Here I have
in mind not only the obvious elements of contract and property law, as
well as the state’s coercive power to enforce them, but antecedent
patterns and norms of social trust, community, and cooperation,
without which market exchange is inconceivable. Finally, and most
important, the economy is “a subsystem of a finite and nongrowing
eco-system,” whose carrying capacity and interactions it must respect
as a condition of its persistence.\footnote{Herman E. Daly, “Policies for Sustainable Development,” paper presented at the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, New Haven, February 9, 1996, p. 4.}


It is, I think, a characteristic of large, formal systems of
coordination that they are accompanied by what appear to be anomalies
but on closer inspection turn out to be integral to that formal order.
Much of this might be termed “mētis to the rescue,” although for
people ensnared in schemes of authoritarian social engineering that
threaten to do them in, such improvisations bear the mark of
scrambling and desperation. Many modern cities, and not just those in
the Third World, function and survive by virtue of slums and squatter
settlements whose residents provide essential services. A formal
command economy, as we have seen, is contingent on petty trade,
bartering, and deals that are typically illegal. A formal economy of
pension systems, social security, and medical benefits is underwritten
by a mobile, floating population with few of these
protections. Similarly, hybrid crops in mechanized farm operations
persist only because of the diversity and immunities of antecedent
landraces. In each case, the nonconforming practice is an
indispensable condition for formal order.

\section{A Case for Mētis-Friendly Institutions}


The invention of scientific forestry, freehold tenure, planned cities,
collective farms, ujamaa villages, and industrial agriculture, for all
their ingeniousness, represented fairly simple interventions into
enormously complex natural and social systems. After being abstracted
from systems whose interactions defied a total accounting, a few
elements were then made the basis for an imposed order. At best, the
new order was fragile and vulnerable, sustained by improvisations not
foreseen by its originators. At worst, it wreaked untold damage in
shattered lives, a damaged ecosystem, and fractured or impoverished
societies.


This rather blanket condemnation must be tempered, especially in the
case of social systems, by at least four considerations. First, and
most important, the social orders they were designed to supplant were
typically so manifestly unjust and oppressive that almost any new
order might seem preferable. Second, high-modernist social engineering
usually came cloaked in egalitarian, emancipatory ideas: equality
before the law, citizenship for all, and rights to subsistence,
health, education, and shelter. The premise and great appeal of the
high-modernist credo was that the state would make the benefits of
technological progress available to all its citizens.


The two remaining reasons for tempering our condemnation of such
schemes have less to do with their potentially destructive
consequences than with the capacity of ordinary human actors to modify
them or, in the end, to bring them down. Where functioning
representative institutions were at hand, some accommodation was
inevitable. In their absence, it is still remarkable how the dogged,
day-to-day resistance of thousands of citizens forced the abandonment
or restructuring of projects. Given sufficient time and leeway, of
course, any high-modernist plan will be utterly remade by popular
practice. Soviet collective farms, the most draconian case, were
finally brought down as much by the dispirited work and resistance of
the kolkhozniki as by the political shifts in Moscow.


Without denying the incontestable benefits either of the division of
labor or of hierarchical coordination for some tasks, I want to make a
case for institutions that are instead multifunctional, plastic,
diverse, and adaptable—in other words, institutions that are
powerfully shaped by mētis. The fact that those ensnared in confining
systems of formal order seem constantly to be working, in their own
interest, to make the systems more versatile is one indication of a
common process of “social domestication.” A second indication is the
social magnetism of autonomy and diversity as seen, for example, in
the popularity of Jacobs’s mixed-use neighborhoods and in the
continued attraction of self-employment.


Diversity and certain forms of complexity, apart from their
attractiveness, have other advantages. In natural systems, we know,
these advantages are manifold. Old-growth forests, polycropping, and
agriculture with open-pollinated landraces \emph{may} not be as productive,
in the short run, as single-species forests and fields or identical
hybrids. But they are demonstrably more stable, more self-sufficient,
and less vulnerable to epidemics and environmental stress, needing far
less in the way of external infusions to keep them on track. Every
time we replace “natural capital” (such as wild fish stocks or
old-growth forests) with what might be called “cultivated natural
capital” (such as fish farms or tree plantations), we gain in ease of
appropriation and in immediate productivity, but at the cost of more
maintenance expenses and less “redundancy, resiliency, and
stability.”\footnote{Ibid., pp. 12-13. Daly adds, “In the limit, all other species become cultivated natural capital, bred, managed at the smaller population size to make more room for humans and their furniture. Instrumental values such as redundancy, resiliency, stability, sustainability, would be sacrificed, along with the intrinsic value of life enjoyment by sentient human species, in the interests of ‘efficiency’ defined as anything that increases the human scale” (p. 13).} If the environmental challenges faced by such systems
are both modest and predictable, then a certain simplification might
also be relatively stable.\footnote{I am grateful to my colleague Arun Agrawal for emphasizing this point.} Other things being equal, however, the
less diverse the cultivated natural capital, the more vulnerable and
nonsustainable it becomes. The problem is that in most economic
systems, the external costs (in water or air pollution, for example,
or the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources, including a reduction in
biodiversity) accumulate long before the activity becomes unprofitable
in a narrow profit-and-loss sense.


A roughly similar case can be made, I think, for human institutions—a
case that contrasts the fragility of rigid, single-purpose,
centralized institutions to the adaptability of more flexible,
multipurpose, decentralized social forms. As long as the task
environment of an institution remains repetitive, stable, and
predictable, a set of fixed routines may prove exceptionally
efficient. In most economies and in human affairs generally, this is
seldom the case, and such routines are likely to be counterproductive
once the environment changes appreciably.  The long-term survival of
certain human institutions—the family, the small community, the small
farm, the family firm in certain businesses—is something of a tribute
to their adaptability under radically changing circumstances. They are
by no means infinitely adaptable, but they have weathered more than
one prediction of their inevitable demise. The small family farm, by
virtue of its flexible labor (including the exploitation of its
children), its capacity to shift into new crops or livestock, and its
tendency to diversify its risks, has managed to persist in competitive
economies when many huge, highly leveraged, mechanized, and
specialized corporate and state farms have failed.\footnote{The classic elaboration of this argument, empirically grounded in many case studies, may be found in Robert M. Netting, \emph{Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture} (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).} In a sector of
the economy where local knowledge, quick responses to weather and crop
conditions, and low overhead (smallness) are more important than in,
say, large industry, the family farm has some formidable advantages.


Even in huge organizations, diversity pays dividends in stability and
resilience. A one-product city like the Stalinist steel-making jewel
of Magnitogorsk is vulnerable when its technology is superseded and
more specialty products are required, whereas a nonspecialized city
with a host of industries and a diverse labor force can weather
greater shocks.  Within the most industrialized economies, it is still
striking that complex and often low-income subsistence strategies,
self-provisioning, and working off the books are both widespread and
essential, although they are nearly invisible in most forms of
economic accounting.\footnote{See the important book by Enzo Mingione, \emph{Fragmented Societies: A Sociology of Economic Life Beyond the Market Paradigm}, trans. Paul Goodrick (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).} Much has also been made of the rather
complex family firms in Emilia-Romagna, Italy, which have thrived for
generations in an extremely competitive world textile market by virtue
of networks of mutuality, adaptability, and a highly skilled and
committed workforce. The family firms are at the same time embedded in
a much-studied local society that is several centuries deep in
associational life and civic skills.\footnote{Robert Putnam, \emph{Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy} (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).} These firms and the dense,
diverse societies upon which they depend have increasingly seemed less
like archaic survivals and more like forms of enterprise ideally
suited to postindustrial capitalism. Even within the narrow confines
of market competitiveness in liberal industrial societies, the case
for polyvalent, adaptive, small units is stronger than any high
modernist of the 1920s could possibly have imagined.


Once we measure such polyvalent institutions by broader criteria,
moreover, the case becomes even more powerful. Much of the argument at
this level comes back to the question posed earlier: what kind of
person does this sort of institution foster? No one has established
the link between economic enterprise and political skills better than
Thomas Jefferson in his celebration of the yeoman farmer. The autonomy
and the skills required in independent farming, Jefferson believed,
helped to nurture a citizen with a habit of responsible decision
making, enough property to avoid social dependence, and a tradition of
reasoning and negotiation with his fellow citizens. The yeomanry was,
in short, an ideal training ground for democratic citizenship.


To any planned, built, or legislated form of social life, one may
apply a comparable test: to what degree does it promise to enhance the
skills, knowledge, and responsibility of those who are a part of it?
On narrower institutional grounds, the question would be how deeply
that form is marked by the values and experience of those who compose
it. The purpose in each case would be to distinguish “canned”
situations that permit little or no modification from situations
largely open to the development and application of mētis.


A brief example comparing war memorials may be helpful. The Vietnam
Memorial in Washington, D.C., is surely one of the most successful war
memorials ever built, if one is to judge by the quantity and intensity
of the visits it receives. Designed by Maya Lin, the memorial consists
simply of a gently undulating site marked (not dominated) by a long,
low, black marble wall listing the names of the fallen. The names are
listed neither alphabetically nor by military unit but
chronologically, in the order in which they fell—thus grouping those
who had fallen on the same day in the same engagement.\footnote{This ordering of the names of the dead, which was insisted on by Maya Lin, caused quite a controversy at the time the memorial was built.} No larger
claim is made about the war either in prose or in sculpture—which is
hardly surprising, in view of the stark political cleavages the war
still inspires.\footnote{Near the site of the Vietnam Memorial is the statue of a small squad of soldiers carrying a wounded comrade. This statue was the original proposal by a good many veterans’ organizations who had opposed the present wall as a fitting monument.} What is most remarkable, however, is the way that
the Vietnam Memorial works for those who visit it, particularly those
who come to pay their respects to the memory of a comrade or loved
one. They touch the names incised on the wall, make rubbings, and
leave artifacts and mementos of their own—everything from poems and a
woman’s highheeled shoe to a glass of champagne and a poker hand of a
full house, aces high. So many of these tributes have been left, in
fact, that a museum has been created to house them. The scene of many
people together at the wall, touching the names of particular loved
ones who fell in the same war, has moved observers regardless of their
position on the war itself. I believe that a great part of the
memorial’s symbolic power is its capacity to honor the dead with an
openness that allows visitors to impress upon it their own meanings,
their own histories, their own memories. The memorial virtually
requires participation in order to complete its meaning.  Although one
would not compare it to a Rorschach test, the memorial nevertheless
does achieve its meaning as much by what citizens bring to it as by
what it imposes.


Compare the Vietnam Memorial to a very different American war
memorial: the sculpture depicting the raising of the American flag at
the summit of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima in World War II. Moving in
its own right, referring as it does to the final moment of a victory
gained at an enormous cost in lives, the Iwo Jima statue is manifestly
heroic. Its patriotism (symbolized by the flag), its reference to
conquest, its larger-than-life scale, and its implicit theme of unity
in victory leave little room for wondering what is expected from the
viewer. Given the virtual unanimity with which that war was, and is,
viewed in the United States, it is hardly surprising that the Iwo Jima
memorial should be monumental and explicit about its message. Although
not exactly “canned,” the Iwo Jima site is more symbolically
self-sufficient, as are most war memorials. Visitors can stand in awe,
gazing on an image that through photographs and sculpture has become a
virtual icon for the War in the Pacific, but they receive its message
rather than completing it.\footnote{For an imaginative application of a comparable logic to the subject of children’s playgrounds, see “Play as an Anarchist Parable,” chap. 10 in Ward, \emph{Anarchy in Action}, pp. 88-94.}


An institution, social form, or enterprise that takes much of its
shape from the evolving mētis of the people engaged in it will thereby
enhance their range of experience and skills. Following the advice of
the saying “Use it or lose it,” the mētis-friendly institution both
uses and renews a valuable public good. As an exclusive litmus test
for all social forms, this is clearly insufficient. All social forms
are “artificially” constructed to serve some human purpose. Where that
purpose is narrow, simple, and invariable over time, it may well be
that codified, hierarchical routines are adequate and possibly the
most efficient in the short run. Even in such cases, however, we
should be aware of the human costs of stultifying routines and the
likely resistance to rote performance.


Whenever, on the contrary, the quality of the institution and its
product depends on engaging the enthusiastic participation of its
people, then such a litmus test makes sense. In the case of housing,
for example, its success cannot be severed from the opinions of its
users.  Housing planners that take as a given the variety of human
tastes and the inevitable (but unpredictable) changes in the shape of
families will accommodate that variation from the outset by providing
flexible building designs and adjustable floor plans. Developers of
neighborhoods, by the same token, will promote the sort of diversity
and complexity that will help to ensure their vitality and
durability. Above all, those with planning and zoning powers will not
see their task as one of making sure that neighborhoods hold, through
thick and thin, to their designed forms. One can imagine many types of
institutions—schools, parks, playgrounds, civic associations, business
enterprises, families, even planning bodies—that might well be
evaluated through the same lens.


A good many institutions in liberal democracies already take such a
form and may serve as exemplars for fashioning new ones. One could say
that democracy itself is based on the assumption that the mētis of its
citizenry should, in mediated form, continually modify the laws and
policies of the land. Common law, as an institution, owes its
longevity to the fact that it is not a final codification of legal
rules, but rather a set of procedures for continually adapting some
broad principles to novel circumstances. Finally, that most
characteristic of human institutions, language, is the best model: a
structure of meaning and continuity that is never still and ever open
to the improvisations of all its speakers.

\part{Sources for Illustrations}


\begin{description}

\item[{Figure 1.}] 
Photograph from P. Mark S. Ashton Collection. Courtesy of P. Mark S. Ashton.


\item[{Figure 2.}] 
Photograph by Angelo Lomeo. Courtesy of Bullaty Loineo Photographers.


\item[{Figures 3-6.}] 
From George Yaney, \emph{The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian
Reform in Russia, 1861-1930} (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1982), pp. 147, 149, 148, 150. Copyright 1982 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois. Used by permission of the University of
Illinois.


\item[{Figure 7.}] 
Photograph by Alex S. MacLean, from James Corner and
MacLean, \emph{Taking Measrnres Across the American Landscape} (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1996), p. 51. Courtesy of Alex S. MacLean,
Landslides.


\item[{Figure 8.}] 
From Mark Girouard, \emph{Cities and People: A Social and
Architectural History} (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985),
p. 91. Courtesy of the city of Bruges.


\item[{Figure 9.}] 
Map from the Chicago Historical Society. Used by
permission of the Chicago Historical Society.


\item[{Figure 10.}] 
Map from A. Alphand, \emph{Les promenades de Paris},
2 vols. (Paris, 1867-73), plates 11 and 12.


\item[{Figure 13.}] 
Photograph of map from the exhibition “Hungerwinter and
Liberation in Amsterdam,” Amsterdam Historical Museum, 1995. Courtesy
of the Amsterdam Historical Museum.


\item[{Figures 14-17.}] 
From Le Corbusier, \emph{The Radiant City},
trans. Pamela Knight (1933; New York: Orion Press, 1964), pp. 204,
220, 225, 149.


\item[{Figure 18.}] 
Plan by Lucio Costa, reprinted in Lawrence Vale,
Architecture, Power, and National Identity (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992), p. 118.


\item[{Figures 19-26.}] 
Photographs by James Holston. From Holston, \emph{The
Modernist City: Art Anthropological Critique of Brasília} (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 100, 102, 132, 313. For
figure 23, photograph by Abril Imagers\Slash{}Carlos Fenerich. Courtesy of
James Holston.


\item[{Figure 27.}] 
Photograph from Ravi Kalia, \emph{Chandigarh: In Search of
an Identity} (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987),
p. 97.  Copyright 1987 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois
University.  Used by permission of the Trustees of Southern Illinois
University.


\item[{Figures 28-30.}] 
Plan and photograph courtesy of Teodor Shanin.


\item[{Figure 31.}] 
Jannik Boesen, Birgit Storgaard Madsen, and Tony Moody,
\emph{Ujamaa: Socialism from Above} (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of
African Studies, 1977), p. 178. Used by permission of the publishers.


\item[{Figure 32.}] 
John M. Cohen and Nils-Ivar Isaksson, “Villagization in
Ethiopia’s Arsi Region,” \emph{Journal of Modern African Studies} 15, no. 3
(1987): 450. Reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Press.


\item[{Figure 33.}] 
Jason W. Clay, Sandra Steingraber, and Peter Niggli,
\emph{The Spoils of Famine: Ethiopian Famine Policy and Peasant
Agriculture}, Cultural Survival Report no. 25 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Cultural Survival, 1988), p. 248. Used by permission of Cultural
Survival, Inc.


\item[{Figure 34.}] 
Painting by Davis Meltzer, from James B. Billard, “The
Revolution in American Agriculture,” with illustrations by James
R. Blair, National Geographic 137, no. 2 (February 1970): 184-85. Used
by permission of Davis Meltzer\Slash{}National Geographic Image Collection.


\item[{Figure 35.}] 
Photograph from Paul Richards, \emph{Indigenous Agricultural
Revolutions: Ecology and Food Production in West Africa} (London:
Unwin Hyman, 1985), plate 3. Courtesy of Paul Richards.


\item[{Figures 36-37.}] 
Drawings from Edgar Anderson, \emph{Plants, Man, and
Life} (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952), pp. 138-39. Used by permission of
the Missouri Botanical Garden.


\end{description}








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The Ted K Archive





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James C. Scott

Seeing Like a State

How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

March 1998


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