LESSONS FROM SEEING LIKE A STATE

TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE MANAGERIAL CLASS?

Among the many drawbacks of left-wing Marxism’s infatuation with Hegelian progressivism is the confusion that the dialectical metaphor creates for an understanding of the history of class. While, admittedly, much of the fault here lies with oversimplifications by those commenting on Marx (his friends and foes, alike), Hegelian Marxism does lend itself to thinking of the conflicting class as a bit part in a transitory stage along an inevitable march toward the transcendent future. A class shows up at its appointed time, to play its role as a supporting character in the choreographed ballet of history. Such thinking undermines the insights of Marx into the materialist foundation of class as a sociological variable.

Yes, class is an expression of the material conditions of the mode of production. (Though, a right-wing — Schmittian influenced — Marxism would insist that mode of coercion and mode of governance need to be included as part of what any society is producing.) Is it plausible though to suggest that from one historical stage to another, the mode of production is going to radically change? Does human nature radically change across historical time? Of course not!¹ Therefore, while there may be dramatic and historically impactful changes in the mode of production, there are going to be irrepressible continuities, as well. That is why classes do not just magically appear out of nowhere, nor mysteriously vanish in a puff of dialectical smoke.

If Marxist analysis turns right, leaving behind Hegelian fairy tales, a whole new window of opportunity opens, to conceive and write the history of a class that escapes the bounds of a rote dialectic. So, if the managerial class is defined by its mastery of symbolic thinking (as I argued in The Managerial Class on Trial) and humans are evolutionarily characterized by their evolved capacity for symbolic communication (as I argued in Not for the Common Good: Evolution and Human Communications) then the managerial class, with its specific skills and class-based values and interests, should be expected to appear across human history. Once any society develops written communication techniques and administrative governance functions, the stage is set for the managerial class to play a role in that society.

For instance, going right back to what is usually considered the dawn of human civilization, in Sumer it was the priestly class that exercised control of education, including the teaching of the earliest human writing forms, and likewise administered the extensive public works programs that created the canal and irrigation systems which set the groundwork for the emergence of Mesopotamia as the cradle of human civilization. This was already the nascent managerial class taking shape. Unsurprisingly, for those who know that class’s more recent history, across the various Sumerian city states, the priestly class had an uneasy relationship with the various kings and councils of elders: seeming to work with them, but also at times clearly conflicts of interests emerged – entirely predictable from within a materialist class analysis.

These kinds of insights open the imagination to the idea of writing a comprehensive history of the managerial class. Your faithful blogger is pondering this prospect. I’ve got to do something with the rest of my life. However, the skills and knowledge necessary to undertake such a project is certainly beyond my capacities, and frankly, likely beyond those of most mortals. So, while I haven’t yet been able to find such a history (relieving me of the job), undertaking that project would at least require a library of secondary sources that tell the story of the managerial class, here and there, even if the authors are not always cognizant of exactly what story it is that they’re actually telling.

A brilliant case in point is James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. Scott’s book helps us see the historical role of the managerial class across many centuries, but simultaneously obscures that view by using the vague abstraction of the state as his denominator. Being a self-styled anarchist, this is an understandable focus on his part, but as he himself notes, it’s not as though every state behaves in the manner that he is analyzing in the book.

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.

So, what distinguishes these “certain kinds” of states? Well, the proof is in the pudding. The behaviours he is identifying are preeminently those of the symbolic manipulators: those whose capacity for abstraction allows them to imagine a management, and indeed engineering, of society that displaces possible futures along lines of correlated characteristics and statistical probabilities. Entailed in such a social imagining are the structures and practices that facilitate such administration and engineering. As such, Scott analyzes the centralization, hierarchization, and homogenization characteristic of the footprint of managerial class logic. The organization of space and identity is examined, from monoculture forests to cities and their neighborhoods, from standardize weights and measures to population censuses.

Scott’s analysis points to what he calls a high-modernism, which is concerned with making society “legible” to those who govern it. This legibility, ability to “read” the social facts on the ground, requires engineering to produce a more transparent and so more practically administrable social material.

Consider some passages from the book for a sense of what he is getting at:

high-modernist ideology…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.

the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.

Early in his book, Scott starts off with a discussion of the socially engineered introduction of standardized, abstract weights and measures, focusing on how they rendered social and economic practice more legible, while simultaneously politicizing such quantifying practices.

Such measurement practices [initially] 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.

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.

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.

No effective central monitoring or controlled comparisons were possible without standard, fixed units of measurement.

Every act of measurement was an act marked by the play of power relations. To understand measurement practices in early modern Europe…one must relate them to the contending interests of the major estates: aristocrats, clergy, merchants, artisans, and serfs.

Scott makes the same kind of points about the politics of legibility, centralization of knowledge and control, in relation to many of the grand urban renewal projects of the last few centuries, beginning with the granddaddy of them all, Haussmann’s restructuring of Paris under Louis Napoleon III.

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 Liberation Nationale’s tenacious resistance to the French in the Casbah of Algiers, 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.

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.

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.

Within Paris itself, there were such revolutionary 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.

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.

Scott goes on to make these same kinds of points about many other such grand schemes of this high-modernism, over multiple centuries: emphasizing the engineering for legibility dimensions, the displacement of local knowledge and practices in place of centralized knowledge and control, and the constant politicization, contestations and resistance, from competing class interests.² The problem, though, as noted above, is that he almost entirely neglects the role of class in these processes, making it difficult to be analytically precise about the competing values and interests which generate the contestations and resistance which he obviously relishes.³ Again, it is an obfuscation of the real, material dynamics at play that blurs all this into some vague notion of the state.

Interestingly, Scott inadvertently draws attention to the real dynamics behind the obfuscation of his own fixation on the state, right from the beginning. This is how he starts Part One of the book (take special note of the final line):

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? … [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?

—Marquis de Vauban, proposing an annual census to Louis XIV in 1686   

For those of us so long steeped in the logic of managerial class rule, it does indeed seem obvious the benefits of such an annual census for maintaining what Scott calls legibility, enabling the most thorough and complete governance. It is interesting, in Scott’s own wording here though, that such an idea apparently wasn’t self-evident to the Sun King. Instead, it had to be proposed to him. He had to be sold on the merits of such a legibility project. And who was selling him on this idea? Who is Marquis de Vauban? Our good friends as Wikipedia describe him thus:

Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Seigneur de Vauban, later Marquis de Vauban (1 May 1633 – 30 March 1707), commonly referred to as Vauban (French: [vobɑ̃]), was a French military engineer who worked under Louis XIV. He is generally considered the greatest engineer of his time, and one of the most important in Western military history.

Though originally born to the nobility, during the 1650-53 Fronde, he was arrested and decided to take up the cause of Louis XIV. With a solid professional training at Carmelite College, where he studied mathematics, geometry, and science, this preeminent engineer of his time was managerial class stock right to the bone.  

It would be pointless to try to anticipate the findings of the kind of expansive history of the managerial class that I’ve speculated about here. However, my hypothesis, to sound a bit grand about it, is that the distinction between states which Scott referred to will prove to be a distinction between which ones had strong, influential managerial classes informing their policy.

Indeed, it may turn out that at other times and places in history the managerial class gained tremendous influence, maybe even defining the contours of governance. And I certainly wouldn’t deny that the state has always been the optimum means for managerial classes of the past to be best able to realize their social engineering ambitions. What perhaps distinguishes our era, is that (I suspect) at no time previously in history has the managerial class been as able to capture the private sector as they have currently.

As discuss at length in The Managerial Class on Trial, the specific material conditions of the Second Industrial Revolution created a rare opportunity for the managerial class to operate not merely through the state, but through control of the private industrial and commercial world. This new power base then allowed them to not merely influence the state, but to exercise a revolution within the form, which enabled them to fully capture the state. That is what makes our era unique and uniquely subject to the interests and ideology, hubris and foibles of the managerial class.

All this though has a history, and it may prove interesting and enlightening to explore that history. And, with the qualifications I’ve offered here kept in mind, Scott’s Seeing Like a State is a useful jumping off point to begin reflection upon that history.

1. As I’ve argued elsewhere (The Managerial Class on Trial), the definition of right-wing is a belief in the limits of human malleability. Though different right-wing people may have different reasons for believing in such limits.

2. Though it’s not a theme emphasized in these remarks, one that does continually run through Scott’s book is the importance of local knowledge – with local not being restricted to a geographic sense. Local for him means something like pragmatic and proximate familiarity with the unique context of the situation. His analysis of the many grand social engineering projects of what he calls high-modernism are that they failed, often causing tremendous harm, and invoking grassroots resistance, precisely because they attempted to impose an abstractly derived, inflexibly engineered formula upon a dynamic and unique set of distinct local circumstances. No doubt, such considerations would be part of the kind of larger history of the managerial class speculated upon here.

3. Literally, a small handful of places he makes passing reference to managerial elites. Such attention is dwarfed though by his constant resort to use of the state as explanatory factor. And he certainly doesn’t make this “managerial elite” an analytically central focus of his analysis.